Presentations from the eResearch Australasia 2008 conference are available.
Here's a brief selection:
The School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is seeking applicants for three-year doctoral fellowships in Digital Curation. The application deadline is January 1, 2009.
Cornell University has launched its DISCOVER Research Service Group to support its data-driven science efforts.
Here's an excerpt from the press release:
Cornell University announced today the establishment of the DISCOVER Research Service Group (DRSG) to facilitate data-driven science at Cornell by developing cross-disciplinary data archival and discovery tools. DISCOVER will conduct pilot projects in selected strategic areas such as the development of data discovery portals using access-layer protocols now under development at Fedora Commons and the Virtual Observatory. . . .
Cornell's Department of Astronomy and the University Library, in partnership with the Cornell Center for Advanced Computing, will work closely with DISCOVER, which is comprised of research groups from multiple disciplines and core data management and curation staff. . . .
The overarching goal of the DISCOVER Research Service Group is to provide accessible paths for the curation, preservation, and mining of scientific data. Systems are needed to make data sets accessible physically over both space (over a wide network) and time (for the indefinite future) and also transparently, using modern Web-based tools that are expected to evolve.
The RAND Corporation has released Embracing the Future: Embedding Digital Repositories in the University of London. (Thanks to Resource Shelf.)
Here's an excerpt from the announcement:
This study informs a consortium of thirteen London institutions with an assessment of current awareness and attitudes of stakeholders regarding digital repositories in three case study institutions. The report identifies drivers for, and barriers to, the embedding of digital repositories in institutional strategy. The findings therefore should be of use to decision-makers involved in the development of digital repositories. Our approach was entirely based on consultations with specific groups of stakeholders in three institutions through interviews with specific individuals.
JISC has released Public Exhibition of Automated Book Scanners Hosted at the Bayerische StaatsBibliothek—Munich 18th-20th June 2008.
Here's an excerpt from the announcement:
Julian Ball, the author of the report, attended an event at the Munich Digitisation Centre (18-10 June 2008) where four vendors exhibited and demonstrated their scanners: Qidenus, Kirtas, Treventus and 4DigitalBooks.
The report lists basic specifications for each scanner, contact details and personal observations on the various products.
EDUCAUSE has published The ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology, 2008.
Here's an excerpt:
This 2008 ECAR research study is a longitudinal extension of the 2004, 2005, 2006, and 2007 ECAR studies of students and information technology. The study is based on quantitative data from a spring 2008 survey of 27,317 freshmen and seniors at 90 four-year institutions and eight two-year institutions; student focus groups that included input from 75 students at four institutions; and analysis of qualitative data from 5,877 written responses to open-ended questions. In addition to studying student ownership, experience, behaviors, preferences, and skills with respect to information technologies, the 2008 study also includes a special focus on student participation in social networking sites.
The National Institute of Informatics has launched JAIRO (Japanese Institutional Repositories Online) in test mode. JAIRO allows federated searching of Japanese institutional repositories. It currently includes 84 repositories containing around 540,000 items.
The Repository Records Statistics (aka ircount) service has a new Web site, and it has expanded its coverage beyond the UK to include weekly record counts from digital repositories around the globe (beta mode).
The Association of Research Libraries has published the ARL Annual Salary Survey 2007–08.
Here's an excerpt from the press release:
The 2007–08 data show that ARL librarians’ salaries outperformed inflation for the fourth consecutive year. The combined median professional salary in US and Canadian ARL university libraries was $61,833—a 3.7% increase from the previous year. Over the same period, the Consumer Price Index rose 2.4% in the US and 2.5% in Canada.
The ARL Annual Salary Survey 2007–08 analyzes salary data from a number of different perspectives, including race, ethnicity, and gender. Minority librarians make up 14.1% of the professional staff in US ARL university libraries; the percentage of minorities in managerial or administrative positions is lower. Women comprise 69.4% of minority staff members.
Gender-based salary differentials persist in ARL libraries in 2007–08. The overall salary for women in the 113 ARL university libraries is 95.4% of that paid to men; this figure compares to 95.7% in 2006–07. While the data show a marked closure of the gender gap in ARL libraries over the long term—in 1980–81, women in ARL libraries were paid roughly 87% of what men were paid—the data also raise the possibility that the closure has peaked, and that a 5% gap between men’s and women’s salaries may persist.
Catherine Mitchell, Acting Director of the eScholarship Publishing Group at the California Digital Library, has been named as the permanent occupant of that post. In this capacity, Mitchell is responsible for the eScholarship Repository, eScholarship Editions, the Mark Twain Project Online, and other ventures.
In her statement about the appointment, Laine Farley, CDL Interim Executive Director, said:
Catherine has held the position on an interim basis since November 2007. During that time, she has led the group to develop a new services-oriented vision and to launch an ambitious redesign of the eScholarship interface. She was also the project manager for the Mark Twain project which successfully launched last November. Catherine’s dedication, deep understanding of scholarly communication, publishing issues, and professionalism are admired by all of us who work with her.
Kevin Franklin, Executive Director of The Institute for Computing in Humanities, Arts and Social Science, has announced the creation of a new metablog (i.e., blog of blogs) called Planet Digital Humanities, Arts and Social Science (Planet DHASS).
DigitalKoans is among the blogs chosen for inclusion in Planet DHASS.
Presentations from ARROW's Repository Day meeting are now available. (Thanks to Open Access News.)
See the DigitalKoans post "Digital Repositories in Australia: Blog Reports on ARROW Repository Day" for links to Chris Rusbridge's posts about Repository Day.
A new study says that large doctoral institutions could face costs that "easily exceed half a million dollars annually" as they try to clamp down on illegal file sharing in order to comply with Section 488 of the Higher Education Opportunity Act of 2008.
The Campus Computing Project's The Campus Costs of P2P Compliance report details the findings of its July 2008 higher education compliance cost study, which included responses from 321 two-year and four-year institutions.
Read more about it at "The Costs of Policing Campus Networks."
The Association of Research Libraries has released E-Science Talking Points for ARL Deans and Directors.
Here's an excerpt:
The term "e-science" is roughly—though not precisely—synonymous with "Cyberinfrastructure;" where the latter term is prevalent in the United States, e-science predominates in the United Kingdom and elsewhere in Europe. Both terms refer to the use of networked computing technologies to enhance collaboration and innovative methods in research. "e-science," however, has a more specific focus on scientific research, whereas Cyberinfrastructure is more inclusive of fields outside the sciences and engineering, and incorporates greater emphasis on supercomputing resources and innovation.
The Object Reuse and Exchange (OAI-ORE) project has released the first production version of its Object Reuse and Exchange specifications.
Here's an excerpt from the press release:
These standards provide the foundation for applications and services that can visualize, preserve, transfer, summarize, and improve access to the aggregations that people use in their daily Web interaction: including multiple page Web documents, multiple format documents in institutional repositories, scholarly data sets, and online photo and music collections. The OAI-ORE standards leverage the core Web architecture and concepts emerging from related efforts including the semantic web, linked data, and Atom syndication. As a result, they integrate both with the emerging machine-readable web, Web 2.0, and the future evolution of networked information. . . .
The documents in the release describe a data model to introduce aggregations as resources with URIs on the web. They also detail the machine-readable descriptions of aggregations expressed in the popular Atom syndication format, in RDF/XML, and RDFa.
A preprint of "Institutional Repositories: Strategies for the Present and the Future," written by Jean-Gabriel Bankier, Connie Foster, and Glen Wiley, is now available. Bankier is the President of the Berkeley Electronic Press, Foster is the Head of the Department of Library Technical Services at the Western Kentucky University Libraries, and Wiley is Metadata Librarian at the Cornell University Library.
The University of Michigan Library has announced that it will use Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial licenses for works that it creates for which the Regents of the University of Michigan hold the copyrights.
Here's an except from the press release:
University Librarian Paul Courant said, "Using Creative Commons licenses is another way the University Library can act on its commitment to the public good. By marking our copyrighted content as available for reuse, we offer the University community and the public a rich set of educational resources free from traditional permissions barriers." . . .
All original copyrighted material that is created by Library staff and in which the copyright belongs to the Regents of the University of Michigan will be available under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial license. This includes bibliographies, research guides, lesson plans, and other resources. For some samples of the kinds of excellent resources that will now be available for adaptation and re-use, see our many Library Research Guides http://www.lib.umich.edu/guides/, the Usability Studies produced by the Library's Usability Working Group http://www.lib.umich.edu/usability/projects/projects.html, or the tutorials for using spatial and numeric data http://www.lib.umich.edu/nsds/spatial_tutorials/.
The Library has begun attaching Creative Commons licenses to content throughout its website, but some pages do not include the license code yet. The licenses will be fully integrated into the Library's new website design, scheduled for release in Fall 2008.
JISC has made available a number of widgets for repository-related services, such as JULIET, OpenDOAR, SWORD, and RoMEO, that can be used on iGoogle, Netvibes, and similar systems. ICO3 developed the widgets for JISC.
You can see the widgets in action at JISC's Netvibes demo page.
The Robertson Library of University of Prince Edward Island has released Islandora, an open source Drupal front-end to the Fedora digital repository software.
Read more about it at "Drupal/Fedora Module from 'Islandora'."
Australia's Plan for Cyber-Safety will not offer an Internet filtering opt-out. Rather, Australians will have to choose between two filtered options: one blocks inappropriate content for children, the other "illegal" content.
Read more about it at "Australians Censor the Internet," "Australia Continues Down the Slippery Slope of Censorship. . . 'For The Children,' of Course," and "No Opt-Out of Filtered Internet."
YouTube has immediately acted on takedown notices from networks such as CBS and Fox News about McCain campaign videos, removing the allegedly infringing videos. The campaign has sent a protest letter to YouTube regarding the takedowns.
Here's an excerpt:
Numerous times during the course of the campaign, our advertisements or web videos have been the subject of DMCA takedown notices regarding uses that are clearly privileged under the fair use doctrine. The uses at issue have been the inclusion of fewer than ten seconds of footage from news broadcasts in campaign ads or videos, as a basis for commentary on the issues presented in the news reports, or on the reports themselves.
Regarding the letter, Gigi Sohn, President of Public Knowledge, said:
It is ironic that the McCain/Palin campaign sent its letter to YouTube complaining about that company’s take-down procedures on the same day that President Bush signed the Pro-IP Act, which is yet another bill written by the big media companies that adds yet more imbalance to our copyright laws.
Read more about it at "McCain Campaign Feels DMCA Sting," "McCain Letter Shows Imbalance in Copyright Law," and "McCain/Palin Campaign Angry over Bogus DMCA Takedowns."
Chris Rusbridge has blogged a series of reports on ARROW Repository Day (the full name of ARROW is Australian Research Repositories Online to the World).
TASI has launched a new online tutorial, Internet for Image Searching. It includes sites that provide images that can be freely used.
President Bush has signed the Prioritizing Resources and Organization for Intellectual Property Act (PRO-IP Act). In addition to strengthening infringement penalties, the bill creates an Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator position (commonly known as the "Copyright Czar") in the Office of the President.
Read more about it at "Bush Signs RIAA-backed Intellectual-Property Law," "President Bush Approves 'Copyright Czar' Bill," and "Stacking Penalties upon Penalties (PRO-IP Passes Senate)."
It's Open Access Day, and the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association has officially been launched.
Here's an excerpt from the press release:
The Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association, OASPA, announces its official launch today in conjunction with an OA Day celebration hosted by the Wellcome Trust in London. The mission of OASPA is to support and represent the interests of Open Access (OA) journals publishers globally in all scientific, technical, and scholarly disciplines through an exchange of information, setting of industry standards, advancing business and publishing models, advocating for gold OA journals publishing, education and the promotion of innovation.
From having first emerged as a new publishing model over a decade ago, OA publishing has become an embedded feature of the scholarly publishing landscape: The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) lists over 3500 peer-reviewed journals; a growing number of professional organizations offer OA publications; university libraries increasingly support OA publishing services; funding organizations support and encourage OA publishing; and a long tail of independent editorial teams and societies now publish their titles OA. Professional OA publishers such as BioMed Central and the Public Library of Science (PLoS) have been in business for over five years, while some scientist/scholar publishers (editorial teams operating independently of a professional publisher) have published their OA journals for a decade or more. Moreover, a number of traditional publishing houses are now engaging in Open Access activities, the recent acquisition of BioMed Central by Springer and the SAGE-Hindawi partnership being two cases in point. By bringing together those who share an interest in developing appropriate business models, tools and standards to support OA journals publishing, it is hoped that success in these areas can be achieved more quickly to the benefit of not only OASPA members, but more importantly, for the scholarly community that OA publishers serve.
Membership in OASPA is open to both scholar publishers and professional publishing organizations, including university presses and for profit and non-profit organizations. Members are expected to demonstrate a genuine interest in OA journals publishing by having signed either the Berlin or Budapest Declarations and must publish at least one full OA journal. Other individuals and organizations who support OA journals publishing or who are interested in exploring opportunities are also welcome. Membership criteria and an application form can be found on the OASPA website, www.oaspa.org.
The founding members of OASPA represent a broad spectrum of OA publishers and include: BioMed Central, Co-Action Publishing, Copernicus, Hindawi Publishing Corporation, Journal of Medical Internet Research (Gunther Eysenbach), Medical Education Online (David Solomon), the Public Library of Science (PLoS), SAGE, SPARC Europe and Utrecht University Library (Igitur). Representatives from each of these publishers will form an interim board until a first General Meeting is held during 2009.
