Digital Library Jobs: Scholarly Communication Librarian at University of Ottawa

The University of Ottawa Library is recruiting a Scholarly Communication Librarian.

Here's an excerpt from the ad:

Reporting to the Associate University Librarian (Access), the incumbent will serve the research and scholarly support needs of the faculty and graduate students through the promotion and provision of web-based publishing and repository services. Current digital initiatives include hosting open-access journals and deployment of an institutional repository (UOttawa Research) for E-Theses and other digital scholarly content created by the campus community.

Research Repository Case Studies

Leonie Hayes, Teula Morgan, and Tom Ruthven have self-archived Research Repository Case Studies in ResearchSpace at the University of Auckland.

Here's an excerpt from the abstract:

A Research Repository Managers Symposium invites managers to submit a "Case Study" outlining the way that their institution has decided to deliver the requirements for ERA—Excellence in Research for Australia and PBRF Performance-Based Research Fund in New Zealand. The symposium session asks authors of the case studies to briefly share their case studies, followed by a guided discussion session determined by participants. The Case Studies will be compiled into a comprehensive document for public distribution via the Educause Australasia 2009 Conference site. . . . The focus of this symposium is how Research Repositories support tertiary institutions in delivering Research Data Collection in Australia and New Zealand.

Ph.D. Scholarship in Digital Rights and Digital Scholarship

EPrints Services is sponsoring a Ph.D. scholarship in Digital Rights and Digital Scholarship at the EPSRC Web Science Doctoral Training Centre at the University of Southampton.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

The Web has had a huge impact on society and on the scientific and scholarly communications process. As more attention is paid to new e-research and e-learning methodologies it is time to stand back and investigate how rights and responsibilities are understood when "copying", "publishing" and "syndicating" are fundamental activities of the interconnected digital world.

Applicants with a technical background (a good Bachelors degree in Computer Science, Information Science, Information Technology or similar) are invited for this 4-year research programme, which begins in October 2009 with a 1-year taught MSc in Web Science and is followed by a three year PhD supervised jointly by the School of Law and the School of Electronics and Computer Science. The full four-year scholarships (including stipend) is available to UK residents.

“Evaluation of Digital Repository Software at the National Library of Medicine”

Jennifer L. Marill and Edward C. Luczak have published "Evaluation of Digital Repository Software at the National Library of Medicine" in the latest issue of D-Lib Magazine.

Here's an excerpt:

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) National Library of Medicine® (NLM) undertook an 18-month project to evaluate, test and recommend digital repository software and systems to support NLM's collection and preservation of a wide variety of digital objects. This article outlines the methodology NLM used to analyze the landscape of repository software and select three systems for in-depth testing. Finally, the article discusses the evaluation results and next steps for NLM. This project followed an earlier NLM working group, which created functional requirements and identified key policy issues for an NLM digital repository to aid in building NLM's collection in the digital environment.

Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog Update (5/15/09)

The latest update of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog (SEPW) is now available, which provides information about new works related to scholarly electronic publishing, such as books, e-prints, journal articles, magazine articles, technical reports, and white papers.

Especially interesting are: Approaches to Managing and Collecting Born-Digital Literary Materials for Scholarly Use, "The Economics of Open Access Publishing," "Estimating the Potential Impacts of Open Access to Research Findings," "Fair to Whom?," "Making the Case for an Institutional Repository to Your Provost," Policy-making for Research Data in Repositories: A Guide, "Self-Archiving Journal Articles: A Case Study of Faculty Practice and Missed Opportunity," "The Stratified Economics of Open Access," and "Where There's a Will There's a Way?: Survey of Academic Librarian Attitudes about Open Access."

University of Oregon Department of Romance Languages Adopts Open Access Mandate

The Department of Romance Languages at the University of Oregon has adopted an open access mandate that includes a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States license requirement. (Thanks to Open Access News).

Here's the policy from the announcement:

Resolved, that the UO Romance Languages Faculty adopts the following policy in support of deposit of scholarly works in Scholars' Bank:

The Romance Languages Faculty of the University of Oregon are committed to disseminating the fruits of their research and scholarship as widely as possible. In keeping with that commitment, the Faculty adopts the following policy:

Every Romance Language tenure-track faculty member is required to self-archive in UO Scholars' Bank a postprint version of every peer-reviewed article or book chapter published while the person is a member of the Romance Languages faculty. The URLs of these postprints will be included in all materials submitted internally to the Romance Languages Department for purposes of review and promotion.

Self-archiving in UO Scholars' Bank means that each Romance Languages faculty member gives to the University of Oregon nonexclusive permission to use and make available that author's scholarly articles for the purpose of open dissemination. Specifically, each Romance Languages faculty member grants to the UO a Creative Commons "Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States" license to each of his or her scholarly articles. The license will apply to all scholarly articles written while the person is a member of the Romance Languages Faculty except for any articles accepted for publication before the adoption of this policy and any articles for which the Faculty member entered into an incompatible licensing or assignment agreement before the adoption of this policy.

The Department of Romance Languages will waive application of the policy for a particular article upon written notification by the author, who informs the Department of the reason.

It is strongly recommended that faculty link publications listed on their Departmental website faculty profile to the corresponding self-archived postprints, and also that they self-archive postprints of articles and book chapters published prior to the adoption of this policy.

To facilitate distribution of the scholarly articles, as of the date of publication, each faculty member will make available an electronic copy of his or her final version of the article and full citation at no charge to a designated representative of the UO Libraries in appropriate formats (such as PDF) specified by the Libraries. After publication, the University of Oregon Libraries will make the scholarly article available to the public in the UO's institutional repository.

Policy-making for Research Data in Repositories: A Guide

JISC has released Policy-making for Research Data in Repositories: A Guide.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The guide is a public deliverable of the JISC-funded DISC-UK DataShare project (2007-2009), http://www.disc-uk.org/datashare.html, which established institutional data repositories and related services at the partner institutions: the Universities of Edinburgh, Oxford and Southampton. It is a distilled result of the experience of the partners, together with Digital Life Cycle Research & Consulting. The guide is one way of sharing our experience with the wider community, as more institutions expand their digital repository services into the realm of research data to meet the demands of researchers who are themselves facing increasing requirements of funders to make their data available for continuing access.

Safeguarding Collections at the Dawn of the 21st Century: Describing Roles & Measuring Contemporary Preservation Activities in ARL Libraries

The Association of Research Libraries has released Safeguarding Collections at the Dawn of the 21st Century: Describing Roles & Measuring Contemporary Preservation Activities in ARL Libraries.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

The report is organized into three thematic sections:

  1. Reshaping the preservation functions in research libraries—Libraries must reconceptualize preservation as a core function that extends beyond activities within a preservation department. As preservation is advanced through a range of investments and partnerships, libraries are in the midst of reshaping priorities and reallocating resources to align with new services and conceptions of collections.

  2. The networked digital environment—ARL members need to expand their activities and deepen their practices related to preserving digital content though Web archiving, deployment of digital repositories, and efforts to preserve e-journals and other born digital content (whether purchased, licensed, or digitized by the library).

  3. Library collaborative strategies—Community-level activities are crucial, both to address the challenges presented by digital formats, but also to make traditional preservation activities more effective.

“Making the Case for an Institutional Repository to Your Provost”

The Berkeley Electronic Press has released "Making the Case for an Institutional Repository to Your Provost."

Here's an excerpt:

Ultimately, when you meet with your provost, it will be essential that you align the strengths of the repository with your provost's mission. With this paper, our goal is to help you maximize the effectiveness of your message when you are ready to "sell" your provost's office on the value of the repository. Through our research, we've identified four key value propositions, or benefits, that have proven to resonate with provosts. To illustrate those benefits, we provide stories, screenshots and weblinks. A good anecdote is worth its proverbial weight in gold. Win your provost over with solid plans, great stories and compelling live examples.

Ed Felten Proposes “Three Strikes” Copyright Law for Print

Ed Felten has proposed "three strikes" copyright law for print.

Here's an excerpt from "A Modest Proposal: Three-Strikes for Print":

My proposed system is simplicity itself. The government sets up a registry of accused infringers. Anybody can send a complaint to the registry, asserting that someone is infringing their copyright in the print medium. If the government registry receives three complaints about a person, that person is banned for a year from using print.

As in the Internet case, the ban applies to both reading and writing, and to all uses of print, including informal ones. In short, a banned person may not write or read anything for a year.

Read more about it at "3 Strikes for Print: A Modest Proposal From Ed Felten."

University of Pittsburgh Press Makes 500 Titles Open Access and Print-on-Demand

The University of Pittsburgh Press has made 500 out-of-print titles open access with a future fee-based print-on-demand option.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

The University of Pittsburgh Press, in collaboration with the University of Pittsburgh Library System and the Chicago Digital Distribution Center (CDDC), is making nearly 500 out-of-print Press titles available again for scholars and students around the world.

Representing the full range of scholarly series and subject areas published by the Press, these titles are now part of the University of Pittsburgh Press Digital Editions collection, fully searchable and freely accessible to anyone with an internet connection through the University of Pittsburgh Library System's D-Scribe Digital Publishing Program. Over the next year, they will also be made available for purchase in reasonably priced paperback editions through the CDDC. Readers and researchers may read and search the full texts online, and those who wish to have a print copy may purchase it through retail outlets or directly from the Press.

Approaches to Managing and Collecting Born-Digital Literary Materials for Scholarly Use

The Office of Digital Humanities in the National Endowment for the Humanities has released the final version of Approaches to Managing and Collecting Born-Digital Literary Materials for Scholarly Use.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

This project is about developing archival tools and best practices for preserving born-digital documents produced by contemporary authors. Traditionally, humanists have found great scholarly value in studying the papers, correspondence, and first drafts of authors, politicians, and other historical figures. In this white paper, the project director make note that contemporary figures compose almost all of their materials on a computer. What challenges will this present to humanists, archivists, and librarians in the future? This very readable paper explores many of these issues with specific case studies involving a number of leading libraries and archives.

Higher Education in a Web 2.0 World

JISC has released Higher Education in a Web 2.0 World.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Web 2.0, the Social Web, has had a profound effect on behaviours, particularly those of young people whose medium and metier it is. They inhabit it with ease and it has led them to a strong sense of communities of interest linked in their own web spaces, and to a disposition to share and participate. It has also led them to impatience—a preference for quick answers—and to a casual approach to evaluating information and attributing it and also to copyright and legal constraints.

The world they encounter in higher education has been constructed on a wholly different set of norms. Characterised broadly, it is hierarchical, substantially introvert, guarded, careful, precise and measured. The two worlds are currently co-existing, with present-day students effectively occupying a position on the cusp of change. They aren’t demanding different approaches; rather they are making such adaptations as are necessary for the time it takes to gain their qualifications. Effectively, they are managing a disjuncture, and the situation is feeding the natural inertia of any established system. It is, however, unlikely to be sustainable in the long term. The next generation is unlikely to be so accommodating and some rapprochement will be necessary if higher education is to continue to provide a learning experience that is recognised as stimulating, challenging and relevant.

The impetus for change will come from students themselves as the behaviours and approaches apparent now become more deeply embedded in subsequent cohorts of entrants and the most positive of them—the experimentation, networking and collaboration, for example—are encouraged and reinforced through a school system seeking, in a reformed curriculum, to place greater emphasis on such dispositions. It will also come from policy imperatives in relation to skills development, specifically development of employability skills. These are backed by employer demands and include a range of ‘soft skills’ such as networking, teamwork, collaboration and self-direction, which are among those fostered by students’ engagement with Social Web technologies.

Higher education has a key role in helping students refine, extend and articulate the diverse range of skills they have developed through their experience of Web 2.0 technologies. It not only can, but should, fulfil this role, and it should do so through a partnership with students to develop approaches to learning and teaching. This does not necessarily mean wholesale incorporation of ICT into teaching and learning. Rather it means adapting to and capitalising on evolving and intensifying behaviours that are being shaped by the experience of the newest technologies. In practice it means building on and steering the positive aspects of those behaviours such as experimentation, collaboration and teamwork, while addressing the negatives such as a casual and insufficiently critical attitude to information. The means to these ends should be the best tools for the job, whatever they may be. The role of institutions of higher education is to enable informed choice in the matter of those tools, and to support them and their effective deployment.

Jonathan Band’s Testimony on the DMCA Film Clip Compilation Exemption

ARL has released Jonathan Band's testimony on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act film clip compilation exemption.

Here's an excerpt:

Finally, putting aside the question of quality and alternatives, we have to ask ourselves why the rightsholders are opposing the modest expansion we seek. Why are they so reflexively confrontational? They know that the uses we seek will not harm their market in any way. They know that whether the exemption is granted or rejected will have absolutely no impact on the level of infringement. They should welcome our use of their content in our classrooms. They should make our legal use as easy as possible. We shouldn’t even have to apply for the exemption. They should proactively declare that they won’t bring DMCA actions against high ed institutions for assembling film compilations. Instead, they insult us by treating us as potential infringers who can’t be trusted to use a technology any 12-year old can download from the Internet. The Librarian of Congress should disregard the frivolous arguments raised by the rightsholders and allow circumvention for film clip compilations for high ed class classes in all disciplines.

Read more about it at "Big Content's 'Theater of the Absurd' at DMCA Hearings."

ARL Developing Alternative to Library Investment Index

The Association of Research Libraries is gathering profile descriptions of its member libraries in order to “to identify similarities and differences among libraries and to identify elements that will be measured for the purposes of an alternative to the expenditure-focused Library Investment Index.” The Library Investment Index is used to create a well-known ranking table of U.S. and Canadian research libraries (see page 90 of the ARL Statistics 2006–2007 as an example.)

Read more about it at "ARL Library Profiles Being Collected."

France Passes “Three-Strikes” Copyright Bill

The French National Assembly has passed the Création et Internet bill, a "three-strikes" copyright bill intended to curb illegal file sharing on the Internet by disconnecting offenders from the network on their third offense. The bill conflicts with a recently passed European Parliament law that prohibits EU member counties from disconnecting Internet users without judicial oversight.

Read more about it at "France Ignores EU and Passes Antipiracy Law" and "France Set for Showdown with EU after Passing 3 Strikes Law."

University of Washington Libraries to Close Three Science Branch Libraries

The University of Washington Libraries will close the Chemistry Library, the Fisheries-Oceanography Library, and the Physics-Astronomy Library this summer, merging them into a research commons in the Allen Library.

Read more about it at "Libraries Lost to Budget Cuts."

ETDs: EThOS Update

Chris Spencer has posted an update on EThOS (Electronic Theses Online Service).

Here's an excerpt:

Over the three months that it has been available as a beta version:

  • Over 100 UK universities have signed up to participate in the service;
  • Traffic to the site has grown to over 550,000 hits per month;
  • The number of theses available for immediate download has tripled, from 4,000 in January to over 12,500 at the end of April;
  • It has become the most popular linking destination from the British Library Integrated Catalogue, generating four times more links than the next most popular resource. . . .

Details on the size of the backlog at the end of April:

  1. Number of theses waiting to be digitised: c10,000;
  2. Average number of new requests for theses per day (as of 6/5/09): 100;
  3. Digitisation capacity (theses per day): 175;
  4. Forecast date for complete digitisation of theses in backlog: October 2009.

EndNote X3 Will Be Compatible with OpenOffice.org Writer

The forthcoming EndNote X3 will be compatible with OpenOffice.org Writer.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

The Healthcare and Science business of Thomson Reuters today announced compatibility between EndNote®—the bibliographic management software used by millions of researchers, librarians and students—and OpenOffice.org Writer. The new EndNote X3 for Windows, which will be released in June, introduces the patent pending Cite While You Write™ technology to OpenOffice.org Writer, an open-source word processor popular among academics.

OpenOffice.org Writer support in EndNote X3 enables users to format in-text citations and the bibliography instantly as required by publishers. Users can search EndNote libraries within OpenOffice.org Writer and select references to cite. The OpenOffice.org Writer formats a paper automatically upon inserting an EndNote citation and can revise an entire paper using more than 3,300 different styles with no additional typing required.

Water Environment Research Foundation Adopts Embargo Free Access Policy

The Water Environment Research Foundation will make its reports freely available after a two-year embargo period. Reports may be released for free access earlier under some conditions.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The Water Environment Research Foundation today announced a new open access initiative that will bring its wastewater and stormwater research results to the forefront of scientific and technical innovation. The new policy, which was vetted with all subscribers through an initial survey and then with a follow-up invitation to comment on the proposal, will go into full effect on July 1, 2009. . . .

The open access policy has two primary components:

  • First, all WERF final research report PDF files and hard copy reports remain available exclusively to subscribers, or available for sale to the public, through WERF and its publishing partners for two years. After the initial two years, all WERF final research report PDF files will be "open access," free to the general public, from the WERF website. (Tools are not part of the open access initiative.)
  • Second, if the WERF Board of Directors, Research Council, Communications Advisory Committee, or executive director determine that an earlier release of a final research report is in the public’s and subscribers' interest, they will need a majority vote in the affirmative to enact "open access" for that report before the 2-year open access date. Once WERF designates a report as open access, a PDF version of the report will be available, free of charge, on the WERF website.