The Archivists’ Toolkit 1.1 Beta (v. 1.0.19) has been released. This version can connect Archivists’ Toolkit clients to MySQL, MS SQLServer, and Oracle database backends.
For more information on the Archivists’ Toolkit, see the "Archivists’ Toolkit Beta 1.1 Released" DigitalKoans posting.
In yet another scholarly publishing company merger, Walter de Gruyter has announced that it has acquired K. G. Saur und Max Niemeyer.
Here’s an excerpt from the press release:
Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG has with immediate effect acquired the complete publishing programme of K. G. Saur Verlag GmbH, which since 2005 has also included the programme of Max Niemeyer Verlag. Through this acquisition Walter de Gruyter will become the market leader in the subject areas classical studies, philosophy, German studies, linguistics and English and Romance studies, as well as in library sciences and general library reference works.
For an analysis of the effect of publisher mergers on serials prices, see the works of Dr. Mark J. McCabe.
Index Data has released Version 1.0.1 of Pazpar2, an open source Z39.50 client.
Here’s an excerpt from the press release:
Pazpar2 . . . can be viewed either as a high-performance metasearching middleware or a Z39.50 client with a webservice interface, depending on your perspective and needs. It is a fairly compact C program—a resident daemon—that incorporates the best we know how to do in terms of providing high performance, user-oriented federated searching. . . .
One cool thing it does is search many databases in parallel, and do it fast, without unduly loading up the user interface. . . It retrieves a set of records from each target, and performs merging, deduplication, ranking/sorting, and pulls browse facets from them. . . .
It doesn’t know anything about data models, so you can handle exotic data sources if you need to. . . you use XSLT to normalize data into an internal model—we provide examples for MARC21 and a DC-esque internal model, and configure ranking, facets, sorting, etc., from that. . . .
UKOLN and JISC CETIS have released An Ecological Approach to Repository and Service Interactions, Draft Version 0.9 for comment.
Here’s an excerpt from the "Not the Executive Summary" section:
This work began with the need to express something of how and why repositories and services interact. As a community we have well understood technical models and architectures that provide mechanisms for interoperability. The actual interactions that occur, however, are not widely understood and knowledge about them is not often shared. This is in part because we tend to share in the abstract through architectures and use cases, articulating interactions or connections requires an engagement with specific details. . . .
Ecology is the study of systems that are complex, dynamic, and full of interacting entities and processes. Although the nature of these interactions and processes may be highly detailed, a higher level view of them is accessible and intuitive. We think that ecology and the ecosystems it studies may offer a useful analogy to inform the task of understanding and articulating the interactions between users, repositories, and services and the information environments in which they take place. This report outlines some concepts from ecology that may be useful and suggests some definitions for a common conversation about the use of this metaphor.
We hope that this report suggests an additional way to conceptualise and analyse interactions and provide a common vocabulary for an ecological approach. It should as a minimum provoke and support some useful discussions about networks and communities.
The British Library has announced that it is now licensing its Turning the Pages Toolkit to libraries and museums. You can see the software in action at their Turning the Pages Web site.
Here’s an excerpt from the press release:
From today, libraries around the World will be able to license the award-winning Turning the Pages software used by the British Library to bring some of the world’s most rare and valuable books online.
Since its launch in 2004, Turning the Pages has grown to become one of the most popular resources at the British Library, allowing the Library to bring iconic treasures such as the Lindisfarne Gospels, Leonardo da Vinci’s Notebooks and Mercator’s Atlas of Europe online for everyone to see. With the launch of Turning the Pages 2.0, and a completely re-built software platform developed by Armadillo Systems, May 2007 also sees launch of a new "toolkit" that allows other libraries and museums around the World to create their own Turning the Pages gallery. . . .
Michael Stocking, Managing Director of Armadillo Systems and developer of the Turning the Pages software said "As well as making it easy for our customers to create their own collections, we also wanted to enhance the Turning the Pages experience. We have migrated the software to a new platform that places the book in a 3-D environment so, as well as being able to examine the book as a piece of text, users can now also examine it as an object. They can now look at the book from different angles, zoom in and even look at two books, side-by-side."
A podcast of Chris Rusbridge’s "Curation of Scientific Data: Challenges for Institutions and their Repositories" presentation at The Adaptable Repository conference is now available. Rusbridge is Director of the Digital Curation Centre in the UK.
The PowerPoint for the presentation is also available.
According to a O’Reilly Radar posting, the Council on Library and Information Resources has been awarded a grant from the Mellon Foundation to study mass digitization efforts.
Here’s an excerpt from the posting that describes the grant’s objectives:
- Assess selected large scale digitization programs by exploring their efficacy and utility for conducting scholarship, in multiple fields or disciplines (humanities, sciences, etc.).
- Write and issue a report with findings and recommendations for improving the design of mass digitization projects.
- Create a Collegium that can serve in the long-term as an advisory group to mass digitization efforts, helping to assure and obtain the highest possible data quality and utility.
- Convene a series of meetings amongst scholars, libraries, publishers, and digitizing organizations to discuss ways of achieving these quality and design improvements.
In his "Creative Commons Statistics from the CC-Monitor Project" iCommons Summit presentation, Giorgos Cheliotis of the School of Information Systems at Singapore Management University estimates that there must be more than 60,000,000 Creative Commons licenses in use.
Based on backlink search data from Google and Yahoo, he also provides the following license breakdown highlights:
- 70% of the licenses allow non-commercial use only (NC)
- Share-Alike (SA) also a very popular attribute, present in over 50% fCC-licensed items (though SA is anyhow self-propagating)
- 25% of the licenses include the ND [no derivative] restriction
if:book reports that Manolis Kelaidis made a big splash at the O’Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing conference with his networked paper book.
Here’s a an excerpt from the posting:
Manolis Kelaidis, a designer at the Royal College of Art in London, has found a way to make printed pages digitally interactive. His "blueBook" prototype is a paper book with circuits embedded in each page and with text printed with conductive ink. When you touch a "linked" word on the page and your finger completes a circuit, sending a signal to a processor in the back cover which communicates by Bluetooth with a nearby computer, bringing up information on the screen.
Here’s an excerpt from a jusTaText posting about the demo:
Yes, he had a printed and bound book which communicated with his laptop. He simply touched the page, and the laptop reacted. It brought up pictures of the Mona Lisa. It translated Chinese. It played a piece of music. Kelaidis suggested that a library of such books might cross-refer, i.e. touching a section in one book might change the colors of the spines of related books on your shelves. Imagine.
Lund University Libraries, creators of the Directory of Open Access Journals, has released a new database called Journal Info, which provides authors with information about 18,000 journals selected from 30 major databases. The National Library of Sweden provides support for JI, which is under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license.
Here’s an excerpt from the FAQ page:
The purpose [of the service] is to provide an aid for the researcher in the selection of journal for publication. The publication market has continuously grown more and more complex. It is important to weigh in facts like scope and quality, but more recently also information about reader availability and library cost. The Lund University Libraries have made an attempt to merge all there items into one tool, giving the researcher the power to make informed choices.
Journal Info records provide basic information about the journal (e.g. journal homepage), "reader accessibility" information (e.g., open access status), and quality information (e.g., where it is indexed).
Tim Donohue, Scott Phillips, and Dorothea Salo have published DSpace How-To Guide: Tips and Tricks for Managing Common DSpace Chores (Now Serving DSpace 1.4.2 and Manakin 1.1).
This 55-page booklet, which is under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License, will be a welcome addition to the virtual bookshelves of institutional repository managers struggling with the mysteries of DSpace.
DRAMA (Digital Repository Authorization Middleware Architecture) has released Fiddler, a beta version of its mura Fedora front-end that provides access control, authentication, full-text searching and a variety of other functions. DRAMA is a sub-project of RAMP (Research Activityflow and Middleware Priorities Project).
Here’s an excerpt from the news item that describes Fiddler’s features:
- Hierarchical access control enforcement: Policies can be applied at the collection level, object level or datastream level. . . .
- Improved access control interface: One can now view existing access control of a particular user or group for a given datastream, object or collection. . . .
- User-centric GUI: mura only presents users with operations for which they have permissions.
- XForms Metadata Input: We employ an XForms engine (Orbeon) for metadata input. XForms allow better user interaction, validation and supports any XML-based metadata schemas (such as MARC or MODS).
- LDAP Filter for Fedora: The current Fedora LDAP filter (in version 2.2) does not authenticate properly, so we have developed a new LDAP filter to fix this problem.
- Local authentication for DAR and ASM: In addition to Shibboleth authentication, the DAR and ASM can be configured to use a local authentication source (eg. via a local LDAP).
- Generic XACML Vocabulary: XACML policies are now expressed in a generic vocabulary rather than Fedora specific ones. . . .
- XACML Optimization: We have optimized of the evaluation engine by employing a cache with user configurable time-to-live. We have also greatly reduced the time for policies matching with DB XML, through the use of bind parameters in our queries.
- Flexible mapping of Fedora actions to new Apache Axis handlers: Axis is the SOAP engine that Fedora employs to provide its web services. The new flexibility allows new handlers to be easily plugged into Fedora to support new features that follow the same Interceptor pattern as our authorization framework.
- Version control: mura now supports version control.
- Full-text search: We enabled full-text search by incorporating Fedoragsearch package.
Here’s a list of a few information-packed directories of Web/Web 2.0 tools that developers may find useful.
If you have never had to use a standalone FTP client, a standalone Telnet client, a Gopher client, or a standalone USENET client, it might be hard to imagine what the Internet was like before Mosiac, the Web browser that put the World-Wide Web on the map and transformed the Internet (and the world). Go dig up a copy of The Internet for Everyone: A Guide for Users and Providers out of your library’s stacks, dust it off, and marvel at how far we have come since 1993. You’ll also meet Archie, Veronica, and WAIS, the Googles of their day.
Another way to travel back in time is to read PC Magazine‘s 1994 review of the NCSA Mosaic for Windows, and, if you really want a history lesson, download Mosaic from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (yes, it’s still available). Also take a look at the NCSA’s About NCSA Mosaic page.
To finish off your journey to the Internet’s Paleolithic age, check out the Timeline of Web Browsers and Hobbes’ Internet Timeline v8.2.
Of course, if you do remember these seemingly ancient technologies, you can easily imagine how primitive today’s hot technologies, such as Web 2.0, will seem in 14 years, and you may wonder whether future generations will remember them clearly or as a minor footnote in technological history.
The Australian Partnership for Sustainable Repositories (APSR) has released Report of the Sustainability Guidelines for Australian Repositories Project (SUGAR).
Here’s an excerpt from the report:
The Sustainability Guidelines for Australian Repositories service (SUGAR)was intended to support people working in tertiary education institutions whose activities do not focus on digital preservation. The target community creates and digitises content for a range of purposes to support learning, teaching and research. While some have access to technical and administrative support many others may not be aware of what they need to know. The typical SUGAR user may have little interest in discussions surrounding metadata, interoperability or digital preservation, and may simply want to know the essential steps involved in achieving the task at hand.
A key challenge for SUGAR was to provide a suitable level and amount of information to meet the immediate focus of the user and their level of expertise while introducing and encouraging consideration of issues of digital sustainability. SUGAR was also intended to stand alone as an online service unsupported by a helpdesk.
The UNESCO Memory of the World Programme, with the support of the Australian Partnership for Sustainable Repositories, has published Towards an Open Source Repository and Preservation System: Recommendations on the Implementation of an Open Source Digital Archival and Preservation System and on Related Software Development.
Here’s an excerpt from the Executive Summary and Recommendations:
This report defines the requirements for a digital archival and preservation system using standard hardware and describes a set of open source software which could used to implement it. There are two aspects of this report that distinguish it from other approaches. One is the complete or holistic approach to digital preservation. The report recognises that a functioning preservation system must consider all aspects of a digital repositories; Ingest, Access, Administration, Data Management, Preservation Planning and Archival Storage, including storage media and management software. Secondly, the report argues that, for simple digital objects, the solution to digital preservation is relatively well understood, and that what is needed are affordable tools, technology and training in using those systems.
An assumption of the report is that there is no ultimate, permanent storage media, nor will there be in the foreseeable future. It is instead necessary to design systems to manage the inevitable change from system to system. The aim and emphasis in digital preservation is to build sustainable systems rather than permanent carriers. . . .
The way open source communities, providers and distributors achieve their aims provides a model on how a sustainable archival system might work, be sustained, be upgraded and be developed as required. Similarly, many cultural institutions, archives and higher education institutions are participating in the open source software communities to influence the direction of the development of those softwares to their advantage, and ultimately to the advantage of the whole sector.
A fundamental finding of this report is that a simple, sustainable system that provides strategies to manage all the identified functions for digital preservation is necessary. It also finds that for simple discrete digital objects this is nearly possible. This report recommends that UNESCO supports the aggregation and development of an open source archival system, building on, and drawing together existing open source programs.
This report also recommends that UNESCO participates through its various committees, in open source software development on behalf of the countries, communities, and cultural institutions, who would benefit from a simple, yet sustainable, digital archival and preservation system. . . .
The New York Public Library’s Science, Industry, and Business Library has installed an Espresso Book Machine for public use through August.
Here’s an excerpt from the press release:
The first Espresso Book Machine™ ("the EBM") was installed and demonstrated today at the New York Public Library’s Science, Industry, and Business Library (SIBL). The patented automatic book making machine will revolutionize publishing by printing and delivering physical books within minutes. The EBM is a product of On Demand Books, LLC ("ODB"—www.ondemandbooks.com). . .
The Espresso Book Machine will be available to the public at SIBL through August, and will operate Monday-Saturday from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. . . .
Library users will have the opportunity to print free copies of such public domain classics as "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" by Mark Twain, "Moby Dick" by Herman Melville, "A Christmas Carol" by Charles Dickens and "Songs of Innocence" by William Blake, as well as appropriately themed in-copyright titles as Chris Anderson’s "The Long Tail" and Jason Epstein’s own "Book Business." The public domain titles were provided by the Open Content Alliance ("OCA"), a non-profit organization with a database of over 200,000 titles. The OCA and ODB are working closely to offer this digital content free of charge to libraries across the country. Both organizations have received partial funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. . . .
The EBM’s proprietary software transmits a digital file to the book machine, which automatically prints, binds, and trims the reader’s selection within minutes as a single, library-quality, paperback book, indistinguishable from the factory-made title.
Unlike existing print on demand technology, EBM’s are fully integrated, automatic machines that require minimal human intervention. They do not require a factory setting and are small enough to fit in a retail store or small library room. While traditional factory based print on demand machines usually cost over $1,000,000 per unit, the EBM is priced to be affordable for retailers and libraries. . . .
Additional EBM’s will be installed this fall at the New Orleans Public Library, the University of Alberta (Canada) campus bookstore, the Northshire Bookstore in Manchester, Vermont, and at the Open Content Alliance in San Francisco. Beta versions of the EBM are already in operation at the World Bank Infoshop in Washington, DC and the Bibliotheca Alexandrina (The Library of Alexandria, Egypt). National book retailers and hotel chains are among the companies in talks with ODB about ordering EBM’s in quantity.
The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) has decided to indefinitely postpone a November 2007 Diplomatic Conference at which the WIPO Broadcasting Treaty could have been approved.
Here’s an excerpt from the EFF’s "Blogging WIPO: Broadcasting Treaty Deferred Indefinitely" posting:
Negotiations on the proposed WIPO Broadcasting Treaty ended on Friday with some welcome news. WIPO Member States agreed to postpone the high-level intergovernmental Diplomatic Conference at which the draft treaty could have been adopted, and have moved discussions back to regular committee meetings, down a notch from the last two "Special Session" meetings. . . .
Before a Diplomatic Conference can be convened, Member States must reach agreement on the core elements of a treaty—the objectives, specific scope and object of protection. While this week’s informal session discussions may have helped clarify Member States’ positions, it does not seem to have brought them closer. There is widespread agreement amongst many Member States, public interest NGOs. libraries and the tech industry that any treaty must focus on the issue of signal theft and not the creation of exclusive rights that will harm those communities. However, it’s equally clear from this week that broadcasters will not settle for anything other than exclusive rights.
Why is this important? Here’s an excerpt from Cory Doctorow’s Boing Boing posting on the subject ("Broadcast Treaty Wounded and Dying!"):
The broadcast treaty creates a copyright-like "broadcast right," for the entities that make works available. So while copyright goes to the people who create things, broadcast rights go to people who have no creative contribution at all. Here’s how it would work: say you recorded some TV to use in your classroom. Copyright lets you do this—copyright is limited by fair use. But the broadcast right would stop you—you’d need to navigate a different and disjointed set of exceptions to broadcast rights, or the broadcaster could sue you.
That’s just for openers. The broadcast right also covers works in the public domain that no one has a copyright in—and even Creative Commons works where the creator has already given her permission for sharing! You can’t use anything that’s broadcast unless you get permission from the caster. What’s more, they’re trying to extend this to the net, making podcasting and other communications where the hoster isn’t the copyright holder (that is, where you create the podcast but someone else hosts it) into a legal minefield.
The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) has released a series of discussion guides for academic librarians to use with faculty. The guides are under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States license.
Here’s an excerpt from the guides’ web page:
This series of Discussion Leader’s Guides can serve as a starting point for a single discussion or for a series of conversations. Each guide offers prework and discussion questions along with resources that provide further background for the discussion leader of an hour-long session.
Using the discussion guides, library leaders can launch a program quickly without requiring special expertise on the topics. A brown-bag series could be initiated by a library director, a group of staff, or by any staff person with an interest in the scholarly communication system. The only requirements are the willingness to organize the gatherings and facilitate each meeting’s discussion.
Library Journal Academic Newswire reports that the University of Maine, the Toronto Public Library, and the Cincinnati Public Library will follow Emory University’s lead and digitize public domain works utilizing Kirtas scanners with print-on-demand copies being made available via BookSurge. (Also see the press release: "BookSurge, an Amazon Group, and Kirtas Collaborate to Preserve and Distribute Historic Archival Books.")
Source: "University of Maine, plus Toronto and Cincinnati Public Libraries Join Emory in Scan Alternative." Library Journal Academic Newswire, 21 June 2007.
EDItEUR has released "ONIX for Serials Coverage Statement Draft Release 0.9 (june 2007)" for comment through September 2007.
Here’s an excerpt from the draft’s Web page:
ONIX for Serials Coverage Statement is an XML structure capable of carrying simple or complex statements of holdings of serial resources, in paper or electronic form, to be included in ONIX for Serials messages for a variety of applications; for example, to express:
- The holdings of a particular serial version by a library
- The coverage of a particular serial version supplied by an online content hosting system
- The coverage of a particular serial version included in a subscription or offering
EDItEUR has also released "SOH: Serials Online Holdings Release1.1 (Draft June 2007)" for comment.
JISC has released its Dealing with Data: Roles, Rights, Responsibilities and Relationships: Consultancy Report, which was written as part of its Digital Repositories Programme’s Data Cluster Consultancy.
Here’s an excerpt from the Executive Summary:
This Report explores the roles, rights, responsibilities and relationships of institutions, data centres and other key stakeholders who work with data. It concentrates primarily on the UK scene with some reference to other relevant experience and opinion, and is framed as "a snapshot" of a relatively fast-moving field. . . .
The Report is largely based on two methodological approaches: a consultation workshop and a number of semi-structured interviews with stakeholder representatives.
It is set within the context of the burgeoning "data deluge" emanating from e-Science applications, increasing momentum behind open access policy drivers for data, and developments to define requirements for a co-ordinated e-infrastructure for the UK. The diversity and complexity of data are acknowledged, and developing typologies are referenced.
The Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography archive file has been updated to include version 68. The ZIP archive file is about 38 MB in size.
The Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog, which was established in June 2001, is six years old.
The latest update of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog (SEPW) is now available, which provides information about new scholarly literature and resources related to scholarly electronic publishing, such as books, journal articles, magazine articles, technical reports, and white papers.
Especially interesting are: Australasian Digital Theses Program: Membership Survey 2006, "The Death of Metadata," "Do You Need a Copyright Librarian?," "The Evolution of Copyright," "Ghosts in the Machine: The Promise of Electronic Resource Management Tools," "Magnifying the ILS with Endeca," Project SPECTRa (Submission, Preservation and Exposure of Chemistry Teaching and Research Data): JISC Final Report, March 2007, "Providing Access to Electronic Journals in Academic Libraries: A General Survey," and "Scholarly Electronic Journal Publishing: A Study Comparing Commercial and Nonprofit/University Publishers."
For weekly updates about news articles, Weblog postings, and other resources related to digital culture (e.g., copyright, digital privacy, digital rights management, and Net neutrality), digital libraries, and scholarly electronic publishing, see the latest DigitalKoans Flashback posting.
Version 68 of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography is now available from Digital Scholarship. This selective bibliography presents over 3,040 articles, books, and other printed and electronic sources that are useful in understanding scholarly electronic publishing efforts on the Internet.
The Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography: 2006 Annual Edition is also available from Digital Scholarship. Annual editions of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography are PDF files designed for printing.
The bibliography has the following sections (revised sections are in italics):
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
