Category: Scholarly Communication

SWORD (Simple Web-service Offering Repository Deposit) Project

Led by UKOLN, The JISC SWORD (Simple Web-service Offering Repository Deposit) Project is developing "a prototype ‘smart deposit’ tool" to "facilitate easier and more effective population of repositories."

Here’s an excerpt from the project plan:

The effective and efficient population of repositories is a key concern for the repositories community. Deposit is a crucial step in the repository workflow; without it a repository has no content and can fulfill no further function. Currently most repositories exist in a fairly linear context, accepting deposits from a single interface and putting them into a single repository. Further deployment of repositories, encouraged by JISC and other funders, means that this situation is changing and we are beginning to see an increasingly complex and dynamic ecology of interactions between repositories and other services and systems. By and large developers are not creating repository systems and software from scratch, rather they are considering how repositories interface with other applications within institutions and the wider information landscape. A single repository, or multiple repositories, might interact with other components, such as VLEs, authoring tools, packaging tools, name authority services, classification services and research systems. In terms of content, resources may be deposited in a repository by both human and software agents, e.g. packaging tools that push content into repositories or a drag-and-drop desktop tool. The type of resource being deposited will also influence the choice of deposit mechanism. If the resources are complex packaged objects then a web service will need to support the ingest of multiple packaging standards.

There is currently no standard mechanism for accepting content into repositories, yet there already exists a stable and widely implemented service for harvesting metadata from repositories (OAI-PMH—Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting). This project will implement a similarly open protocol or specification for deposit. By taking a similar approach, the project and the resulting protocol and implementations will gain easier acceptance by a community already familiar with the OAI-PMH.

This project aims to develop a Simple Web-service Offering Repository Deposit (SWORD)—a lightweight deposit protocol that will be implemented as a simple web service within EPrints, DSpace, Fedora and IntraLibrary and tested against a prototype ‘smart deposit’ tool. The project plans to take forward the lightweight protocol originally formulated by a small group working within the Digital Repositories Programme (the ‘Deposit API’ work) . The project is aligned with the Object Reuse and Exchange (ORE) Mellon-funded two-year project by the Open Archives Initiative, which commenced in October 2006. Members of the SWORD project team are represented on its Technical and Liaison Committees. . . . . The SWORD project is not attempting to duplicate work being done being done by ORE, but seeks to build on existing work to support UK-specific requirements whilst feeding into the ongoing ORE project.

Digital Humanities Centers Network Being Formed

Several individuals, including John Unsworth, have issued a call for the formation of a network of digital humanities centers.

Here’s an excerpt from the call:

If you represent something that you would consider a digital humanities center, anywhere in the world, we are interested in including you in a developing network of such centers. The purpose of this network is cooperative and collaborative action that will benefit digital humanities and allied fields in general, and centers as humanities cyberinfrastructure in particular. It comes out of a meeting hosted by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the University of Maryland, College Park, April 12-13, 2007 in Washington, D.C., responding in part to the report of the American Council of Learned Societies report on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences, published in 2006.

We leave the definition of "digital humanities" up to you, but we intend to be inclusive, and we know that there will be cross-over into the social sciences, media studies, digital arts, and other related areas. If you think your center is a digital humanities center, in whole or in part, then we’d be glad to have you as part of the network. This might include humanities centers with a strong interest in or focus on digital platforms. The definition of "center" is only slightly more prescriptive: a center should be larger than a single project, and it should have some history or promise of persistence.

Some early initiatives are likely to include

  • workshops and training opportunities for faculty, staff, and students
  • developing collaborative teams that are, in effect, pre-positioned to apply for predictable multi-investigator, multi-disciplinary, multi-national funding opportunities, beginning with an upcoming RFP that invites applications for supercomputing in the humanities
  • exchanging information about tools development, best practices, organizational strategies, standards efforts, and new digital collections, through a digital humanities portal

For further information (including how to respond), see the call.

DSpace Executive Director Appointed

Michele Kimpton, formerly of the Internet Archive, has been appointed the Executive Director of the newly formed DSpace nonprofit organization.

Here’e an excerpt from the announcement:

I am happy to report that we are making good progress on establishing the new non-profit organization, and I would like to take this opportunity to announce that Michele Kimpton has accepted the position as Executive Director for the organization. The DSpace non-profit corporation will initially provide organizational, legal and financial support for the DSpace open source software project. Prior to joining DSpace, Michele Kimpton was one of the founding Directors at Internet Archive, in charge of Web archiving technology and services. . . .

Michele developed an organization within Internet Archive to help support and fund open source software and web archiving programs, so she comes to us with a lot of experience in both open source software and long-term digital curation. Her organization worked primarily with National Libraries and Archives around the world, so she is familiar with large, widely diverse and distributed communities. Michele was one of the co-founders of the IIPC ( International Internet Preservation Consortium, netpreserve.org), whose mission is to work collaboratively to develop tools, standards and processes for archiving and preservation of web material.

The DSpace non-profit corporation is in the final stages of completing filing status as a not-for-profit corporation of Massachusetts. By summer 2007 we expect to have this legal entity in place, and a complete Board of Directors. Both MIT and Hewlett Packard have provided the start up funding to establish the organization over the next several years. . . .

Position Papers from the NSF/JISC Repositories Workshop

Position papers from the NSF/JISC Repositories Workshop are now available.

Here’s an excerpt from the Workshop’s Welcome and Themes page:

Here is some background information. A series of recent studies and reports have highlighted the ever-growing importance for all academic fields of data and information in digital formats. Studies have looked at digital information in science and in the humanities; at the role of data in Cyberinfrastructure; at repositories for large-scale digital libraries; and at the challenges of archiving and preservation of digital information. The goal of this workshop is to unite these separate studies. The NSF and JISC share two principal objectives: to develop a road map for research over the next ten years and what to support in the near term.

Here are the position papers:

EDUCAUSE 2006 Podcast on Penn’s Institutional Repository

In this podcast ("Content Recruitment and Development: A Proactive Approach to Building an Institutional Repository"), Marjorie Hassen describes the University of Pennsylvania Libraries’ strategy for developing and supporting the ScholarlyCommons@Penn, an institutional repository based on the Digital Commons platform.

Friday’s OAI5 Presentations

Presentations from Friday’s sessions of the 5th Workshop on Innovations in Scholarly Communication in Geneva are now available.

Here are a few highlights from this major conference:

  • Doctoral e-Theses; Experiences in Harvesting on a National and European Level (PowerPoint): "In the presentation we will show some lessons learned and the first results of the Demonstrator, an interoperable portal of European doctoral e-theses in five countries: Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden and the UK."
  • Exploring Overlay Journals: The RIOJA project (PowerPoint): "This presentation introduces the RIOJA (Repository Interface to Overlaid Journal Archives) project, on which a group of cosmology researchers from the UK is working with UCL Library Services and Cornell University. The project is creating a tool to support the overlay of journals onto repositories, and will demonstrate a cosmology journal overlaid on top of arXiv."
  • Dissemination or Publication? Some Consequences from Smudging the Boundaries between Research Data and Research Papers (PDF): "Project StORe’s repository middleware will enable researchers to move seamlessly between the research data environment and its outputs, passing directly from an electronic article to the data from which it was developed, or linking instantly to all the publications that have resulted from a particular research dataset."
  • Open Archives, The Expectations of the Scientific Communities (RealVideo): "This analysis led the French CNRS to start the Hal project, a pluridisciplinary open archive strongly inspired by ArXiv, and directly connected to it. Hal actually automatically transfers data and documents to ArXiv for the relevant disciplins; similarly, it is connected to Pum Med and Pub Med Central for life sciences. Hal is customizable so that institutions can build their own portal within Hal, which then plays the role of an institutional archive (examples are INRIA, INSERM, ENS Lyon, and others)."

(You may want to download PowerPoint Viewer 2007 if you don’t have PowerPoint 2007).

Thursday’s OAI5 Presentations

Presentations from Thursday’s sessions of the 5th Workshop on Innovations in Scholarly Communication in Geneva are now available.

Here are a few highlights from this major conference:

  • Business Models for Digital Repositories (PowerPoint): "Those setting up, or planning to set up, a digital repository may be interested to know more about what has gone before them. What is involved, what is the cost, how many people are needed, how have others made the case to their institution, and how do you get anything into it once it is built? I have recently undertaken a study of European repository business models for the DRIVER project and will present an overview of the findings."
  • DRIVER: Building a Sustainable Infrastructure of European Scientific Repositories (PowerPoint): "Ten partners from eight countries have entered into an international partnership, to connect and network as a first step more than 50 physically distributed institutional repositories to one, large-scale, virtual Knowledge Base of European research."
  • On the Golden Road : Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics (RealVideo): "A working party works now to bring together funding agencies, laboratories and libraries into a single consortium, called SCOAP3 (Sponsoring Consortium for Open access Publishing in Particle Physics). This consortium will engage with publishers towards building a sustainable model for open access publishing. In this model, subscription fees from multiple institutions are replaced with contracts with publishers of open access journals where the SCOAP3 consortium is a single financial partner."
  • Open Access Forever—Or Five Years, Whichever Comes First: Progress on Preserving the Digital Scholarly Record (RealVideo): "The current state of the curation and preservation of digital scholarship over its entire lifecycle will be reviewed, and progress on problems of specific interest to scholarly communication will be examined. The difficulty of curating the digital scholarly record and preserving it for future generations has important implications for the movement to make that record more open and accessible to the world, so this a timely topic for those who are interested in the future of scholarly communication."

(You may want to download PowerPoint Viewer 2007 if you don’t have PowerPoint 2007).

OpenDOAR API

The OpenDOAR project has announced the availability of an API for accessing digital repository data in their database.

Here’s an excerpt from the press release:

OpenDOAR, as a SHERPA project, is pleased to announce the release of an API that lets developers use OpenDOAR data in their applications. It is a machine-to-machine interface that can run a wide variety of queries against the OpenDOAR Database and get back XML data. Developers can choose to receive just repository titles & URLs, all the available OpenDOAR data, or intermediate levels of detail. They can then incorporate the output into their own applications and ‘mash-ups’, or use it to control processes such as OAI-PMH harvesting. . . .

OpenDOAR is a continuing project hosted at the University of Nottingham under the SHERPA Partnership. OpenDOAR maintains and builds on a quality-assured list of the world’s Open Access Repositories. OpenDOAR acts as a bridge between repository administrators and the service providers who make use of information held in repositories to offer search and other services to researchers and scholars worldwide.

A key feature of OpenDOAR is that all of the repositories we list have been visited by project staff, tested and assessed by hand. We currently decline about a quarter of candidate sites as being broken, empty, out of scope, etc. This gives a far higher quality assurance to the listings we hold than results gathered by just automatic harvesting. OpenDOAR has now surveyed over 1,100 repositories, producing a classified Directory of over 800 freely available archives of academic information.

Wednesday’s OAI5 Presentations

Presentations from Wednesday’s sessions of the 5th Workshop on Innovations in Scholarly Communication in Geneva are now available.

Here are a few highlights from this major conference:

  • MESUR: Metrics from Scholarly Usage of Resources (PowerPoint): "The two-year MESUR project, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, aims to define and validate a range of usage-based impact metrics, and issue guidelines with regards to their characteristics and proper application. The MESUR project is constructing a large-scale semantic model of the scholarly community that seamlessly integrates a wide range of bibliographic, citation and usage data."
  • OAI Object Re-Use and Exchange (PowerPoint): "In this presentation, we will give an overview of the current activities, including: defining the problem of compound documents within the web architecture, enumerating and exploring several use cases, and identifying likely adopters of OAI-ORE."
  • OpenDOAR Policy Tools and Applications (RealVideo): "OpenDOAR has developed a set of policy generator tools for repository administrators and is contacting administrators to advocate policy development."
  • State of OAI-PMH (PowerPoint): "The OAI-PMH was released in 2001 and stabilized at v2.0 in 2002. Since then there has been steady growth in adoption of the protocol. Support for the OAI-PMH is assumed for base-level interoperability between institutional repositories, and is also provided for many other collections of scholarly material. I will review the current landscape and reflect on some milestones and issues."

(You may want to download PowerPoint Viewer 2007 if you don’t have PowerPoint 2007).

And the Beat Goes On: Serials Crisis Redux

Library Journal has published its annual review of serials prices. This year, its title is "Serial Wars."

There is considerable discussion of open access issues in the article, and Peter Suber has commented: "This is an excellent picture of where OA stands today. If you have colleagues who want to know what’s been happening and only have time for one article, give them this URL."

As usual, the big bucks in serials are for STM journals (see the table below from the article), and, no surprise, the country with the highest average price per title is the Netherlands.

TABLE 1 AVERAGE 2007 PRICE FOR SCIENTIFIC DISCIPLINES
Discipline Average Price Per Title
Chemistry $3,429
Physics 2,865
Engineering 2,071
Biology 1,676
Technology 1,502
Astronomy 1,426
Geology 1,424
Food Science 1,345
Math & Computer Science $1,313
Zoology 1,308
Health Sciences 1,199
Botany 1,179
General Science 1,139
Geography 1,050
Agriculture 898

What about next year?: "Expect overall price increases to be in the seven percent to nine percent range for 2008 subscriptions."

Scholarly Journal Podcasts

In a recent SSP-L message, Mark Johnson, Journal Manager of HighWire Press, identified three journals that offer podcasts or digital audio files:

Here are a few others:

Trends in Scholarly Journal Prices 2000-2006

LISU, which is based in the Department of Information Science at Loughborough University, has released Trends in Scholarly Journal Prices 2000-2006, a report commissioned by Oxford Journals.

Here’s an excerpt from the press release:

The research updates the previous findings on pricing for biomedical journals, and has also been extended to analyze pricing for social science titles. Findings within the report show little variation to the original data published in 2004: there are continued trends in price variance across publishers, including median price increases ranging from 42% to 104% for biomedical titles, and 47% to 120% for social science titles. Median journal prices also continue to vary widely between publishers for both these disciplines, ranging from £198 to £859 in biomedical titles, and £119 to £513 in the Social Sciences. . . .

Further information on the report:

• Over 8,000 journals were included in the analysis.

• Publishers included in the analysis were:

o Blackwell Publishing

o Cambridge University Press

o Elsevier

o Lippincott Williams and Wilkins

o Nature (specialist journals)

o Oxford Journals

o Springer

o Sage

o Taylor and Francis

o University of Chicago Press

o Wiley

Key Findings

• Median journal prices ranged from £198 to £859 for biomedical titles, and £119 to £513 for social science titles in 2006

• Increases in the median journal price between 2000 and 2006 varied from 42% to 104% in biomedical titles and 47% to 120% for social science titles.

• Median price per page ranged from 31p to £1.06 for biomedical titles, and 13p to 93p for social science titles in 2006

• Median price per point of impact factor ranged from £110 to £775 for biomedical titles in 2006, and from £186 to £552 for social science titles.

The Depot: A UK Digital Repository

The JISC Repositories and Preservation program has established the Depot, so that researchers who do not have an institutional repository can deposit digital postprints and other digital objects.

Here’s an excerpt from the press release:

The general strategy being adopted in the UK is that every university should develop and establish its own institutional repository (IR), as part of a comprehensive ‘JISC RepositoryNet’. Many researchers can already make use of the IRs set up in their institution, but that is not (yet) the case for all. A key purpose for The Depot is to bridge that gap during the period before all have such provision, and to provide a deposit facility that will enable all UK researchers to expose their publications to readers under terms of Open Access.

The Depot will also have a re-direct function to link researchers to the appropriate home pages of their own institutional repositories. The end result should be more content in repositories, making it easier for researchers and policy makers to have peer-reviewed research results exposed to wider readership under Open Access. . . .

The principal focus for The Depot is the deposit of post-prints, digital versions of published journal articles and similar items. There are plans to include links to places for depositing other digital materials, such as research datasets and learning materials. As indicated, The Depot helps provide a level-playing field for all UK researchers and their institutions, especially when deposit under Open Access is required by grant funding bodies. It may also become a useful facility for institutions as they implement and manage their own repositories, helping to promote the habit of deposit among staff, with the simple message, ‘put it in the depot’.

The Depot is based on E-Prints software and is compliant with the Open Archive Initiative (OAI), which promotes standards for repository interoperability. Its contents will be harvested and searched through the Intute Repository Search project. It offers a redirect service, UK Repository Junction, to ensure that content that comes within the remit of an extant repository is correctly placed there instead of in The Depot.

Additionally, as IRs are created, The Depot will offer a transfer service for content deposited by authors based at those universities, to help populate the new IRs. The Depot will therefore act as a ‘keepsafe’ until a repository of choice becomes available for deposited scholarly content. In this way, The Depot will avoid competing with extant and emerging IRs while bridging gaps in the overall repository landscape and encouraging more open access deposits.

A Depot FAQ is available.

Researchers’ Use of Academic Libraries and Their Services

The Research Information Network (RIN) and the The Consortium of Research Libraries in the British Isles (CURL) have published a new report titled Researchers’ Use of Academic Libraries and Their Services.

Here’s an excerpt from the report’s Web page:

This study was designed to provide an up-to-date and forward-looking view of how researchers interact with academic libraries in the UK. Harnessing empirical data and qualitative insights from over 2250 researchers and 300 librarians, the RIN and CURL hope that the results will be useful in informing the debate about the future development of academic libraries and the services they provide to researchers.

This is an important moment in the relationship between researchers and research libraries in the UK. The foundations of the relationship are beginning to be tested by shifts in the way that researchers work. The rise of e-research, interdisciplinary work, cross-institution collaborations, and the expectation of massive increases in the quantity of research output in digital form all pose new challenges. These challenges are about how libraries should serve the needs of researchers as users of information sources of many different kinds, but also about how to deal with the information outputs that researchers are creating.

Currently, the majority of researchers think that their institutions’ libraries are doing an effective job in providing the information they need to do their work, but it is time to consider the future roles and responsibilities of all those involved in the research cycle—researchers, research institutions and national bodies, as well as libraries—in meeting the challenges that are coming.

Version 67, Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography

Version 67 of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography is now available from Digital Scholarship. This selective bibliography presents over 2,960 articles, books, and other printed and electronic sources that are useful in understanding scholarly electronic publishing efforts on the Internet.

The Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography: 2006 Annual Edition is also available from Digital Scholarship. Annual editions of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography are PDF files designed for printing.

The bibliography has the following sections (revised sections are in italics):

1 Economic Issues
2 Electronic Books and Texts
2.1 Case Studies and History
2.2 General Works
2.3 Library Issues
3 Electronic Serials
3.1 Case Studies and History
3.2 Critiques
3.3 Electronic Distribution of Printed Journals
3.4 General Works
3.5 Library Issues
3.6 Research
4 General Works
5 Legal Issues
5.1 Intellectual Property Rights
5.2 License Agreements
6 Library Issues
6.1 Cataloging, Identifiers, Linking, and Metadata
6.2 Digital Libraries
6.3 General Works
6.4 Information Integrity and Preservation
7 New Publishing Models
8 Publisher Issues
8.1 Digital Rights Management
9 Repositories, E-Prints, and OAI
Appendix A. Related Bibliographies
Appendix B. About the Author
Appendix C. SEPB Use Statistics

Scholarly Electronic Publishing Resources includes the following sections:

Cataloging, Identifiers, Linking, and Metadata
Digital Libraries
Electronic Books and Texts
Electronic Serials
General Electronic Publishing
Images
Legal
Preservation
Publishers
Repositories, E-Prints, and OAI
SGML and Related Standards

OpenLOCKSS Project

Led by the University of Glasgow Library, the new JISC-funded OpenLOCKSS project will preserve selected UK open access publications.

Here’s an excerpt from the project proposal:

Although LOCKSS has initially concentrated on negotiations with society and commercial publishers, there has always been an interest in smaller open-access journals, as evidenced by the LOCKSS Humanities Project1, where twelve major US libraries have collaborated to contact more than fifty predominantly North American open access journal titles, enabling them to be preserved within the LOCKSS system. . . .

At present, much open access content is under threat, and is difficult to preserve for posterity under standard arrangements, at least until the British Library, and the other UK national libraries, are able to take a more proactive and comprehensive stance in preserving websites comprising UK output. Many open access journals are small operations, often dependent on one or two enthusiastic editors, often based in university departments and/or small societies, concerned with producing the next issue, and often with very little interest in or knowledge of preservation considerations. Their long term survival beyond the first few issues can often be in doubt, but their content, where appropriate quality controls have been applied, is worthy of preservation.

LOCKSS is an ideal low-cost mechanism for ensuring preservation, provided that appropriate contacts can be made and plug-in developments completed, and sufficient libraries agree to host content, on the Humanities Project model. . . .

Earlier in 2006, a survey was carried out by the LOCKSS Pilot Project, to discover preferences for commercial/society publishers to approach with a view to participating in LOCKSS, and Content Complete Ltd have been undertaking this work, as well as negotiating with the NESLi2 publishers on their LOCKSS participation. . . .

We propose to consider initially the titles with at least six votes (it may not be appropriate to approach all these titles, for example we shall check that all are currently publishing and confirm that they appear to be of appropriate quality), followed by those with five or four votes. We propose that agreements for LOCKSS participation are concluded with at least twelve titles, with fifteen as a likely upper limit.

Repository 66: OA Digital Repository Map Mashup

Stuart Lewis of the University of Wales Aberystwyth has created a Google Map mashup called Repository 66 that shows worldwide open access digital repositories using data from ROAR and OpenDOAR. (Route 66 was a famous highway in the US.)

Is It Time to Stop Printing Journals?

There has been lively discussion about whether it is time to stop printing journals on Liblicense-l of late (March archive and April archive).

Here’s my take.

There are two aspects to this question: (1) Is the print journal format still required for reading purposes?; and (2) Is the print journal format still required to insure full access to journals given that many e-journals are under licenses (and are not owned by libraries) and digital preservation is still in its infancy?

It appears that the answer to (1) may finally be “no, for many users.” However, this may be contingent to some degree on the fact that many commercial e-journals are composed of article PDF files that allow users to print copies that replicate printed articles.

The answer to (2) is less clear, since continued access is contingent on periodic license negotiations and the changing business practices of publishers. Embargoes, ILL restrictions, incomplete back runs, and similar issues may give libraries pause. Very promising digital preservation efforts, such as LOCKSS and Portico still need to pass the test of time. Few libraries believe that publishers by themselves can be relied on to preserve e-journals (for one thing, publishers go out of business).

However, the reality for many libraries is that they have no choice but to dump print whenever possible for strictly economic reasons: print plus electronic is increasingly unaffordable for a variety of reasons.

Dr. John Hoey Joins the Scholarly Exchange Board

Julian Fisher, Managing Director of the Scholarly Exchange, has announced that Dr. John Hoey has joined the Scholarly Exchange Board.

Here’s an excerpt from the SPARC-OAForum announcement:

Dr. Hoey is the former editor-in-chief of the Canadian Medical Association Journal and long an advocate of open access publishing. A specialist in community medicine and internal medicine, he is Professor of Medicine (adjunct) at Queen’s University and a Special Advisor to the Principal on Public Health.

Scholarly Exchange, Inc. has eliminated a major obstacle in starting open access journals by providing a free and fully supported e-publishing platform. Combining Open Journal Systems public-domain software with complete hosting and support, this service offers scholars unrivaled freedom and flexibility to produce academic journals at a price that fosters the open access model. It also develops tools and methods to promote and support open access journals.

Syracuse University Press Now Reports to the Library

In the Winter 2006-2007 issue of The Library Connection, the Syracuse University Library indicates that the Syracuse University Press now reports to the SU Library.

Here’s a excerpt from the relevant article:

In September Syracuse University interim vice chancellor and provost Eric F. Spina announced that Syracuse University Press would report to Suzanne Thorin, university librarian and dean of libraries. The new relationship enables SU Press to take advantage of the Library’s infrastructure to contain costs.

Report About Users’ Digital Repository Needs at the University of Hull

The RepoMMan Project at the University of Hull has published The RepoMMan User Needs Analysis report.

Here’s an excerpt from the JISC-REPOSITORIES announcement:

The document covers the repository needs of users in the research, learning & teaching, and administration areas. Whilst based primarily on needs expressed in interviews at the University of Hull the document is potentially of wider applicability, drawing from an on-line survey of researchers elsewhere and a survey of the L&T community undertaken by the CD-LOR Project.

SERU Working Group Draft Best Practices Document

The NISO Shared E-Resource Understanding (SERU) Working Group has released a draft best practices document (The SERU Approach to E-Resource Subscriptions: Framework for Development and Use of SERU).

According to the press release, this document "presents a shared set of understandings to which publishers and libraries can point when negotiating the sale of electronic content. The framework offers publishers and libraries a solution to the often-burdensome process of bilateral negotiation of a formal license agreement by allowing the sale of e-resources without licenses if both parties feel their perception of risk has been adequately addressed by current law and developing norms of behavior."

(Prior posting on SERU.)

DRAMA Project’s Fedora Authentication Code Alpha Release

The DRAMA (Digital Repository Authorization Middleware Architecture) project has released an alpha version of its Fedora authentication code. DRAMA is part of the RAMP (Research Activityflow and Middleware Priorities Project) project.

Here’s an excerpt from the fedora-commons-users announcement about the release’s features:

  • Federated authentication (using Shibboleth) for Fedora.
  • Extended XACML engine support via the introduction of an XML database for storing and querying policies and XACML requests over web services.
  • Re-factoring of Fedora XACML authorization into an interceptor layer which is separate from Fedora.
  • A new web GUI for Fedora nicknamed "mura" (Note: that we will be changing the GUI name to a new one soon).

Mellon Grants to CLIR/DLF

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has given grants to both the Council on Library and Information Resources and the Digital Library Federation.

Here’s an excerpt from the CLIR grant press release:

The Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) has received a three-year, $2.19 million grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support general operations. The award will allow CLIR to launch a range of new initiatives in six program areas: cyberinfrastructure, preservation, the next scholar, the emerging library, leadership, and new models. . . .

The breadth of CLIR’s new agenda is represented in six interrelated program areas:

Cyberinfrastructure defines the base technologies of computation and communication, the software programs, and the data-curation and data-preservation programs needed to manage large-scale multimedia data sets, particularly those pertaining to the digital record of our cultural heritage;

Preservation explores sustainable strategies for preserving all media in a complex technological, policy, and economic environment;

The Next Scholar explores and assesses new methodologies, fields of inquiry, strategies for data gathering and collaboration, and modes of communication that are likely to define the next generation of scholars;

The Emerging Library explores and articulates the changing concept of the library with particular focus on its core functions and the consequences for staffing, research and teaching, and economic modeling;

Leadership investigates and defines the skills and expertise needed to administer, inspire, and inform the next generation; and

New Models extrapolates from an array of CLIR’s findings and other related research how academic organizations, institutions, behaviors, and culture may evolve over the coming decade.

Here’s an excerpt from the DLF grant press release:

The Digital Library Federation (DLF) has received an $816,000 grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for a project designed to make distributed digital collections easier for scholars to use. The project, DLF Aquifer Development for Interoperability Across Scholarly Repositories: American Social History Online, will implement schemas, data models, and technologies to enable scholars to use digital collections as one in a variety of local environments. . . .

The project will address the difficulty that humanities and social science scholars face in finding and using digital materials located in a variety of environments with a bewildering array of interfaces, access protocols, and usage requirements. DLF Aquifer seeks to provide scholars with consistent access to digital library collections pertaining to nineteenth- and twentieth-century U.S. social history across institutional boundaries. The collections are in a variety of formats and include maps and photographs from the Library of Congress historical collections; sheet music from the Sam DeVincent Collection of American Sheet Music at Indiana University; and an array of regional collections, such as Michigan County Histories from the University of Michigan and Tennessee Documentary History from the University of Tennessee, that will facilitate cross-regional studies when combined.

By integrating American Social History Online into a variety of local environments, the project will bring the library to the scholar and make distributed collections available through locally supported tools. The project will take two years to develop and implement, from April 2007 to March 2009.