Larry Carver Named Digital Preservation Pioneer

The National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program at the Library of Congress has named Larry Carver, retired Director of Library Technologies and Digital Initiatives at University of California at Santa Barbara, as a digital preservation pioneer.

Here's an excerpt from the UCSB press release:

"We at the UCSB Library are thrilled that Larry Carver has received this important and well-deserved recognition," said Brenda Johnson, university librarian. "His tireless and innovative work in the development of the Map and Imagery Lab and the Alexandria Digital Library has brought international attention to our library and has benefited thousands of scholars, students, and members of the public from around the world. We offer him our heartiest congratulations on being named a Library of Congress ‘Pioneer of Digital Preservation.'" . . .

Carver began his career at the library where he helped build an impressive collection of maps, aerial photography, and satellite imagery that led to the development of the Map and Imagery Laboratory (MIL) in 1979. As the MIL collections grew, Carver felt that geospatial data presented a unique challenge to the library. He believed that coordinate-based collections should be managed differently than book-based collections. But not everyone agreed with him.

"It became apparent that handling traditional geospatial content in a typical library context was just not satisfactory and another means to control that data was important," he said. "It wasn't as easy as it sounds. I was in a very conservative environment, and they were not easily convinced that this was something a library should do."

Carver and others spent years developing an exhaustive set of requirements for building a geospatial information management system. The system had a number of innovative ideas. "We included traditional methods of handling metadata but also wanted to search by location on the Earth's surface," Carver said. "The idea was that if you point to a place on the Earth you could ask the question, 'What information do you have about that space?,' as opposed to a traditional way of having to know ahead of time who wrote about it."

An opportunity to develop that system arrived in 1994 when UCSB received funding from the National Science Foundation for Carver and his team to build the Alexandria Digital Library. "We produced the first operational digital library that was based on our research," Carver said. "Our concentration was to be able to develop a system that could search millions of records with latitude and longitude coordinates and present those results via the Internet."

The basic concepts behind the Alexandria Digital Library have been widely adopted by Google Earth, Wikipedia, and others. Carver couldn't be more delighted.

"I think it's wonderful," Carver said. "We weren't trying to be the only game in town. We were just trying to raise consciousness way back in the early 1980s that this was a viable way of handling geospatial material. This approach lets people interact with data in a realistic way without having a great deal of knowledge about an individual object. It was a new way of dealing with massive amounts of information in an environment that made finding and accessing information much easier."

Read more about it at "Digital Preservation Pioneer: Larry Carver."

Stanford Intellectual Property Litigation Clearinghouse Launched

The Law, Science & Technology Program at Stanford Law School has launched the Stanford Intellectual Property Litigation Clearinghouse.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

This publicly available, online research tool will enable scholars, policymakers, lawyers, judges, and journalists to review real-time data about IP legal disputes that have been filed across the country, and ultimately to analyze the efficacy of the system that regulates patents, copyrights, trademarks, antitrust, and trade secrets.

The Intellectual Property Litigation Clearinghouse database includes real-time data summaries, industry indices, and trend analysis together with a full-text search engine, providing detailed and timely information that cannot be found elsewhere in the public domain. Stanford Law School, along with its partner organizations that funded the development and provided industry insight, are releasing the IPLC in phased modules, and today’s release, the Patent Litigation Module, includes more than 23,000 cases filed in U.S. district courts since 2000—raw data for every district court patent case and all results (outcomes and opinions).

Intellectual property (IP) is a key driver of the American economy, and IP litigation is big business. By one estimate, the nation’s copyright and patent industries alone contributed almost 20 percent of private industry’s share of the U.S. gross domestic product and were responsible for close to 40 percent of all private industry growth.

What's a Fast Wide Area Network Data Transfer? Now, It's 114 Gigabits per Second

At SuperComputing 2008, an international team headed by California Institute of Technology researchers demonstrated wide area network, multiple-country data transfers that peaked at 114 gigabits per second and sustained a 110 gigabit per second rate.

Read more about it at "High Energy Physics Team Sets New Data-Transfer World Records."

Google Book Search Bibliography, Version 3

The Google Book Search Bibliography, Version 3 is now available.

This bibliography presents selected English-language articles and other works that are useful in understanding Google Book Search. It primarily focuses on the evolution of Google Book Search and the legal, library, and social issues associated with it. Where possible, links are provided to works that are freely available on the Internet, including e-prints in disciplinary archives and institutional repositories. Note that e-prints and published articles may not be identical.

"In Search Of A Standardized Model for Institutional Repository Assessment or How Can We Compare Institutional Repositories?"

Chuck Thomas, Florida Center for Library Automation, and Robert H. McDonald, University of California San Diego, have deposited a postprint of "In Search Of A Standardized Model for Institutional Repository Assessment or How Can We Compare Institutional Repositories?" in eScholarship.

Here's the abstract:

Assessing universities and faculty is a continuous struggle. Academic administrators must labor year after year to gather meaningful statistics for assessment exercises such as periodic institutional accreditations, program reviews, and annual funding requests. It is hard to overstate the difficulty and complexity of compiling such data. The professional literature of higher education administration contains frequent calls over the past several decades, for better ways to measure performance in colleges and universities. One way to accomplish this is through the work of research libraries and their use of institutional repositories. Developing a standardized way to assess a university's ouput through the use of digital repository metrics is one such method to assess and compare separate institutions. This paper looks at several models that could be of use in this process.

Laine Farley Named as Executive Director of the California Digital Library

Laine Farley has been named as the Executive Director of the California Digital Library. Farley has served as the Interim Executive Director since July 2006.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

"What we needed was not just a great leader for the CDL, but also a strategy for building the next generation of digital libraries," said Daniel Greenstein, UC vice provost for academic information and strategic services. "It was equally clear that the best way forward in envisioning this new world would be to draw upon the creativity, leadership and talent already within UC and the CDL, and to ramp up our planning efforts. Laine's vision and leadership, which she has demonstrated during challenging times, will take the CDL in new and exciting directions."

As part of ongoing planning with the University of California libraries, Farley will work closely with the university librarians on the 10 campuses and others throughout the UC system to ensure that systemwide library services continue to evolve to better support libraries and scholars.

Previously, Farley's roles at the CDL have included positions as director of digital library services and deputy university librarian. In addition, she was the user services coordinator and the coordinator of bibliographic policy and services at the UC Division of Library Automation. She has also been a reference librarian and coordinator of bibliographic instruction at UC Riverside, and head of the humanities department at the Steen Library at Stephen F. Austin State University. Farley holds a B.A. in liberal arts (Plan II) and an M.L.S. from the University of Texas at Austin.

SAGE Report: Meeting the Challenges: Societies and Scholarly Communication

SAGE has released Meeting the Challenges: Societies and Scholarly Communication (Thanks to Adrian K. Ho's Digital & Scholarly: News about Research and Scholarship in the Digital Age.)

Here's an excerpt:

The survey was supported by the Association for Learned Professional and Scholarly Publishers; the Professional/Scholarly Publishing Division of the Association of American Publishers; the International Association for Science, Technical and Medical Publishers, and the Federation of Behavioral, Psychological and Cognitive Sciences, and made available to the 600+ members of these organizations.

The online survey of 30 questions was available for response from 2 September, 2008 – 23 September, 2008.

118 responses were completed during this time—reflecting approximately 19% of the organizations contacted.

Societies cited the major challenges facing them as international presence for their organization; membership retention and growth; provision of online services; resources (funding and income); and Open Access. International presence was the most highly-ranked attribute for societies (49%), with particular importance placed on sales representation on a global scale.

Springer Digital Publications to be Archived in CLOCKSS

Springer Science+Business Media has announced that its digital publications will be archived in the dark CLOCKSS archive.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

The CLOCKSS archive allows research libraries and scholarly publishers, who launched CLOCKSS as a pilot program, to preserve and store its electronic content. Once ingested, the econtent is kept safe and secure in a dark archive until it is triggered and the CLOCKSS Board determines that the content should be copied from the archive and made freely available to all, regardless of prior subscription. Due to the success of the pilot program, the founding members unanimously agreed to incorporate and invite others to participate in CLOCKSS.

Participating CLOCKSS libraries and publishers govern the archive themselves via three tiers of governance—an executive board, a board of directors, and an advisory council. Research libraries working alongside publishers like Springer are able to help shape policy and practice in their communities.

"In a great show of confidence, Springer has joined the CLOCKSS initiatives, putting its complete trust in an archive they helped build," says Gordon Tibbitts, Co-Chair of CLOCKSS. "Springer is helping to shoulder the responsibility, alongside its publishing peers and research library customers, of keeping their scholarly assets safe and protected for future generations of scholars." . . .

In addition to storing Springer’s journal content with CLOCKSS, the publisher has submitted a proposal to the CLOCKSS Board outlining a pilot project to test the feasibility and legal issues surrounding preservation of eBook content. Because eBook contracts differ from journal contracts, Springer can only deposit eBook files when its authors' rights are protected.

CLOCKSS is a joint venture between the world’s leading scholarly publishers and research libraries. Its mission is to build a sustainable, geographically distributed dark archive with which to ensure the long-term survival of Web-based scholarly publications for the benefit of the greater global research community. Governing Libraries include the Australian National University, EDINA at the University of Edinburgh, Indiana University, New York Public Library, OCLC Online Computer Library Center, Rice University, Stanford University, the University of Alberta, the University of Hong Kong and the University of Virginia. Governing Publishers include the American Medical Association, the American Physiological Society, bepress, Elsevier, IOP Publishing, Nature Publishing Group, Oxford University Press, SAGE Publications, Springer, Taylor & Francis and Wiley-Blackwell.

New from Boyle: The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind

Noted intellectual property expert James Boyle has published a new book, The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind.

It is under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike License, and the PDF can be freely downloaded. It is available in print form from the Yale University Press.

Here's an excerpt from the book's home page:

Our music, our culture, our science, and our economic welfare all depend on a delicate balance between those ideas that are controlled and those that are free, between intellectual property and the public domain. In The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind (Yale University Press) James Boyle introduces readers to the idea of the public domain and describes how it is being tragically eroded by our current copyright, patent, and trademark laws. In a series of fascinating case studies, Boyle explains why gene sequences, basic business ideas and pairs of musical notes are now owned, why jazz might be illegal if it were invented today, why most of 20th century culture is legally unavailable to us, and why today’s policies would probably have smothered the World Wide Web at its inception. . . .

With a clear analysis of issues ranging from Thomas Jefferson’s philosophy of innovation to musical sampling, from Internet file sharing and genetic engineering to patented peanut butter sandwiches, this articulate and charming book brings a positive new perspective to important cultural and legal debates, including what Boyle calls the "range wars of the information age": today’s heated battles over intellectual property. Intellectual property rights have been viewed as geeky, technical and inaccessible. Boyle shows that, as a culture, we can no longer afford the luxury of this kind of willed ignorance.

"Comments on the Commission's Green Paper on Copyright in the Knowledge Economy"

Søren Sandfeld Jakobsen et al. have deposited "Comments on the Commission's Green Paper on Copyright in the Knowledge Economy" in SSRN.

Here's the abstract:

This paper is a reaction to the [European] Commission's Green Paper on Copyright in the Knowledge Economy. It discusses issues concerning the three step test model licenses, digitization and orphan works, disability discrimination and access to digital content, dissemination for teaching and research, dissemination through libraries and user created content.

Repository Deposit Software: SWORD PHP Library Released

Stuart Lewis has released a PHP library for the SWORD (Simple Web-service Offering Repository Deposit) software.

Here's an excerpt from his post:

There are many web applications that could deposit into repositories using SWORD, and many of these are written in PHP. Examples might include open source Content Management Systems, Blogs or Wikis. By using this library you can easily retrieve service documents and make deposits by using the API provided. There are two simple method calls (one to retrieve a service document and one to deposit a file). In addition there is a packager included that can package a file and metadata together into a package format supported by both DSpace and EPrints. This is the same code which is used to power the Facebook SWORD deposit tool (http://fb.swordapp.org/).

Stanford's HighWire Press Hits 5 Million Article Mark

With the addition of a backfile 1884 article, "Dermatitis Herpetiformis," in JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association, HighWire Press, a division of the Stanford University Libraries, hit the five million article mark. Over two million of those articles are freely available.

Read more about it at "5 Million Articles Online at HighWire: The Evolution of an e-Publishing Platform."

Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog Update (12/3/08)

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: "The aDORe Federation Architecture: Digital Repositories at Scale"; "Copyright Angst, Lust for Prestige and Cost Control: What Institutions Can Do to Ease Open Access"; Current Models of Digital Scholarly Communication; "Digital Preservation and Copyright: An International Study"; "Electronic Journals and Changes in Scholarly Article Seeking and Reading Patterns,"; "From Advocacy to Implementation: The NIH Public Access Policy and Its Impact"; "FRPAA and NIH Mandate: A Blessing in Disguise for Scientific Society Publishers?"; "The Future of Repositories? Patterns for (Cross-)Repository Architectures"; A Guide for the Perplexed: Libraries & the Google Library Project Settlement; The Liblog Landscape 2007-2008: A Lateral Look; "Predictions for 2009"; and "A Study of Institutional Repository Holdings by Academic Discipline."

NetLibrary UK Library Survey Shows Strong Interest in Increasing E-Book Holdings

A survey of 300 UK libraries by NetLibrary indicates that three-fourths of academic libraries and half of public libraries plan to increase e-book holdings next year.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

A massive 85% of public Libraries responding to the survey indicated that they were most interested in developing fiction eBook collections despite recent research that suggests eBooks are most often used for reference purposes. Possibly this trend is being fuelled by the growth in take up and availability of eBook reading devices among public library users such as Amazon’s Kindle and Sony’s Reader. . . .

Of the academic libraries who responded to the survey, half indicated that their use of eBooks was to support their core reading lists in various subject areas—the main ones being Business/Management (13%), Medicine/Health (9%) Education (6%) and Engineering (5%).