America COMPETES Act Establishes Interagency Public Access Committee

The signing of the America COMPETES Reauthorization Act of 2010 by President Obama establishes a new Interagency Public Access Committee. The International Association of Scientific, Technical & Medical Publishers (STM) has issued a press release that "applauds the efforts of US legislators in crafting the charter of the Interagency Public Access Committee."

Here's an excerpt from the Act:

SEC. 103. INTERAGENCY PUBLIC ACCESS COMMITTEE.

(a) ESTABLISHMENT.—The Director shall establish a working group under the National Science and Technology Council with

the responsibility to coordinate Federal science agency research and policies related to the dissemination and long-term stewardship of the results of unclassified research, including digital data and peer-reviewed scholarly publications, supported wholly, or in part, by funding from the Federal science agencies.

(b) RESPONSIBILITIES.—The working group shall—

(1) identify the specific objectives and public interests that need to be addressed by any policies coordinated under (a);

(2) take into account inherent variability among Federal science agencies and scientific disciplines in the nature of research, types of data, and dissemination models;

(3) coordinate the development or designation of standards for research data, the structure of full text and metadata, navigation tools, and other applications to maximize interoperability across Federal science agencies, across science and engineering disciplines, and between research data and scholarly publications, taking into account existing consensus standards, including international standards;

(4) coordinate Federal science agency programs and activities that support research and education on tools and systems required to ensure preservation and stewardship of all forms of digital research data, including scholarly publications;

(5) work with international science and technology counterparts to maximize interoperability between United States based unclassified research databases and international databases and repositories;

(6) solicit input and recommendations from, and collaborate with, non-Federal stakeholders, including the public, universities, nonprofit and for-profit publishers, libraries, federally funded and non federally funded research scientists, and other organizations and institutions with a stake in long term preservation and access to the results of federally funded research;

(7) establish priorities for coordinating the development of any Federal science agency policies related to public access to the results of federally funded research to maximize the benefits of such policies with respect to their potential economic or other impact on the science and engineering enterprise and the stakeholders thereof;

(8) take into consideration the distinction between scholarly publications and digital data;

(9) take into consideration the role that scientific publishers play in the peer review process in ensuring the integrity of the record of scientific research, including the investments and added value that they make; and

(10) examine Federal agency practices and procedures for providing research reports to the agencies charged with locating and preserving unclassified research.

(c) PATENT OR COPYRIGHT LAW.—Nothing in this section shall be construed to undermine any right under the provisions of title 17 or 35, United States Code.

(d) APPLICATION WITH EXISTING LAW.—Nothing defined in section

(b) shall be construed to affect existing law with respect to Federal science agencies’ policies related to public access.

(e) REPORT TO CONGRESS.—Not later than 1 year after the date of enactment of this Act, the Director shall transmit a report to Congress describing—

(1) the specific objectives and public interest identified under (b)(1);

(2) any priorities established under subsection (b)(7);

(3) the impact the policies described under (a) have had on the science and engineering enterprise and the stakeholders, including the financial impact on research budgets;

(4) the status of any Federal science agency policies related to public access to the results of federally funded research; and

(5) how any policies developed or being developed by Federal science agencies, as described in subsection (a), incorporate input from the non-Federal stakeholders described in subsection (b)(6).

(f) FEDERAL SCIENCE AGENCY DEFINED.—For the purposes of this section, the term ‘‘Federal science agency’’ means any Federal agency with an annual extramural research expenditure of over $100,000,000.

| Digital Scholarship |

Daily Tweets 2011-01-17

Virginia Tech Names Tyler Walters as Dean of University Libraries

Virginia Tech has named Tyler Walters as its Dean of University Libraries.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Tyler Walters, associate dean for technology and resource services at the Library and Information Center at Georgia Tech, has been named dean of University Libraries at Virginia Tech. . . .

"Tyler Walters brings an outstanding vision to the university and will be an engaging and effective advocate for the libraries within the university and larger community," said Virginia Tech Senior Vice President and Provost Mark McNamee. "His view of librarians as authoritative guides and stewards of the intellectual record, coupled with his commitment to position the libraries as a strong partner in all of the academic endeavors of the university, fit exceptionally well with the needs articulated by faculty and staff when we initiated the search." . . .

Walters began his career in 1987 as an assistant in the photographic archives unit of the North Carolina Division of Archives and History in Raleigh, N.C. From 1988 to 1992, he served as the assistant university archivist at the Northwestern University Library. In 1992, he went to the Iowa State University Library as assistant professor in the special collections department. He was promoted to associate professor and served as head of the special collections department from 1996 to 1998.

In 1998, he was appointed director of the William R. Haselton Library and Knowledge Center at the Institute of Paper Science and Technology in Atlanta, now a unit of Georgia Tech. In 2002, he began as the associate director of digital and technical services at Georgia Tech, later as associate director for technology and resource services, and most recently as associate dean. . . .

Walters has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, National Endowment for the Humanities, the Library of Congress, the National Archives and Records Administration, and the Institute of Museum and Library Services. He has raised $3.3 million in grants and gifts while at Georgia Tech.

Walters has co-founded new inter-institutional organizations such as the MetaArchive Cooperative (digital preservation services) and the GALILEO Knowledge Repository (Georgia’s statewide repository service).

| Digital Scholarship |

Web Development Librarian at East Carolina University

East Carolina University's J.Y. Joyner Library is recruiting a Web Development Librarian.

Here's an excerpt from the ad:

Responsibilities: Reporting to the Assistant Director for Library Technology and Digital Initiatives, the Web Development Librarian will:

  • Provide vision and leadership in designing, developing and supporting the main library web site and integrating it with the larger library web presence which includes discovery tools, digital collections, and electronic resources
  • Lead, supervise, and direct the Web Development Team
  • Maintain and refine existing web services offered by the department
  • Develop and implement web applications and tools, particularly for mobile environments
  • Ensure that web services and applications are tailored for targeted user groups, including distance education students, on-site patrons, faculty members, and library staff
  • Evaluate local web resources through a variety of assessment methods
  • Actively explore current web technologies, recommending and implementing best practices for an academic library environment
  • Participate as a member of the library's technology team Dean's Council

| Digital Scholarship |

The New Renaissance

The European Commission's Comité des Sages has released The New Renaissance.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

The report, called "The New Renaissance," key conclusions and recommendations are:

  • The Europeana portal should become the central reference point for Europe's online cultural heritage. Member States must ensure that all material digitised with public funding is available on the site, and bring all their public domain masterpieces into Europeana by 2016. Cultural
  • Works that are covered by copyright, but are no longer distributed commercially, need to be brought online. It is primarily the role of rights-holders to digitise these works and exploit them. But, if rights holders do not do so, cultural institutions must have a window of opportunity to digitise material and make it available to the public, for which right holders should be remunerated.
  • EU rules for orphan works (whose rights holders cannot be identified) need to be adopted as soon as possible. The Report defines eight fundamental conditions for any solution.
  • Member States need to considerably increase their funding for digitisation in order to generate jobs and growth in the future. The funds needed to build 100 km of roads would pay for the digitisation of 16% of all available books in EU libraries, or the digitisation of every piece of audio content in EU Member States' cultural institutions.
  • Public-private partnerships for digitisation must be encouraged. They must be transparent, non-exclusive and equitable for all partners, and must result in cross-border access to the digitised material for all. Preferential use of the digitised material granted to the private partner should not exceed seven years.
  • To guarantee the preservation of collections in their digital format, a second copy of this cultural material should be archived at Europeana. In addition, a system should be developed so that any cultural material that currently needs to be deposited in several countries would only be deposited once.

| Digital Scholarship |

Head of Library Systems at University of Richmond

The University of Richmond Libraries are recruiting a Head of Library Systems.

Here's an excerpt from the ad (position number: 501284):

The Head of Library Systems oversees the staff and application support functions of the library's enterprise systems. The Head of Library Systems envisions, plans and implements collaborative strategies for current and future library enterprise applications with all sectors of the Library and Information Services to achieve ambitious organizational goals within budgets and timescales; fosters and sustains operational and strategic relationships with peer institutions, consortia, and information system vendors; assigns, coordinates, directs, and supervises the staff in the department responsible for several enterprise systems; ensures established data standards and IT best practices are followed to ensure interoperability and efficient operations, and to minimize risk; supports numerous relationships within the libraries, the university, with peer institutions and with vendors to determine functional and technical requirements.

| Digital Scholarship |

Cloud-Sourcing Research Collections: Managing Print in the Mass-Digitized Library Environment

OCLC has released Cloud-Sourcing Research Collections: Managing Print in the Mass-Digitized Library Environment.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

The objective of the project was to examine the feasibility of outsourcing management of low-use print books held in academic libraries to shared service providers, including large-scale print and digital repositories. The study assessed the opportunity for library space saving and cost avoidance through the systematic and intentional outsourcing of local management operations for digitized books to shared service providers and progressive downsizing of local print collections in favor of negotiated access to the digitized corpus and regionally consolidated print inventory.

Some of the findings from the project that are detailed in the report include:

  • There is sufficient material in the mass-digitized library collection managed by the HathiTrust to duplicate a sizeable (and growing) portion of virtually any academic library in the United States, and there is adequate duplication between the shared digital repository and large-scale print storage facilities to enable a great number of academic libraries to reconsider their local print management operations.
  • The combination of a relatively small number of potential shared print providers, including the US Library of Congress, was sufficient to achieve more than 70% coverage of the digitized book collection, suggesting that shared service may not require a very large network of providers.
  • Substantial library space savings and cost avoidance could be achieved if academic institutions outsourced management of redundant low-use inventory to shared service providers.
  • Academic library directors can have a positive and profound impact on the future of academic print collections by adopting and implementing a deliberate strategy to build and sustain regional print service centers that can reduce the total cost of library preservation and access.

| Digital Scholarship |

Digital Scholarship 2010 Use Statistics

Digital Scholarship received over 9.2 million file requests ("hits") in 2010. There were over 3.3 million page views (i.e., HTML pages, PDF files, text files, or Word files). There were over 1.4 million visitors. Visitors came from 208 countries.

The top 10 countries by number of visitors were:

  1. United States
  2. France
  3. United Kingdom
  4. Germany
  5. China
  6. Canada
  7. Russian Federation
  8. Japan
  9. Australia
  10. Brazil

The top ten identified universities using Digital Scholarship by number of page views were:

  1. University of Sydney
  2. Harvard University
  3. Universitaet zu Koeln
  4. University of Waterloo
  5. Nanyang Technological University
  6. University of Washington
  7. Library and Archives Canada
  8. Universitaet Hamburg
  9. University of Toronto
  10. University of Michigan

The Digital Scholarship publications with the heaviest use were DigitalKoans (over 5.7 million hits and over 2.4 million page views) and the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography (over 1.2 million hits and over 489,000 page views).

The analysis was done using WebLog Expert.

Digital Scholarship’s 2010 Publications

Digital Scholarship's 2010 publications are listed below:

Digital Scholarship publications are under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License.

| Digital Scholarship |

Daily Tweets 2010-12-13

NISO Will Make Information Standards Quarterly Open Access in 2011

The National Information Standards Organization has announced that Information Standards Quarterly will become open access in 2011.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

"ISQ has undergone a significant transformation over the past three years as it moved from a newsletter to a full-color magazine," states Cynthia Hodgson, NISO Managing Editor. "With the support of a new ISQ Editorial Board and guest content editors, the contributed content has expanded significantly. Our goal with ISQ is to educate and inform our readers on standards, present practical and replicable implementations of standards-based technologies and best practices, and identify areas where standards could help to solve problems."

"ISQ provides a unique perspective with its overlapping interests to the library, publisher, and information systems and services audience," explains Todd Carpenter, NISO Managing Director and Publisher of ISQ. "NISO's Board of Directors strongly believes that providing the information in ISQ via open access will enhance the visibility and reach of the work of our community. We also intend to migrate the archives to open access and convert much of the backfile to electronic format."

The print version of ISQ will still be available by subscription or free to NISO members who opt-in to receive it in print. This approach, combined with the open access of the electronic version, will reduce the environmental impact and costs of print publishing while increasing the accessibility of the magazine to everyone in the NISO community and in related standards and technology arenas.

| Digital Scholarship |

Virginia Commonwealth University Resolution Supporting Open Access Publishing in Tenure Decisions

The Virginia Commonwealth University Faculty Senate has passed a resolution supporting recognition of open access publishing in the tenure process.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Whereas, the faculty of Virginia Commonwealth University are dedicated to achieving the greatest public good by making their research and scholarship as widely available as possible;

Whereas, commercial publishers of scholarly journals have drastically increased subscription prices to many of the journals where VCU faculty now publish their research and scholarship beyond the affordability of many individuals and institutions; and

Whereas, faculty have many options for publishing their research and scholarship in open access journals, hybrid journals, or in open access repositories so that the world can have free access to it if they negotiate to retain their copyright of their work;

Therefore, the Faculty Senate of Virginia Commonwealth University recommends:

VCU Promotion and Tenure committees should recognize that publication and editorial effort in open access, peer-reviewed journals or republication of peer-reviewed articles in an open access repository offers added value and greater public good than scholarship made only available in expensive journal publications.

| Digital Scholarship |

Library Web Developer/Designer at Princeton University Library (Revised)

The Princeton University Library is recruiting a Library Web Developer/Designer.

Here's an excerpt from the ad:

The Web Developer position will help the Library Web Development Manager on specific projects to deliver more library content and services to our users from our web sites. Specific projects may include designing new sites, or using new web services technologies to improve the user experience in discovering, searching, finding, or acquiring library materials and content. Additionally, the position will assist in implementing the Drupal CMS, customizing the interface for the latest version of the OPAC, and creating mobile ready versions of the library web site and catalog. Customization tasks for the new NextGen Discovery system will be a large component of the work. Projects will also likely include implementation of open source code created in other libraries, using various API's made available by Google, OCLC, or Code4Lib members, as well as various library vendors. This position will also be assigned other digital library projects as the need arises. Conducting user-centric usability studies is highly desirable, so experience in this area will be preferred.

| Digital Scholarship |

National Historical Publications and Records Commission Grants

The National Historical Publications and Records Commission has funded 53 grant proposals, including seven digitization projects.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

DIGITIZATION
Grants for digitizing entire archival collections of historical importance.

Georgia State University
Atlanta, GA                                            $90,102
The PATCO Records Digitization Project.
A 20-month project to digitize eight series—approximately 179,000 scans—of  the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) records from the union's national office.

Getty Research Institute
Los Angeles, CA                                  $100,790
Living the American Dream: Housing and Urban Development in Los Angeles, 1936-1997. 
A two year project to digitize and make available online approximately 60,500 images from the Leonard Nadel Papers and the Julius Shulman Photography Archive. 

Library of Virginia
Richmond, VA                                     $150,000
Augusta County, VA, Chancery Records, 1745-1912.
A two year project to digitize the Augusta County Chancery Court records, consisting of 460 cubic feet totally approximately 900,000 images representing 10,437 cases. .

Marist College
Poughkeepsie, NY                                $103,979
Lowell Thomas Papers Digitization Project.
A project to digitize 36,164 images, including 8,000 glass plate negatives, 6,500 lantern slides, 13,000 photographic prints, 300 stereopticon cards, 1,800 film negatives, and more items in the Graphic Materials Series in Lowell Thomas Papers, a collection drawn from the works of the 20th century American writer and broadcaster.

Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
Rutgers, NJ                                            $57,390
Housing Law and Policy Digital Archive.
A project to digitize two collections of materials, totaling 94,000 pages, in the areas of public housing law and urban history.

University of Illinois, Chicago
Chicago, IL                                            $47,099
Chicago: Photographic Images of Change.
A two year project to digitize approximately 30,275 photographs of historic Chicago sites, streets, neighborhoods and buildings contained within the James S. Parker collection (1900-2003) and the Chicago Photographic collection (ca. 1890-1970). 

University of North Texas
Denton, TX                                           $30,509
The Civil War and Reconstruction.
Aone year project to digitize and make available online a group of eight 19th century collections totaling 22,412 pages.  The records span from 1823-1919, but the bulk of the records date from the period of the Civil War and Reconstruction.

| Digital Scholarship |

Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography, Version 79

Version 79 of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography is now available from Digital Scholarship as an XHTML website with live links to many included works. This selective bibliography includes over 3,880 articles, books, technical reports, and other scholarly textual sources that are useful in understanding scholarly electronic publishing efforts on the Internet. All included works are in English. It is available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.

Changes in This Version

Two new sections have been added in this version: (1) Electronic Books and Texts: Research and (2) General Works: Research (Multiple-Types of Electronic Works).

The bibliography has the following sections (new/revised sections are marked with an asterisk):

Table of Contents

Dedication
1 Economic Issues*
2 Electronic Books and Texts
2.1 Case Studies and History*
2.2 General Works*
2.3 Library Issues*
2.4 Research*
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*
4.1 Research (Multiple-Types of Electronic Works)*
5 Legal Issues
5.1 Digital Copyright*
5.2 License Agreements*
6 Library Issues
6.1 Digital Libraries*
6.2 Digital Preservation*
6.3 General Works*
6.4 Metadata and Linking*
7 New Publishing Models*
8 Publisher Issues*
8.1 Digital Rights Management and User Authentication*
9 Repositories, E-Prints, and OAI*
Appendix A. Related Bibliographies*
Appendix B. About the Author*
Appendix C. SEPB Use Statistics

The following recent Digital Scholarship publications may also be of interest:

  1. Electronic Theses and Dissertations Bibliography, Version 5
  2. Institutional Repository Bibliography, Version 3
  3. Transforming Scholarly Publishing through Open Access: A Bibliography (a paperback, a PDF file, and an XHTML website)

See also: Reviews of Digital Scholarship Publications.

Daily Tweets 2010-12-12

Daily Tweets 2010-12-11

Daily Tweets 2010-12-10

Visiting Digital Library Research Programmers (3) at University of Illinois Library at Urbana-Champaign

The University of Illinois Library at Urbana-Champaign is recruiting three Visiting Digital Library Research Programmers (various position lengths).

Here's an excerpt from the ad:

The successful candidates will be appointed to support current digital library grant-funded research projects being conducted at the Grainger Engineering Library Information Center. Appointees will report to the respective grant project’s principal investigators (PIs) and will be members of the University Library's Software Development Group. Specifically, these three positions will support and be funded by the following grant projects:

  • Emblematica Online: Emblem Digitization, The German Emblem Database, and The OpenEmblem Portal (funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities)
  • The Institute of Museum and Libraries Digital Collections & Content Project, 2-year extension: Advancing the IMLS DCC to Promote our Collective Cultural Heritage (funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services)
  • The Bamboo Technology Project, Phase I (funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation)
  • The Open Annotation Collaboration, Phase II: Demonstration & Refinement (funding request pending with the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation)
  • The National Ethics Resource Center Digital Library (funded by the National Science Foundation)

| Digital Scholarship |

8% of Online Americans Use Twitter

The Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project has released 8% of Online Americans Use Twitter.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Eight percent of the American adults who use the internet are Twitter users. Some of the groups who are notable for their relatively high levels of Twitter use include:

  • Young adults—Internet users ages 18-29 are significantly more likely to use Twitter than older adults.
  • African-Americans and Latinos—Minority internet users are more than twice as likely to use Twitter as are white internet users.
  • Urbanites—Urban residents are roughly twice as likely to use Twitter as rural dwellers.

| Digital Scholarship |

Head of Web & Emerging Technologies at University of Miami Libraries

The University of Miami Libraries are recruiting a Head of Web & Emerging Technologies.

Here's an excerpt from the ad:

Under the direction of the Director for Information Management & Systems, the Head of Web & Emerging Technologies provides leadership, direction, and technical expertise in the design, development, and implementation of the Libraries' web presence and promotes user-centered interfaces, technologies, resources, and services designed to enhance the user experience. The Web & Emerging Technologies Department works in close collaboration with Systems and Digital Programs and Scholarship staff, stake-holders and unit-level managers.

| Digital Scholarship |

Presentations from the SPARC 2010 Digital Repositories Meeting

Presentations from the SPARC 2010 Digital Repositories Meeting are now available.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

"Reputation management systems," "new spin on Open Access," "stretching knowledge bases," "exposing reality," and "valuing knowledge exchange at the institutional level" were just a few of the ways participants in the SPARC 2010 Digital Repositories Meeting expressed their vision for advancing repository advocacy into the fuller fabric of the Open Access movement. The sentiment is one outcome of the gathering, jointly hosted by SPARC, SPARC Japan/NII, and SPARC Europe, in Baltimore on November 8 & 9, 2010. SPARC has today released summaries, slides, and video from the event.

The SPARC digital repositories meetings have played an integral part in advancing the potential of open online repositories to expand the dissemination of scholarship and transform scholarly communication. First held in 2004, the meeting is regularly hosted in the UK or Europe, Japan, and North America, draws hundreds of participants from around the globe, and has helped set the stage for key developments over the past six years. This time, participants indicated the need for a broader meeting and discussion, which highlight repositories in the full Open Access context.

"Repositories are core components of the Open Access movement," said Heather Joseph, Executive Director of SPARC. "They’re deeply integrated with policy moves and at the forefront of managing Open Access to materials above and beyond the scholarly literature—not to mention author rights management and other aspects. It just makes sense that conversations about repository advocacy take place alongside moves to create policies. SPARC's next biennial meeting, in 2012, will aim to meet this need, and we look forward to working with our members to figure out the best approach."

The 2010 meeting set forth to explore four key trends: Repository-based publishing strategies, Global repository networks, Open data, and Making the case for financial sustainability. These panel discussions were supplemented with an Innovation Fair, where new technologies, strategies, and approaches were highlighted, and a Sponsor Showcase.

| Digital Scholarship |

Daily Tweets 2010-12-09