Category: Open Access

Urgent: Send a Message to Congress about the NIH Public Access Policy

Peter Suber has pointed out that ALA has an Action Alert that allows you to just fill in a form to send a message to your Congressional representatives about the NIH Public Access Policy.

Under "Compose Message" in the form, I suggest that you shorten the Subject to "Support the NIH Public Access Policy." As an "Issue Area" you might use "Budget" or "Health." Be sure to fill in your salutation and phone number; they are required to send an e-mail even though the form does not show them as required fields.

I’ve made slight modifications to the talking points and created a Web page so that the talking points can simply be cut and pasted into the "Editable text to" section of the form as the message.

ACRLog Urgent Call for Action about NIH Policy Vote

An urgent call for action has been issued on ACRLog about upcoming House and Senate votes on Labor, Health and Human Services appropriations bills that will determine whether NIH-funded researchers are required to make their final manuscripts publicly accessible within twelve months of publication.

Here's an excerpt from the posting:

We need your help to keep the momentum going. The full House of Representatives and the full Senate will vote on their respective measures this summer. The House is expected to convene on Tuesday, July 17. We’re asking that you contact your US Representative and your US Senators by phone or fax as soon as possible and no later than Monday afternoon. Urge them to maintain the Appropriations Committee language. (Find talking points and contact info for your legislators in the ALA Legislative Action Center. It is entirely possible that an amendment will be made on the floor of the House to delete the language in the NIH policy.

Want to know more? Listen to an interview with Heather Joseph of SPARC on the ALA Washington Office District Dispatch blog. Find background on the issue along with tips on communicating effectively with your legislators in the last two issues of ACRL’s Legislative Update and at the Alliance for Taxpayer Access website.

Peter Suber has issued a similar call on Open Access News. Here it is in full:

Tell Congress to support an OA mandate at the NIH

Let me take the unusual step of repeating a call to action from yesterday in case it got buried in the avalanche of news. 

The House Appropriations Committee approved language establishing an OA mandate at the NIH.  The full House is scheduled to vote on the appropriations bill containing that language on Tuesday, July 17. 

Publishers are lobbying hard to delete this language.  If you are a US citizen and support public access for publicly-funded research, please ask your representative to support this bill, and to oppose any attempt to amend or strike the language.  Contact your representative now, before you forget.

Time is short.  Offices are closed on the weekend, but emails and faxes will go through.  Send an email or fax right now or telephone before Monday afternoon.

Because the Senate Appropriations Committee approved the same language in June, you should contact your Senators with the same message.  But the vote by the full House is in three days, while the vote by the full Senate has not yet been scheduled.

For help in composing your message, see

Then spread the word!

Update on the DSpace Foundation

Michele Kimpton, Executive Director of the DSpace Foundation, gave gave a talk about the foundation at the DSpace UK & Ireland User Group meeting in early July.

Her PowerPoint presentation is now available.

Source: Lewis, Stuart. "Presentations from Recent DSpace UK & Ireland User Group Meeting," Unilever Centre for Molecular Informatics, Cambridge—Jim Downing, 11 July 2007.

Code4Lib Journal Established

The newly established Code4Lib Journal has issued a call for papers.

Here’s an excerpt from the call:

The Code4Lib Journal (C4LJ) will provide a forum to foster community and share information among those interested in the intersection of libraries, technology, and the future.

Submissions are currently being accepted for the first issue of this promising new journal. Please submit articles, abstracts, or proposals for articles to c4lj-articles@googlegroups.com (a private list read only by C4LJ editors) by Friday, August 31, 2007. Publication of the first issue is planned for late December 2007.

Possible topics for articles include, but are not limited to:

* Practical applications of library technology. Both actual and
hypothetical applications invited.
* Technology projects (failed, successful, proposed, or
in-progress), how they were done, and challenges faced
* Case studies
* Best practices
* Reviews
* Comparisons of third party software or libraries
* Analyses of library metadata for use with technology
* Project management and communication within the library environment
* Assessment and user studies . . . .

The goal of the journal is to promote professional communication by minimizing the barriers to publication. While articles in the journal should be of a high quality, they need not follow any formal structure or guidelines. Writers should aim for the middle ground between, on the one hand, blog or mailing-list posts, and, on the other hand, articles in traditional journals. . . .

The Journal will be electronic only, and at least initially, edited rather than refereed. . . .

Code4Lib Journal Editorial Committee

Carol Bean
Jonathan Brinley
Edward Corrado
Tom Keays
Emily Lynema
Eric Lease Morgan
Ron Peterson
Jonathan Rochkind
Jodi Schneider
Dan Scott
Ken Varnum

Index Data Releases Open Source Pazpar2 Z39.50 Client

Index Data has released Version 1.0.1 of Pazpar2, an open source Z39.50 client.

Here’s an excerpt from the press release:

Pazpar2 . . . can be viewed either as a high-performance metasearching middleware or a Z39.50 client with a webservice interface, depending on your perspective and needs. It is a fairly compact C program—a resident daemon—that incorporates the best we know how to do in terms of providing high performance, user-oriented federated searching. . . .

One cool thing it does is search many databases in parallel, and do it fast, without unduly loading up the user interface. . . It retrieves a set of records from each target, and performs merging, deduplication, ranking/sorting, and pulls browse facets from them. . . .

It doesn’t know anything about data models, so you can handle exotic data sources if you need to. . . you use XSLT to normalize data into an internal model—we provide examples for MARC21 and a DC-esque internal model, and configure ranking, facets, sorting, etc., from that. . . .

How Many Creative Commons Licenses Are in Use?

In his "Creative Commons Statistics from the CC-Monitor Project" iCommons Summit presentation, Giorgos Cheliotis of the School of Information Systems at Singapore Management University estimates that there must be more than 60,000,000 Creative Commons licenses in use.

Based on backlink search data from Google and Yahoo, he also provides the following license breakdown highlights:

  • 70% of the licenses allow non-commercial use only (NC)
  • Share-Alike (SA) also a very popular attribute, present in over 50% fCC-licensed items (though SA is anyhow self-propagating)
  • 25% of the licenses include the ND [no derivative] restriction

Lund University Journal Info Database Now Available

Lund University Libraries, creators of the Directory of Open Access Journals, has released a new database called Journal Info, which provides authors with information about 18,000 journals selected from 30 major databases. The National Library of Sweden provides support for JI, which is under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license.

Here’s an excerpt from the FAQ page:

The purpose [of the service] is to provide an aid for the researcher in the selection of journal for publication. The publication market has continuously grown more and more complex. It is important to weigh in facts like scope and quality, but more recently also information about reader availability and library cost. The Lund University Libraries have made an attempt to merge all there items into one tool, giving the researcher the power to make informed choices.

Journal Info records provide basic information about the journal (e.g. journal homepage), "reader accessibility" information (e.g., open access status), and quality information (e.g., where it is indexed).

DSpace How-To Guide

Tim Donohue, Scott Phillips, and Dorothea Salo have published DSpace How-To Guide: Tips and Tricks for Managing Common DSpace Chores (Now Serving DSpace 1.4.2 and Manakin 1.1).

This 55-page booklet, which is under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License, will be a welcome addition to the virtual bookshelves of institutional repository managers struggling with the mysteries of DSpace.

DRAMA Releases Fedora Front-End Beta for Authentication/Full-Text Search

DRAMA (Digital Repository Authorization Middleware Architecture) has released Fiddler, a beta version of its mura Fedora front-end that provides access control, authentication, full-text searching and a variety of other functions. DRAMA is a sub-project of RAMP (Research Activityflow and Middleware Priorities Project).

Here’s an excerpt from the news item that describes Fiddler’s features:

  • Hierarchical access control enforcement: Policies can be applied at the collection level, object level or datastream level. . . .
  • Improved access control interface: One can now view existing access control of a particular user or group for a given datastream, object or collection. . . .
  • User-centric GUI: mura only presents users with operations for which they have permissions.
  • XForms Metadata Input: We employ an XForms engine (Orbeon) for metadata input. XForms allow better user interaction, validation and supports any XML-based metadata schemas (such as MARC or MODS).
  • LDAP Filter for Fedora: The current Fedora LDAP filter (in version 2.2) does not authenticate properly, so we have developed a new LDAP filter to fix this problem.
  • Local authentication for DAR and ASM: In addition to Shibboleth authentication, the DAR and ASM can be configured to use a local authentication source (eg. via a local LDAP).
  • Generic XACML Vocabulary: XACML policies are now expressed in a generic vocabulary rather than Fedora specific ones. . . .
  • XACML Optimization: We have optimized of the evaluation engine by employing a cache with user configurable time-to-live. We have also greatly reduced the time for policies matching with DB XML, through the use of bind parameters in our queries.
  • Flexible mapping of Fedora actions to new Apache Axis handlers: Axis is the SOAP engine that Fedora employs to provide its web services. The new flexibility allows new handlers to be easily plugged into Fedora to support new features that follow the same Interceptor pattern as our authorization framework.
  • Version control: mura now supports version control.
  • Full-text search: We enabled full-text search by incorporating Fedoragsearch package.

Towards an Open Source Repository and Preservation System

The UNESCO Memory of the World Programme, with the support of the Australian Partnership for Sustainable Repositories, has published Towards an Open Source Repository and Preservation System: Recommendations on the Implementation of an Open Source Digital Archival and Preservation System and on Related Software Development.

Here’s an excerpt from the Executive Summary and Recommendations:

This report defines the requirements for a digital archival and preservation system using standard hardware and describes a set of open source software which could used to implement it. There are two aspects of this report that distinguish it from other approaches. One is the complete or holistic approach to digital preservation. The report recognises that a functioning preservation system must consider all aspects of a digital repositories; Ingest, Access, Administration, Data Management, Preservation Planning and Archival Storage, including storage media and management software. Secondly, the report argues that, for simple digital objects, the solution to digital preservation is relatively well understood, and that what is needed are affordable tools, technology and training in using those systems.

An assumption of the report is that there is no ultimate, permanent storage media, nor will there be in the foreseeable future. It is instead necessary to design systems to manage the inevitable change from system to system. The aim and emphasis in digital preservation is to build sustainable systems rather than permanent carriers. . . .

The way open source communities, providers and distributors achieve their aims provides a model on how a sustainable archival system might work, be sustained, be upgraded and be developed as required. Similarly, many cultural institutions, archives and higher education institutions are participating in the open source software communities to influence the direction of the development of those softwares to their advantage, and ultimately to the advantage of the whole sector.

A fundamental finding of this report is that a simple, sustainable system that provides strategies to manage all the identified functions for digital preservation is necessary. It also finds that for simple discrete digital objects this is nearly possible. This report recommends that UNESCO supports the aggregation and development of an open source archival system, building on, and drawing together existing open source programs.

This report also recommends that UNESCO participates through its various committees, in open source software development on behalf of the countries, communities, and cultural institutions, who would benefit from a simple, yet sustainable, digital archival and preservation system. . . .

POD for Library Users: New York Public Library Tries Espresso Book Machine

The New York Public Library’s Science, Industry, and Business Library has installed an Espresso Book Machine for public use through August.

Here’s an excerpt from the press release:

The first Espresso Book Machine™ ("the EBM") was installed and demonstrated today at the New York Public Library’s Science, Industry, and Business Library (SIBL). The patented automatic book making machine will revolutionize publishing by printing and delivering physical books within minutes. The EBM is a product of On Demand Books, LLC ("ODB"—www.ondemandbooks.com). . .

The Espresso Book Machine will be available to the public at SIBL through August, and will operate Monday-Saturday from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. . . .

Library users will have the opportunity to print free copies of such public domain classics as "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" by Mark Twain, "Moby Dick" by Herman Melville, "A Christmas Carol" by Charles Dickens and "Songs of Innocence" by William Blake, as well as appropriately themed in-copyright titles as Chris Anderson’s "The Long Tail" and Jason Epstein’s own "Book Business." The public domain titles were provided by the Open Content Alliance ("OCA"), a non-profit organization with a database of over 200,000 titles. The OCA and ODB are working closely to offer this digital content free of charge to libraries across the country. Both organizations have received partial funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. . . .

The EBM’s proprietary software transmits a digital file to the book machine, which automatically prints, binds, and trims the reader’s selection within minutes as a single, library-quality, paperback book, indistinguishable from the factory-made title.

Unlike existing print on demand technology, EBM’s are fully integrated, automatic machines that require minimal human intervention. They do not require a factory setting and are small enough to fit in a retail store or small library room. While traditional factory based print on demand machines usually cost over $1,000,000 per unit, the EBM is priced to be affordable for retailers and libraries. . . .

Additional EBM’s will be installed this fall at the New Orleans Public Library, the University of Alberta (Canada) campus bookstore, the Northshire Bookstore in Manchester, Vermont, and at the Open Content Alliance in San Francisco. Beta versions of the EBM are already in operation at the World Bank Infoshop in Washington, DC and the Bibliotheca Alexandrina (The Library of Alexandria, Egypt). National book retailers and hotel chains are among the companies in talks with ODB about ordering EBM’s in quantity.

ARL’s Library Brown-Bag Lunch Series: Issues in Scholarly Communication

The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) has released a series of discussion guides for academic librarians to use with faculty. The guides are under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States license.

Here’s an excerpt from the guides’ web page:

This series of Discussion Leader’s Guides can serve as a starting point for a single discussion or for a series of conversations. Each guide offers prework and discussion questions along with resources that provide further background for the discussion leader of an hour-long session.

Using the discussion guides, library leaders can launch a program quickly without requiring special expertise on the topics. A brown-bag series could be initiated by a library director, a group of staff, or by any staff person with an interest in the scholarly communication system. The only requirements are the willingness to organize the gatherings and facilitate each meeting’s discussion.

The University of Maine and Two Public Libraries Adopt Emory’s Digitization Plan

Library Journal Academic Newswire reports that the University of Maine, the Toronto Public Library, and the Cincinnati Public Library will follow Emory University’s lead and digitize public domain works utilizing Kirtas scanners with print-on-demand copies being made available via BookSurge. (Also see the press release: "BookSurge, an Amazon Group, and Kirtas Collaborate to Preserve and Distribute Historic Archival Books.")

Source: "University of Maine, plus Toronto and Cincinnati Public Libraries Join Emory in Scan Alternative." Library Journal Academic Newswire, 21 June 2007.

Dealing with Data: Roles, Rights, Responsibilities and Relationships

JISC has released its Dealing with Data: Roles, Rights, Responsibilities and Relationships: Consultancy Report, which was written as part of its Digital Repositories Programme’s Data Cluster Consultancy.

Here’s an excerpt from the Executive Summary:

This Report explores the roles, rights, responsibilities and relationships of institutions, data centres and other key stakeholders who work with data. It concentrates primarily on the UK scene with some reference to other relevant experience and opinion, and is framed as "a snapshot" of a relatively fast-moving field. . . .

The Report is largely based on two methodological approaches: a consultation workshop and a number of semi-structured interviews with stakeholder representatives.

It is set within the context of the burgeoning "data deluge" emanating from e-Science applications, increasing momentum behind open access policy drivers for data, and developments to define requirements for a co-ordinated e-infrastructure for the UK. The diversity and complexity of data are acknowledged, and developing typologies are referenced.

Council of Australian University Librarians ETD Survey Report

The Council of Australian University Librarians has released Australasian Digital Theses Program: Membership Survey 2006.

Here’s an excerpt from the "Key Findings" section:

1. The average percentage of records for digital theses added to ADT is 95% when digital submission is mandatory and 17% when it is not mandatory. . . .

2. 59% of respondents will have mandatory digital submission in place in 2007.

3. With this level of mandatory submission it is predicted that 60% of all theses produced in Australia and New Zealand in 2007 will have a digital copy recorded in ADT. . . .

5. The overwhelming majority of respondents offer a mediated submission service, either only having a mediated service or offering both mediated and self-submission services. When mediated and self-submission are both available, the percentage self-submitted is polarised with some achieving over a 75% self-submission rate.

6. Over half the respondents have a repository already and most are using it to manage digital theses.

7. 87% will have a repository by the end of this year, and the rest are in the initial planning stage.

CIC’s Digitization Contract with Google

Library Journal Academic Newswire has published a must-read article ("Questions Emerge as Terms of the CIC/Google Deal Become Public") about the Committee on Institutional Cooperation’s Google Book Search Library Project contract.

The article includes quotes from Peter Brantley, Digital Library Federation Executive Director, from his "Monetizing Libraries" posting about the contract (another must-read piece).

Here’s an excerpt from Brantley’s posting:

In other words—pretty much, unless Google ceases business operations, or there is a legal ruling or agreement with publishers that expressly permits these institutions (excepting Michigan and Wisconsin which have contracts of precedence) to receive digitized copies of In-Copyright material, it will be held in escrow until such time as it becomes public domain.

That could be a long wait. . . .

In an article early this year in The New Yorker, "Google’s Moon Shot," Jeffrey Toobin discusses possible outcomes of the antagonism this project has generated between Google and publishers. Paramount among them, in his mind, is a settlement. . . .

A settlement between Google and publishers would create a barrier to entry in part because the current litigation would not be resolved through court decision; any new entrant would be faced with the unresolved legal issues and required to re-enter the settlement process on their own terms. That, beyond the costs of mass digitization itself, is likely to deter almost any other actor in the market.

Report on Chemistry Teaching/Research Data and Institutional Repositories

The JISC-funded SPECTRa project has released Project SPECTRa (Submission, Preservation and Exposure of Chemistry Teaching and Research Data): JISC Final Report, March 2007.

Here’s an excerpt from the Executive Summary:

Project SPECTRa’s principal aim was to facilitate the high-volume ingest and subsequent reuse of experimental data via institutional repositories, using the DSpace platform, by developing Open Source software tools which could easily be incorporated within chemists’ workflows. It focussed on three distinct areas of chemistry research—synthetic organic chemistry, crystallography and computational chemistry.

SPECTRa was funded by JISC’s Digital Repositories Programme as a joint project between the libraries and chemistry departments of the University of Cambridge and Imperial College London, in collaboration with the eBank UK project. . . .

Surveys of chemists at Imperial and Cambridge investigated their current use of computers and the Internet and identified specific data needs. The survey’s main conclusions were:

  • Much data is not stored electronically (e.g. lab books, paper copies of spectra)
  • A complex list of data file formats (particularly proprietary binary formats) being used
  • A significant ignorance of digital repositories
  • A requirement for restricted access to deposited experimental data

Distributable software tool development using Open Source code was undertaken to facilitate deposition into a repository, guided by interviews with key researchers. The project has provided tools which allow for the preservation aspects of data reuse. All legacy chemical file formats are converted to the appropriate Chemical Markup Language scheme to enable automatic data validation, metadata creation and long-term preservation needs. . . .

The deposition process adopted the concept of an "embargo repository" allowing unpublished or commercially sensitive material, identified through metadata, to be retained in a closed access environment until the data owner approved its release. . . .

Among the project’s findings were the following:

  • it has integrated the need for long-term management of experimental chemistry data with the maturing technology and organisational capability of digital repositories;
  • scientific data repositories are more complex to build and maintain than are those designed primarily for text-based materials;
  • the specific needs of individual scientific disciplines are best met by discipline-specific tools, though this is a resource-intensive process;
  • institutional repository managers need to understand the working practices of researchers in order to develop repository services that meet their requirements;
  • IPR issues relating to the ownership and reuse of scientific data are complex, and would benefit from authoritative guidance based on UK and EU law.

NIH Public Access Policy Mandate Needs Immediate Support

The Alliance for Taxpayer Access has issued an action alert regarding a change in the NIH Public Access Policy that would mandate deposit of articles resulting from NIH-funded research. Peter Suber has discussed this issue in relation to a call by ACRL for an NIH mandate.

Here is the alert:

The NIH Public Access Policy is currently under consideration by Congress, as part of the larger FY08 Labor/HHS, Education, and Related Agencies Appropriations Bill. The House is expected to mark up the FY08 Labor/HHS Appropriations Bill on Thursday, June 7th.

Please take action now to express your support for a shift to mandatory policy Fax your House Representative a letter as soon as possible.

Visit http://www.house.gov for contact information. Constituents of the House Appropriations Labor/HHS Subcommittee are especially encouraged to write. (http://appropriations.house.gov/Subcommittees/sub_lhhse.shtml)

For talking points and background on the NIH Public Access Policy and recent legislative measures, please see the ATA Web site at http://www.taxpayeraccess.org/nih.html.

NIH Policy Status

The House is expected to mark up the FY08 Labor/HHS Appropriations Bill within the week. The bill will then move to the full Appropriations committee. Please stand by for an announcement about House activities from the Alliance for Taxpayer Access in the coming days.

The Senate Appropriations Committee—Labor/HHS Subcommittee is expected to review their versions of appropriations bills later this month.

Google Library Project Adds Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC)

The Google Book Search Library Project has an important new participant—the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC). The CIC members are the University of Chicago, the University of Illinois, Indiana University, the University of Iowa, the University of Michigan, Michigan State University, the University of Minnesota, Northwestern University, Ohio State University, Pennsylvania State University, Purdue University, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. As many as 10 million volumes will be digitized from the collections of these major research libraries.

Here’s an excerpt from the CIC press release:

This partnership between our 12 member universities and Google is unprecedented. What makes this work so exciting is that we will literally open the pages of millions of books that have been assembled on our library shelves over more than a century. In literally seconds, we’ll be able browse across the content of thousands of volumes, searching for words or phrases, and making links across those texts that would have taken weeks or months or years of dedicated and scrupulous analysis. It is an extraordinary effort, blending the efforts and aspirations of librarians, university administrators, and scholars from across 12 world-class research universities. And our corporate partner possesses unparalleled expertise in creating and opening the digital world to coherent and comprehensive searching.

The effort is not entirely without controversy—no great undertaking ever is. But our universities believe strongly in the power of information to change the world, and in preserving, protecting and extending access to information. We have carefully weighed and considered the intellectual property issues and believe that our effort is firmly within the guidelines of current copyright law, while providing some flexibility as those laws are tested in the new digital environment in the coming years.

Repositories as Platforms for Researchers e-Portfolios Podcast

The Australian Partnership for Sustainable Repositories (APSR) has made a podcast of Susan Gibbons’s "Repositories as Platforms for Researchers e-Portfolios" presentation at the Adaptable Repository workshop at the University of Sydney.

Powerpoints from the workshop’s presentations are also available.

MIDESS (Management of Images in a Distributed Environment with Shared Services) Project

The JISC-funded MIDESS Project is examining issues related to the management of digital audio, images, video, and other digital content in distributed digital repositories as well as at the national level. It is being conducted by the London School of Economics, University College London, the University of Birmingham, and the University of Leeds.

Here is an excerpt from the "Aims and Objectives of the MIDESS Project" page:

  • The MIDESS project will be building digital content databases at three of the partner institutions . . .
  • These databases will be populated with digital content which has already been created, or is currently under creation, by the partner institutions. . . .
  • Opportunities for the sharing and re-use of digital collections across institutions will be explored . . .
  • Metadata standards will be established, and metadata developed, for each collection added to the repositories. . . .
  • MIDESS will explore the role of digital content databases with a particular focus on interoperability with enterprise content management architectures.
  • MIDESS will also aim to establish how distributed digital repositories could encourage the wider exposure and sharing of content across institutions through an evaluation of requirements for centralised metadata harvesting services.
  • MIDESS will seek to pilot an infrastructure which could serve as a model for future distributed national digitisation activities.

The project has produced a number of interesting documents, especially the detailed workpackages, which deal with issues such as digital preservation, enterprise storage, intellectual property, and user requirements.

Report on Embedding and Reusing PerX in a VLE

The PerX (Pilot Engineering Repository Xsearch) project has released its Report on Embedding and Reusing PerX in a VLE. (A "VLE" is a virtual learning environment.)

Here’s an excerpt from the introduction:

This report presents the reusable middleware we have used to embed PerX functionality into the University VLE, VISION, a commercial VLE Blackboard system. We have done our best to use service oriented architectures (SOA) as possible. We argue that by using open source and open standards approaches rather than software and practices developed specifically for a particular VLE product, it is possible to obtain open reusable middleware that can simplify the DLVLE integration and bridge the functionality of both environments. We hope that our methodology can provide a common foundation on which a variety of institutions may build their own customized middleware to integrate scholarly objects in VLEs.

Here’s a brief description of the PerX project from its home page:

The PerX project has developed a pilot service which provides subject resource discovery across a series of repositories of interest to the engineering learning and research communities. This pilot was used as a test-bed to explore the practical issues that would be encountered when considering the possibility of full scale subject resource discovery services.

Happy Birthday Open Access News!

Open Access News is five today. OAN‘s indefatigable primary author Peter Suber has written over 10,800 OAN postings during this period. Going further back to 2001, he has written 109 issues of the SPARC Open Access Newsletter (formerly called the Free Online Scholarship Newsletter) as well as important papers on open access.

Thanks, Peter. The open access movement owes you a huge debt of gratitude for this fine work.

Report on Ingest Tools for Digital Repositories

The Cairo Project has released Cairo Tools Survey: A Survey of Tools Applicable to the Preparation of Digital Archives for Ingest into a Preservation Repository. It has also released a related report, Cairo Use Cases: A Survey of User Scenarios Applicable to the Cairo Ingest Tool.

Here’s a description of the Cairo Project from its home page:

Cairo will develop a tool for ingesting complex collections of born-digital materials, with basic descriptive, preservation and relationship metadata, into a preservation repository. The project is based on needs identified by the JISC-funded Paradigm project and the Wellcome Library’s Digital Curation in Action project. It is a key building block in the partner institutions’ strategy to develop digital repository architectures which can support the development of digital collections over the long-term.

The REMAP Project: Record Management and Preservation in Digital Repositories

The REMAP Project at the University of Hull has been funded by JISC investigate how record management and digital preservation functions can be best supported in digital repositories. It utilizes the Fedora system.

Here’s an except from the Project Aims page (I have added the links in this excerpt):

The REMAP project has the following aims:

  • To develop Records Management and Digital Preservation (RMDP) workflow(s) in order to understand how a digital repository can support these activities
  • To embed digital repository interaction within working practices for RMDP purposes
  • To further develop the use of a WSBPEL orchestration tool to work with external Web services, including the PRONOM Web services, to provide appropriate metadata and file information for RMDP
  • To develop and test a notification layer that can interact with the orchestration tool and allow RSS
    syndication to individuals alerting them to RMDP tasks
  • To develop and test an intermediate persistence layer to underpin the notification layer and interact
    with the WSBPEL orchestration tool to allow orchestrated workflows to take place over time
  • To test and validate the use of the enhanced WSBPEL tool with institutional staff involved in RMDP activities