McGill's Centre for Intellectual Property Policy Launches CIPP Wiki

The Centre for Intellectual Property Policy at McGill University has launched the CIPP Wiki.

Here's an excerpt from the home page:

Join colleagues and friends at the CIPP in setting out a re-draft of the [Canadian] Copyright Act. Using this wiki platform, we would ask you to draft possible articles on pressing issues of copyright reform. McGill members of the CIPP wiki team have identified specific areas and articles of reform, but feel free to add others in the general comments section

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STM, the Federation of European Publishers, and Others Sign Search Guidelines for Orphan Works Memorandum

STM, the Federation of European Publishers, and 23 other organizations have signed a "Memorandum of Understanding on Diligent Search Guidelines for Orphan Works." The text of the document does not appear to be available; however, the press release seems to reference the 2006 "STM Position: The Use of Orphan Works."

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

The Memorandum is an outcome of extensive discussions of the High Level Expert Group on Digital libraries set up by Commissioner Reding as part of the EU i2010 initiatives. It covers a broad range of copyright sectors, including the text sector, and has incorporated the previous STM work on orphan works (REF).

The memorandum is one of several outcomes agreed by all participants in the Copyright SubGroup of the High Level Expert Group and reflects the leadership of its Chair Tarja Koskinen-Olsson, Honorary President of IFRRO and the input of its members, especially Anne Bergman-Tahon of the Federation of European Publishers.

Evaluation of the JISC UK LOCKSS Pilot Report Released

JISC has released Evaluation of the JISC UK LOCKSS Pilot.

Here's an excerpt from the Executive Summary:

This report provides an evaluation of the UK LOCKSS pilot project as it reaches the end of its pilot phase. LOCKSS (Lots Of Copies Keep Stuff Safe) is an international community-based archiving initiative led by Stanford University in the US with over 170 member libraries worldwide, archiving content from over 200 publishers. It is a community-based archiving service operating on open-source software, giving libraries control over their own archived content with the emphasis on low cost and low maintenance.

In March 2006, JISC in partnership with the Consortium of Research Libraries in the British Isles (CURL) funded membership of a collective UK LOCKSS Alliance for 24 selected UK HE libraries. The Digital Curation Centre (DCC) at the department of HATII within the University of Glasgow received funding to set up the UK LOCKSS Technical Support Service to provide technical advice and general support to pilot members and Content Complete Ltd. (CCL) were funded to negotiate with NESLi2 and other publishers to allow LOCKSS-based archiving. The UK LOCKSS pilot is particularly innovative as the first effort to establish a country wide LOCKSS network. The study found that the UK LOCKSS pilot project had achieved its overall aim of setting up a UK LOCKSS Alliance of 30 HE libraries, but that in relation to the detailed aims and objectives there were a number of issues to be addressed if the project was to become self-sustaining at the end of the pilot phase.

Microsoft Releases Beta of Article Authoring Add-in for Microsoft Office Word 2007

Microsoft has released a beta version of its Article Authoring Add-in for Microsoft Office Word 2007.

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

Beta 1 of Word add-in to enhance the authoring of scientific and technical articles, including support for the National Library of Medicine XML format This Beta 1 release enables reading and writing of XML-based documents in the format used by the National Library of Medicine for archiving scientific articles.

Digital Library Federation Spring Forum 2008 Presentations

The Digital Library Federation has released presentations from its Spring Forum 2008.

Here's a selection of the presentations:

Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog Update (6/4/08)

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 American Chemical Society and Open Access"; "Evaluating the Impact of the Institutional Repository, or Positioning Innovation between a Rock and a Hard Place"; "Every Library's Nightmare? Digital Rights Management, Use Restrictions, and Licensed Scholarly Digital Resources"; "Institutional Repositories: Faculty Deposits, Marketing, and the Reform of Scholarly Communication"; "Library Budgets, Open Access, and the Future of Scholarly Communication"; "The Need to Formalize Trust Relationships in Digital Repositories"; "Open Access and the Self-Correction of Knowledge" and "PREMIS With a Fresh Coat of Paint: Highlights from the Revision of the PREMIS Data Dictionary for Preservation Metadata."

DSpace Foundation and Fedora Commons Investigate Joint Collaboration

The DSpace Foundation and the Fedora Commons have been recently investigating the possibility of joint collaboration.

Here's an excerpt from a Dspace-General message:

Over the last few weeks, we (Michele Kimpton and Sandy Payette) have been discussing the possibilities of our organizations collaborating. . . .

Over the past couple of weeks, we have had informal discussions with members of our communities, leaders in libraries and higher education, and Board members to get initial feedback as to whether they would support collaboration and the outcomes they would like to see as a result.

This past week, we convened members of both communities during the PASIG conference to get input and ideas regarding a collaboration.

Thus far, all of the stakeholders we have had the opportunity to talk with have been extremely supportive and excited about the possibility of the Fedora and DSpace communities working together in some capacity.

As a result of these discussions, we have agreed to move forward in our exploration of collaborative possibilities. Over the next several weeks our organizations will meet to plan the next steps in the process. Our intent is to bring together the ideas and expertise within both communities to come up with the most compelling issues to work on to best serve our communities.

Digital-Scholarship.Com Service Somewhat Erratic

The digital-scholarship.com mirror site is having intermittent outages. As mentioned previously, the hosting service that supports this mirror had a serious problem. That problem was an explosion "that produced enough force to move walls." Read more about it at "Explosion Has Data Center Scrambling, Users Venting." Obviously, patience is called for regarding stable service restoration.

Keep in mind for any future service outages that Digital Scholarship has two sites that largely mirror each other and use different hosting services:

It is unlikely that both sites would be unavailable at the same time.

For further details, see "Digital Scholarship Publications Overview":

Sustainability and Revenue Models for Online Academic Resources: An Ithaka Report Released

The Strategic Content Alliance has released Sustainability and Revenue Models for Online Academic Resources: An Ithaka Report.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

This paper was commissioned by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) is the first step in a three-stage process aimed at gaining a more systematic understanding of the mechanisms for pursuing sustainability in not-for-profit projects. It focuses on what we call 'online academic resources' (OARs), which are projects whose primary aim is to make content and scholarly discourse available on the web for research, collaboration, and teaching. This includes scholarly journals and monographs as well as a vast array of new formats that are emerging to disseminate scholarship, such as preprint servers and wikis. It also includes digital collections of primary source materials, datasets, and audio-visual materials that universities, libraries, museums, archives and other cultural and educational institutions are putting online.

This work is being done as part of the planning work for the Strategic Content Alliance (SCA), so it emphasises the development and maintenance of digital content useful in the networked world. In this first stage, we have conducted an initial assessment of the relevant literature focused on not-for-profit sustainability, and have compared the processes pursued in the not-for-profit and education sectors with those pursued by commercial organisations, specifically in the newspaper industry. The primary goal of this initial report is to determine to what extent it would make sense to conduct a more in-depth study of the issues surrounding sustainability.

Public Beta of Object Reuse and Exchange Specifications (OAI-ORE) Released

The Open Archives Initiative has released the public beta of Object Reuse and Exchange Specifications.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

Over the past eighteen months the Open Archives Initiative (OAI), in a project called Object Reuse and Exchange (OAI-ORE), has gathered international experts from the publishing, web, library, and eScience community to develop standards for the identification and description of aggregations of online information resources. These aggregations, sometimes called compound digital objects, may combine distributed resources with multiple media types including text, images, data, and video. The goal of these standards is to expose the rich content in these aggregations to applications that support authoring, deposit, exchange, visualization, reuse, and preservation. Although a motivating use case for the work is the changing nature of scholarship and scholarly communication, and the need for cyberinfrastructure to support that scholarship, the intent of the effort is to develop standards that generalize across all web-based information including the increasing popular social networks of “web 2.0”. The beta version of the OAI-ORE specifications and implementation documents are released to the public on June 2, 2008. These documents 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.

Muradora 1.3 Released: Web-Based GUI for Fedora

The DRAMA team at Macquarie University has released version 1.3 release of Muradora.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Muradora is a web-based GUI for the popular Fedora repository, built using enterprise Java Spring and Struts 2 frameworks. Amongst the common features found in a typical repository such as search, browse, self-submission, and versioning supports, Muradora enables flexible access control for end users (based on the XACML standard), inter-domain authentication and federated identity (using Shibboleth implementation of the SAML standard), and multiple metadata schema management (via W3C XForms standard).

Notable features in 1.3 release:

  • Faceted Search: By incorporating GSearch 2.0 with Solr support, users can perform faceted searches, i.e. one can now narrow down search results based on other categories.
  • All-in-one installation: There is now an installation script for Unix/Linux systems which will install all the necessary components for Muradora. The complete package is called "muradora-allinone".
  • RSS/Atom Feeds: Users can subscribe to collections (even non-public collections) and get notifications of new objects added to those collections.
  • Thumbnail preview and gallery view: Thumbnails are now generated automatically for images. Thanks to the work by the MediaShelf team, one can browse and search using either the traditional listing view or with the gallery view.

Presentations from the 152nd ARL Membership Meeting

ARL has released presentations from its 152nd membership meeting, which was titled "Institutional Strategies Supporting E-Scholarship & Multidisciplinary Research."

Here's a selection of the presentations:

OAI2LODServer Version 0.2 Released

MediaSpaces has released Version 0.2 of the OAI2LODServer.

Here's a description from the software's home page:

The OAI2LOD Server exposes any OAI-PMH compliant metadata repository according to the Linked Data guidelines. This makes things and media objects accessible via HTTP URIs and query able via the SPARQL protocol. Parts of the OAI2LOD architecture, especially the front-end, are based on the D2R Server implementation.

Further, it provides a configurable linking mechanism based on string similarity metrics. This allows the automatic linking of OAI-PMH data with other open data sets such as DBPedia or any other OAI-PMH repository exposed via the OAI2LOD Server.

Repositories Support Project Briefings Released

The Repositories Support Project has released several new or updated briefings:

Key Services [ Paper ]

This briefing paper gives an overview of some of the
key services currently available to repository managers and provides further details on how to access and use them.

Metadata [ Paper ]

This paper explores the topic of metadata in the repository and includes advice and information on metadata schemas and application profiles.

Making Effective Use of Your Repository [ Paper ]

Repositories are both part of an institution’s local information provision and part of the developing global open access information environment. This briefing paper discusses these contexts, helping the repository to serve the institution’s business needs effectively.

Repository Policy Framework – Updated [Paper]

Updated information about giving structure to your repository planning through the implementation of a policy framework.

Orphan Works Bills Clear House and Senate Committees

Orphan works bills in House (H.R. 5889, The Orphan Works Act of 2008) and the Senate (S. 2913, the Shawn Bentley Orphan Works Act of 2008) have been marked up by the appropriate Congressional committees. House testimony by Marybeth Peters, The Register of Copyrights, overviews the issues involved in the legislation.

The bills are not without controversy. Prominent copyright reformer Lawrence Lessig wrote an Op Ed piece in The New York Times opposing the bills, calling them "both unfair and unwise." Public Knowledge and others countered his objections. Various associations of content creators, such as photographers, have been vocal opponents of the bills.

Read more about it at "ASMP Urges Photographers to Oppose 'Orphan Works' Bill," "Issue Brief: Orphan Works," "Library Group Favors Senate over House Bill on Orphan Works," "Orphan Works," "Orphan Works Bill Clears Senate Committee, May Soon Find Home," "Release the Orphan Works!," "Senate Marks Up Orphan Works," and "Two Cartoon-Group Presidents Slam Possible 'Orphan Works' Legislation."

Digital-Scholarship.Com Service Restored

The host service that supports digital-scholarship.com is back up.

Keep in mind for any future service outages that Digital Scholarship has two sites that largely mirror each other and use different hosting services:

It is unlikely that both sites would be unavailable at the same time.

For further details, see "Digital Scholarship Publications Overview":

Google Book Search Bibliography, Version 2

The Google Book Search Bibliography, Version 2 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.

Obituary: Steve Cisler, Librarian Extraordinaire and Community Network Advocate

Steve Cisler, who was well-known for his pioneering work as a Senior Scientist for Apple Computer (where he ran its Apple Library of Tomorrow program from 1988-1997) and as a community networking advocate, died on May 15, 2008. Cisler was born on Oct. 14, 1942 in Louisville, Kentucky. At the time of his death, Cisler was a Research Associate and Project Manager for the KnowledeX project at Santa Clara University's Center for Science, Technology, and Society. His obituary ("Steve Cisler: Librarian Knew a Lot about a Lot") was published in the The Mercury News.

Here is a speaker profile from a 2007 conference:

Steve Cisler, upon graduation from Northwestern University in 1965, started a school library in rural Togo, West Africa when he was a Peace Corps teacher. After three years doing search and rescue with the U.S. Coast Guard, he attended University of California Berkeley where he received his Master of Library Science. He only began using computers in middle age, at a public computer lab in his branch library in Contra Costa County Library where he worked for 14 years. In 1985 he joined The Well and ran an online forum on information and libraries for many years. In 1988 at Apple Computer Inc Advanced Technology Group, he started a grant program called Apple Library of Tomorrow for innovative projects in libraries, museums, and local community networks where citizens were setting up local free Internet services. He supported the first copyright-free online book about the Internet (the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Big Dummies Guide to the Internet). He worked on deregulation of the radio frequencies and standards that became known as 802.11 or Wi-Fi. Over the past 7 years he has consulted in Latin America, Thailand, Jordan, and Uganda on short-term projects involving telecenters, school computer labs and indigenous groups using information and communication technologies. In 2004 he spent eight months disconnected and driving around the U.S. and Mexico talking to people NOT using the Internet. From 2005-6 he chaired a working group on piracy and intellectual property in the Pacific as part of the Pacific Rim New Media Summit in San Jose in August 2006. He lives in San Jose, Calif., with his wife, an elementary school principal. His hobbies include gardening, kayaking, and winemaking. He can be reached at sacisler@yahoo.com and he posts from time to time on http://place.typepad.com/digitalcommons.

Steve Cisler was an extraordinary man, who early on clearly saw the transformational potential of the Internet and worked diligently to help realize that potential with his usual joie de vivre. In 1993, Cisler won the LITA/Gaylord Award for Achievement in Library and Information Technology, and in 1996 he won a Silver Award from the U.S. National Commission on Libraries and Information Science. Cisler served on the Editorial Board of The Public-Access Computer Systems Review from 1992-2000.

There has been an outpouring of tributes to Steve. Here is a sample: "Steve Cisler—First Internet Librarian," "Steve Cisler, Digital Librarian, RIP," and "Steve Cisler, RIP." He will be greatly missed.

Electronic Theses and Dissertations Bibliography, Version 2

The Electronic Theses and Dissertations Bibliography, Version 2 is now available from Digital Scholarship.

This bibliography presents selected English-language articles, conference papers, and other printed and electronic sources that are useful in understanding electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs). Where possible, links are provided to sources 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.