DSpace and Fedora Commons Merge to Form DuraSpace

DSpace and Fedora Commons have merged to form a new organization, DuraSpace.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

The joined organization, named "DuraSpace," will sustain and grow its flagship repository platforms – Fedora and DSpace. DuraSpace will also expand its portfolio by offering new technologies and services that respond to the dynamic environment of the Web and to new requirements from existing and future users. DuraSpace will focus on supporting existing communities and will also engage a larger and more diverse group of stakeholders in support of its not-for-profit mission. The organization will be led by an executive team consisting of Sandy Payette (Chief Executive Officer), Michele Kimpton (Chief Business Officer), and Brad McLean (Chief Technology Officer) and will operate out of offices in Ithaca, NY and Cambridge, MA.

"This is a great development," said Clifford Lynch, Executive Director of the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI). "It will focus resources and talent in a way that should really accelerate progress in areas critical to the research, education, and cultural memory communities. The new emphasis on distributed reliable storage infrastructure services and their integration with repositories is particularly timely."

Together Fedora and DSpace make up the largest market share of open repositories worldwide, serving over 700 institutions. These include organizations committed to the use of open source software solutions for the dissemination and preservation of academic, scientific, and cultural digital content.

"The joining of DSpace and Fedora Commons is a watershed event for libraries, specifically, and higher education, more generally," said James Hilton, CIO of the University of Virginia. "Separately, these two organizations operated with similar missions and a shared commitment to developing and supporting open technologies. By bringing together the technical, financial, and community-based resources of the two organizations, their communities gain a robust organization focused on solving the many challenges involved in storing, curating, and preserving digital data and scholarship," he said.

New Products

DuraSpace will continue to support its existing software platforms, DSpace and Fedora, as well as expand its offerings to support the needs of global information communities. The first new technology to emerge will be a Web-based service named "DuraCloud." DuraCloud is a hosted service that takes advantage of the cost efficiencies of cloud storage and cloud computing, while adding value to help ensure longevity and re-use of digital content. The DuraSpace organization is developing partnerships with commercial cloud providers who offer both storage and computing capabilities.

The DuraCloud service will be run by the DuraSpace organization. Its target audiences are organizations responsible for digital preservation and groups creating shared spaces for access and re-use of digital content. DuraCloud will be accessible directly as a Web service and also via plug-ins to digital repositories including Fedora and DSpace. The software developed to support the DuraCloud service will be made available as open source. An early release of DuraCloud will be available for selected pilot partners in Fall 2009.

Key Benefits of the DuraSpace Organization

DuraSpace will support both DSpace and Fedora by working closely with both communities and when possible, develop synergistic technologies, services, and programs that increase interoperability of the two platforms. DuraSpace will also support other open source software projects including the Mulgara semantic store, a scalable RDF database.

DuraSpace is mission-focused. The organization will be associated with its broader mission of working towards developing services and solutions on behalf of diverse communities rather than focusing on single-solution product development. This change in orientation can be characterized as moving beyond the software and toward the mission.

DuraSpace will bring strength and leadership to a larger community and amplify the value brought by each organization individually. With both organizations working in unison, there can be significant economies of scale, synergies in developing open technologies and services, and a strong position for long-term sustainability.

Version 75, Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography

Version 75 of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography is now available from Digital Scholarship. This selective bibliography presents over 3,400 articles, books, and other digital and printed sources that are useful in understanding scholarly electronic publishing efforts on the Internet. Where possible, links are provided to works that are freely available on the Internet, including e-prints in disciplinary archives and institutional repositories.

The Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography: 2008 Annual Edition is now available as a paperback book.

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

Dedication
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

The 2006, 2007, and 2008 annual PDF editions of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography are also available.

An article about the bibliography ("Evolution of an Electronic Book: The Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography") has been published in The Journal of Electronic Publishing.

djatoka Version 1.1/djatoka Viewer Version 2.0 Released

djatoka version 1.1 and djatoka Viewer version 2.0 have been released.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

djatoka is a Java-based open source image server with an attractive basic feature set and extensibility under control of the community of implementers. Off-the-shelf, djatoka provides compression and region extraction of JPEG 2000 images, URI-addressability of regions, and support for a rich set of input/output image formats (e.g., BMP, GIF, JPG, PNG, PNM, TIF, JPEG 2000). djatoka also comes with a plug-in framework that allows transformations to be applied to regions and resolutions (e.g., watermarking).

John Price Wilkin Talks about the Hathi Trust

OCLC has released a new podcast, The Hathi Trust and "The Silence of the Archive" in which Roy Tennant interviews John Price Wilkin, Executive Director, Hathi Trust and AUL for Library Information Technology at the University of Michigan, about the Hathi Trust.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

John makes an amazing prediction about this invigorating collaborative development and also talks about "the silence of the archive," as well as the issues it poses for those interested in preserving our cultural heritage.

University of California Systemwide 2008 Use Statistics for Databases, E-Books, and Journals

The California Digital Library has released University of California systemwide 2008 use statistics for selected databases, e-books, and journals.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

One of the observations from reading the 2008 usage reports is that there are wide variations in some reported statistics. Some of the changes may reflect actual usage trends and some may result from anomalies in the data. Below are some possible reasons for the usage changes:

  • New content or backfiles have been added
  • New features or links implemented on the interface associated with full-text access
  • Data mining activities
  • More external entry points for the full-text content, e.g., Google Scholar
  • Greater use of Google Scholar and other search engines instead of A&I databases, resulting in usage declines for those databases
  • Research interest changes on the campuses

In addition, some publishers are now providing and end-users have begun using software that allows users to easily download multiple full-text articles simultaneously.  For example, since September 2008, Elsevier has partnered with Quosa, a document download software company, to allow users to download up to 20 PDF versions of full-text research with only a few clicks.  CDL will be monitoring the effect these new tools may have on UC usage reports.

SWORD Named Most Innovative Project at JISC Repositories and Preservation Conference

UKOLN's SWORD (Simple Web-service Offering Repository Deposit) Project was named most innovative project at the JISC Repositories and Preservation conference.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

SWORD, whose partners include developers of the DSpace, EPrints, Fedora and IntraLibrary repository software platforms, plus the University of York and CASIS at the University of Wales, has created a mechanism for repositories to deposit and receive deposits via a standard protocol, thus making it possible for different repositories and other applications to move content around more easily. SWORD has received much interest, and a growing community of active developers is building, including Microsoft whose SWORD plug-in can support deposits direct to a repository from within Microsoft Word. FeedForward, a close second for the award, is also SWORD-compliant. Work on SWORD continues within the UKOLN suite of activities.

Cornell Lifts Use Restrictions on Reproductions of Public Domain Works, Including over 70,000 E-Books

The Cornell University Library has eliminated use restrictions on reproductions of public domain works, including over 70,000 e-books.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

In a dramatic change of practice, Cornell University Library has announced it will no longer require its users to seek permission to publish public domain items duplicated from its collections. Instead, users may now use reproductions of public domain works made for them by the Library or available via Web sites, without seeking any further permission.

The Library, as the producer of digital reproductions made from its collections, has in the past licensed the use of those reproductions. Individuals and corporations that failed to secure permission to repurpose these reproductions violated their agreement with the Library. "The threat of legal action, however," noted Anne R. Kenney, Carl A. Kroch University Librarian, "does little to stop bad actors while at the same time limits the good uses that can be made of digital surrogates. We decided it was more important to encourage the use of the public domain materials in our holdings than to impose roadblocks."

The immediate impetus for the new policy is Cornell’s donation of more than 70,000 digitized public domain books to the Internet Archive (details at www.archive.org/details/cornell).

"Imposing legally binding restrictions on these digital files would have been very difficult and in a way contrary to our broad support of open access principles," said Oya Y. Rieger, Associate University Librarian for Information Technologies. "It seemed better just to acknowledge their public domain status and make them freely usable for any purpose. And since it doesn't make sense to have different rules for material that is reproduced at the request of patrons, we have removed permission obligations from public domain works."

Institutional restrictions on the use of public domain work, sometimes labeled "copyfraud," have been the subject of much scholarly criticism. The Cornell initiative goes further than many other recent attempts to open access to public domain material by removing restrictions on both commercial and non-commercial use. Users of the public domain works are still expected to determine on their own that works are in the public domain where they live. They also must respect non-copyright rights, such as the rights of privacy, publicity, and trademark. The Library will continue to charge service fees associated with the reproduction of analog material or the provision of versions of files different than what is freely available on the Web. All library Web sites will be updated to reflect this new policy during 2009.

The new Cornell policy can be found at cdl.library.cornell.edu/guidelines.html.

Fedora 3.2 Released

The Fedora Commons has released Fedora 3.2.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Included in Fedora 3.2 is the long-awaited, web-based administrative client, initial integration with the emerging Akubra storage- abstraction layer, many useful bug fixes, and the experimental release of a Fedora decoupled from the familiar 'fedora' context path.

Read more about it at "Fedora Repository 3.2 Release Notes."

University of Calgary Academic Council of Library and Cultural Resources Adopts Open Access Mandate

The University of Calgary's Academic Council of Libraries and Cultural Resources has adopted an open access mandate. (Thanks to Open Access News.)

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

The Academic Council of Libraries and Cultural Resources at the University of Calgary has adopted a mandate to deposit their scholarly output in Dspace, the University’s open access scholarly repository. The repository has been in place since March 2003 and currently provides access to a broad range of scholarly output, including a growing collection of full text university theses.

Members of the Council, comprised of archivists, curators, and librarians, have long supported open access through promotions on campus such as Open Access Day, membership in SPARC and Canadian Association of Research Libraries, support for online open access journals published through the University of Calgary Press, and an active program of introducing the repository to faculty and graduate students. Libraries and Cultural Resources also funds the $100,000 Open Access Authors Fund to assist researchers to publish in open access journals.

The text of the mandate is:

"As an active member of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, Libraries and Cultural Resources at the University of Calgary endorses the Budapest Open Access Initiative, the Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing and the Berlin Declaration.

LCR academic staff members believe that the output of our scholarly activities should be as widely disseminated and openly available as possible. Our scholarly output includes but is not limited to journal articles, books and book chapters, presentations if substantial, conference papers and proceedings, and datasets.

Effective April 17, 2009, LCR academic staff commit to

  • Deposit their scholarly output in the University of Calgary’s open access scholarly repository
  • Promote Open Access on campus and assist scholars in making their research openly available
  • Where possible, publish their research in an open-access journal"

Dryad Repository Gets $2.18 Million Grant from the National Science Foundation

The Dryad Repository has received a $2.18 million grant from the National Science Foundation.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

The repository, called Dryad, is designed to archive data that underlie published findings in evolutionary biology, ecology and related fields and allow scientists to access and build on each other’s findings.

The grant recipients are:

The National Evolutionary Synthesis Center and the Metadata Research Center have been developing Dryad in coordination with a large group of Journals and Societies in evolutionary biology and ecology. With the new grant, the additional team members are contributing to the development of the repository. . . .

Currently, a tremendous amount of information underlying published research findings is lost, researchers say. The lack of data sharing and preservation makes it impossible for the data to be examined or re-used by future investigators.

Dryad addresses these shortcomings and allows scientists to validate published findings, explore new analysis methodologies, repurpose data for research questions unanticipated by the original authors, integrate data across studies and look for trends through statistical meta-analysis.

"The Dryad project seeks to enable scientists to generate new knowledge using existing data," said Kathleen Smith, Ph.D., principal investigator for the grant, a biology professor at Duke and director of the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center. "The key to Dryad in our view is making data deposition a routine and easy part of the publication process."

Digital Library Jobs: TDL Team Leader at Texas Digital Library

The Texas Digital Library is recruiting a TDL Team Leader (Senior Systems Analyst).

Here's an excerpt from the ad:

Purpose of position: To supervise a team of 3 programmers engaged in the design, development, maintenance and testing of software in support of the programs of the Texas Digital Library (TDL), a 19 member consortium of universities throughout Texas.

Essential functions: Design operational and system improvements, research, implement, test and maintain new and deployed web and database applications. Consult with users to define application requirements. Recommend technical and procedural design for applications. Prepare documentation and present system studies. Compose documentation for procedures and guidelines for application users. Lead technical team to accomplish goals within deadlines. Produce reports for TDL co-Directors to keep them informed of the progress of TDL projects and activities.

British Library Releases “Copyright for Education and Research: Golden Opportunity or Digital Black Hole?”

The British Library has released "Copyright for Education and Research: Golden Opportunity or Digital Black Hole?"

Here's an excerpt:

The Golden Opportunity is:

  • a vibrant research environment which fully utilises technological developments for education and research which in turn supports the UK’s knowledge economy.

The Digital Black Hole is:

  • digital lockdown where access is restricted and education, research and the knowledge economy are stifled.

Also available is a MP3 audio file of the May 5th debate "Golden Opportunity or Digital Black Hole?" with Dame Lynne Brindley, David Lammy MP, Torin Douglas, Dr. Annette Davison, Simon Tanner and Rod Bristow. See the debate press release for details.

Digital Library Jobs: Digital Projects Coordinator at Mississippi State

The Digital Preservation and Access Unit of the Mississippi State University Library is recruiting a Digital Projects Coordinator.

Here's an excerpt from the ad:

To provide innovative, dynamic, team-oriented responsibilities as Coordinator of the Library's Digital Preservation and Access Unit. Mississippi State University Libraries has a highly collaborative environment where excellence in job performance, scholarship and service are valued and required; will lead the Libraries in building digital services and collections; will combine the technical skills necessary to build digital collections with the management and leadership skills necessary to build a service that requires input and expertise from across the Libraries; will work closely with special collections and archives, cataloging and metadata and systems staff to manage the network of skills needed to provide digital collections of value to the Libraries and the University; will directly oversee all aspects of the digitization and preservation of the Charles Templeton Sheet Music Collection; will be responsible for assisting in the ongoing development of the web presence for all digital library projects.

President Obama Requests $265,556,000 for IMLS

President Obama has asked Congress for $265,556,000 for the Institute of Museum and Library Services' FY 2010 budget allocation, an increase of $1,453,000 over FY 2009.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

The President requested $213,240,000 for the nation’s 123,000 libraries. Of that amount, approximately 80 percent is distributed through the Grants to States program to the State Library Administrative Agencies (SLAAs) in each of the 50 states, the District of Columbia, U.S. territories, and freely associated state, according to a population-based formula. These grants help libraries meet the community needs, use technology to develop new service models and reach underserved populations. Library funding also supports:

  • National Leadership Grants to support creation of new tools, research, models, services, practices, or alliances to shape tomorrow’s libraries;
  • Native American and Native Hawaiian Library Services Grants to support improved access to library services for Native Americans, Alaska Native Villages, and Native Hawaiians; and the
  • Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian grants that build the professional capacity of libraries by improving staff knowledge and skills.

University of Oregon Library Faculty Adopt Open Access Mandate

The University of Oregon Library Faculty have unanimously adopted an open access mandate (thanks to Open Access News).

Here's the open access resolution from the announcement:

The Library 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:

Each Library 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 Library faculty member grants 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 Library 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 Dean of the Libraries will waive application of the policy for a particular article upon written notification by the author, who informs the UO of the reason.

To facilitate distribution of the scholarly articles, as of the date of publication, each faculty member will make available an electronic copy of the author's final version of the article and full citation at no charge to a designated representative of the 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.

In March of this year, the Oregon State University Libraries faculty adopted a Library Faculty Open Access Policy.

DigitalKoans

Digital Repositories Roadmap Review: Towards a Vision for Research and Learning in 2013

JISC has released Digital Repositories Roadmap Review: Towards a Vision for Research and Learning in 2013.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The review is structured into two parts. Firstly it makes a number of recommendations targeted at the JISC Executive. The review then goes on to identify a number of milestones of relevance to the wider community that might act as a measure of progress towards the wider vision of enhanced scholarly communication. Achievement of these milestones would be assisted by JISC through its community work and funding programmes. The review addresses repositories for research outputs, research data and learning materials in separate sections.

DigitalKoans

Library IT Jobs: Web Services Librarian at Golden Gate University

The Golden Gate University Library is recruiting a Web Services Librarian.

Here's an excerpt from the ad:

As leader of the Library Web Team, this librarian works collegially with others:

  • Coordinates the creation and management of the online content presented on the University Library's Web properties.
  • Analyzes current content, as well as anticipating future content needs, and adjusts web information accordingly.
  • Assesses effectiveness and usability of website; identifies improvements that consider the various needs and learning styles of GGU students and faculty.

DigitalKoans

Open Source OPAC: Blacklight 2.1 Release

The Blacklight 2.1 Release is now available.

Here's an excerpt from the Blacklight Frequently Asked Questions:

Blacklight is an open source OPAC (online public access catalog). That means libraries (or anyone else) can use it to allow people to search and browse their collections online. Blacklight uses Solr to index and search, and it has a highly configurable Ruby on Rails front-end. Currently, Blacklight can index, search, and provide faceted browsing for MARC records and several kinds of XML documents, including TEI, EAD, and GDMS. Blacklight was developed at the University of Virginia Library and is made public under an Apache 2.0 license.

DigitalKoans

Proposed Budget Cuts Threaten LSU Press

The Louisiana State University Press is listed in "Louisiana State University System: Preliminary Budget Reduction Proposals" under a $4,100,000 "Cut general fund support to academic support units" item, which says:

This cut will require certain academic support entities to implement new fees for their services or to increase their existing fees to students, faculty, staff, and/or the general public. Because of the nature of some of these entities and their fixed cost of operation, it is very possible they cannot generate the revenue needed and will close. Examples of units that may be impacted as a result of this type of decision are the LSU Museum of Art, Rural Life Museum, Hilltop Arboretum, LSU Press, Southern Review, Louisiana Library Network, Alumni Association and the Fire & Emergency Training Institute.

Read more about it at "Louisiana State U. Press Might Get the Ax."

DigitalKoans

IR Deposit Using Embedded Document Metadata: Deposit Plait: Final Report

JISC has released Deposit Plait: Final Report.

Here's an excerpt:

The aim of the Deposit Plait project was to examine potential for easing the deposit of journal articles into institutional repositories by making use of any metadata embedded within the document properties of the document being deposited. . . .

The first stage of the project was to see how easy it is to extract this metadata. The target file formats that the project worked with were the Open Document Format (as created by OpenOffice), OpenXML (as created by Microsoft Office 2007), and .doc files (as created by version of Microsoft Office from 97 to 2003). There are standard open source software libraries that can extract both standard and custom metadata fields from each of these file forms.

The second stage of the project was to see how easy it is to use extracted metadata as search terms in order to search for a more complete metadata record. In the case where the item being deposited into the repository has been in existence for some time (it is a 'retrospective deposit') then metadata found can be used to perform a search. Different search methods were implemented as examples, including using search APIs, and screen scraping from search services. Whilst the method works fine, there are the normal licensing issues to consider, and whether licences cover the user for this type of metadata re-use.

The project concluded by creating an online demonstration system. In contrast to a normal repository deposit where the user enters metadata, and then uploads a file, this system requires the user to first upload a file. The metadata is extracted, and the user is allowed to choose which (one or more) of the fields to use as the basis of a search. The search is then initiated and matching records returned. The user can then pick and choose fields from the results the 'plait' together their final metadata record.

DigitalKoans

Digital Library Jobs: Digital Technologies Development Librarian at NCSU

The North Carolina State University Libraries are recruiting a Digital Technologies Development Librarian.

Here's an excerpt from the ad:

The Digital Technologies Development Librarian provides technical leadership and hands-on programming expertise for digital library projects. She or he identifies emerging technologies that have potential for new and improved library services. Working both independently and in team settings, the incumbent develops new digital library services through an iterative process that emphasizes performance, sustainability, and usability. She or he develops tools that support ongoing data analysis of library services and digital library projects. The Digital Technologies Development Librarian maintains and provides enhancements to existing digital library applications and collaborates closely with Information Technology staff to develop and maintain supporting technology infrastructure. She or he participates in library planning and serves on library-wide committees, task forces, and teams. NCSU librarians are expected to be active professionally and to contribute to developments in the field. Reports to the Associate Head for Digital Library Development.

DigitalKoans

Wolters Kluwer 2009 First-Quarter Update

Wolters Kluwer released its "Wolters Kluwer 2009 First-Quarter Scheduled Trading Update."

Here's an excerpt:

The company continues to see resilience in its first-quarter profitability despite challenging economic conditions in North America and Europe which have impacted the buying decisions of our professional customers. Regardless of these challenges, the professionals we serve continued to demand new and innovative solutions to improve their productivity. We continued to address these needs and as a result revenues from online and software solutions exceeded 50% of total revenues in the quarter. Retention rates on subscription products were largely in line with the prior year, while new subscription sales and sales on transactional products were weak as anticipated at the beginning of the year and from delayed customer purchase decisions. Despite these conditions, the ordinary EBITA margin [Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation and Amortization margin] in the first quarter was in line with the prior year due to earlier cost containment actions, the continued migration of revenues from print to electronic products, the benefits of the Springboard operational excellence program and the contribution of higher margin acquisitions completed in the prior year. First-quarter cash flow was in line with expectations, and integration of prior year acquisitions is on track. The resilient portfolio and strong cash generation continue to support a solid financial position.

DigitalKoans