John A. Kunze has announced on DC-GENERAL that the RFC for Dublin Core (RFC 5013) has just been published.
He notes that it "contains the same element definitions as the recently revised NISO standard, Z39.85-2007, but is freely accessible in one click via a global set of mirrored repositories used by the highly technical audiences that support and define Internet infrastructure."
The Scholarly Publishing Office of the University of Michigan Library has released a CommentPress version of University Publishing in a Digital Age.
Using this CommentPress version, you can provide paragraph-level commentary on this provocative report.
BookRenter.com has officially launched its text book rental service. Students will be able to rent textbooks for up to 125 days (there is a 30 day minimum).
Source: Kimberly, Maul. "BookRenter.com Allows Students to Rent Textbooks." The Book Standard, 21 August 2007.
The University of Minnesota has launched its institutional repository, the Digital Conservancy. It utilizes DSpace.
Here's a description from the University Digital Conservancy FAQ page:
The University Digital Conservancy is a program of the University of Minnesota, administered by the University Libraries. The program provides stewardship, reliable long-term open access, and broad dissemination of the digital scholarly and administrative works of University of Minnesota faculty, departments, centers and offices. Materials in the Conservancy are freely available online to the University community and to the public.
Here are selected web pages about the Digital Conservancy:
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: "The Changing Landscape of Serials: Open Access Journals in the Public Catalog"; "DRIVER: Seven Items on a European Agenda for Digital Repositories"; "EThOSnet: Building a UK e-Theses Community"; "Incentivizing the Open Access Research Web Publication-Archiving, Data-Archiving and Scientometrics"; "Institutional Repositories and Their 'Other' Users: Usability Beyond Authors"; "Interoperability for the Discovery, Use, and Re-Use of Units of Scholarly Communication"; "Next-Generation Implications of Open Access"; "The PubMed Central Archive and the Back Issue Scanning Project"; and "The State of Scholarly Communications: An Environmental Scan of Emerging Issues, Pitfalls, and Possibilities."
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.
Of late, an air of discouragement has begun to permeate discussions about institutional repositories. Of course, this is understandable. E-print deposit rates have been disappointing, deposit mandates hard to come by, and real operational costs have been higher than some imagined.
Are institutional repositories dead on arrival?
The answer is determined by our expectations.
If we expect swift, easy, rapid progress with university administrators and faculty enthusiastically rallying behind institutional repositories, the answer is "yes." The thrill of putting up the repository software and seeing the initial inflow of e-prints is, for many, gone; the experiment has failed; and it's time to cut our losses and move on.
On the other hand, if we expect that the establishment of fully functional institutional repositories will be a complex, lengthy, and expensive venture, we are on target, and remarkable progress has been made worldwide in a short period of time.
I'm in the latter camp. I cannot say this enough: successful institutional repositories are not primarily determined by technical factors, rather they are determined by attitudinal factors. In other words, faculty, especially key faculty such as holders of endowed chairs and journal editors, and university administrators, especially provosts and presidents, must be convinced that institutional repositories are essential infrastructure for the 21st century. For the most part, the argument rests on the scholarly communication crisis theme, with institutional repositories portrayed as part of the remedy. However, institutional prestige, institutional visibility, and improved citation impact factors are important themes as well. The successful, relentless communication of these themes to key constituencies is essential to the successful establishment of institutional repositories.
In my view, the best strategy for a institution without a repository is to start a vigorous scholarly communication outreach program first. The next best strategy is to do so in parallel with putting up an institutional repository. Next is to implement a scholarly communication program after the repository is up. The worst strategy is to put up a repository with no scholarly communication program—this is a recipe for failure.
So, chin up. It will take slow, steady effort to succeed, but it will be worth it in the end.
If you were writing a strategic plan for a major academic research library in 2007, what would it look like?
Here are two answers to that question:
The DSpace UK & Ireland User Group has put up a list of DSpace Installations in the UK and Ireland on the DSpace Wiki.
In a move that could change the $5 billion legal publishing marketplace, Carl Malamud, who established public.resource.org earlier this year, plans on making more than ten million court decisions freely available on the Internet.
Here's an excerpt from "A Quest to Get More Court Rulings Online, and Free":
Mr. Malamud has a significant track record in battling publishers over public information. In 1994 he began a crusade that ultimately persuaded the federal government to make records from the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Patent and Trademark Office available online to the public at no cost.
He said the free availability of that digital information did not undercut the businesses that were making money from the information at the time. . . .
The Public Resource effort is one of several attempts to make the nation's laws more accessible. One project, AltLaw (altlaw.org) is a joint effort by Columbia Law School’s Program on Law and Technology and the Silicon Flatirons program at the University of Colorado Law School to permit free full-text searches of the last decade of federal appellate and Supreme Court opinions.
Source: Markoff, John. "A Quest to Get More Court Rulings Online, and Free." The New York Times, 20 August 2007, B6.
Athabasca University has established AU Press, which will publish open access books, journals, and other digital publications.
Here's an excerpt from the press release:
AU Press, Canada’s first 21st century university press, is dedicated to disseminating knowledge emanating from scholarly research to a broad audience through open access digital media and in a variety of formats (e.g., journals, monographs, author podcasts).
Our publications are of the highest quality and are assessed by peer review; however, we are dedicated to working with emerging writers and researchers to promote success in scholarly publishing.
Our geographical focus is Canada, the West, and the Circumpolar North, and we are mandated to publish innovative and experimental works that challenge the limits of established canons, subjects and formats. Series under development in several subject areas will promote and contribute to specific academic disciplines, and we aim to revitalize neglected forms such as diary, memoir and oral history.
At AU Press, we also publish scholarly websites with a particular focus on distance education and e-learning, labour studies, Métis and Aboriginal studies, gender studies and the environment.
Here’s a list of a few Web/Web 2.0 resources and tools that developers may find useful.
The Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL) and SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) have released the SPARC Canadian Author Addendum.
Here's an excerpt from the press release:
Traditional publishing agreements often require that authors grant exclusive rights to the publisher. The new SPARC Canadian Author Addendum enables authors to secure a more balanced agreement by retaining select rights, such as the rights to reproduce, reuse, and publicly present the articles they publish for non-commercial purposes. It will help Canadian researchers to comply with granting council public access policies, such as the Canadian Institutes of Health Research Policy on Access to Research Outputs. The Canadian Addendum reflects Canadian copyright law and is an adaptation of the original U.S. version of the SPARC Author Addendum. . . .
An explanatory brochure complements the Addendum. Both the brochure and addendum are available in French and English on the CARL and SPARC Web sites and will be widely distributed. SPARC, in conjunction with ARL and ACRL, has also introduced a free Web cast on Understanding Author Rights. See http://www.arl.org/sparc/author for details.
Two EDUCAUSE Live! Podcasts have been released:
Portico is launching a e-Book preservation study, which will last the rest of the year.
Here's an excerpt from the press release:
In response to several requests from publishers and libraries, Portico is conducting a study in order to assess how to extend its archival infrastructure and service to respond to the emerging need to preserve e-books. During the study we will analyze the structure and preservation needs of e-books and determine what adjustments to Portico's existing, operational and technological infrastructure and the economic model developed to support e-journal preservation might be required in order to respond to this new genre. Portico's e-journal archiving service was developed through a pilot project that drew heavily upon engagement with publisher and library pilot participants. We anticipate that a similar process will be essential in understanding how best to respond to the challenges of e-book preservation. . . .
The current participants in the E-Book Preservation study include:
Publishers
- American Math Society
- Elsevier
- Morgan Claypool
- Taylor and Francis
Libraries
- Case Western Reserve University
- Cornell University Library
- McGill University
- SOLINET
- Texas University Libraries
- University College of London
- Yale University Library
SHEPRA has released Institutional Repositories: Staff and Skills Requirements.
Here’s an excerpt from the document:
This document began in response to requests received by the core SHERPA team for examples of job descriptions for repository posts. Its development has been greatly assisted by contributions from the SHERPA partners and UKCORR members.
This document will be revised annually (July/August) to reflect changing needs and requirements. Input from the repository community will be sought at this time.
The German National Library and SUB Göttingen have announced the official release of the kopal Library for Retrieval and Ingest on diglib.
Here's an excerpt from the message:
The kopal project (Co-operative Development of a Long-term Digital Information Archive) was dedicated to find a solution to providing not only bitstream preservation but long-term accessibility as well in the form of a cooperatively developed and operated long-term archive for digital data. The German National Library, the Goettingen State and University Library, the Gesellschaft fuer wissenschaftliche Datenverarbeitung mbH Goettingen, and IBM Germany have been working in close cooperation on a technological solution. The now released software tools mark the successful development of such an archiving solution.
The Open-Source-Software koLibRI is a framework to integrate a long term preservation system as the IBM Digital Information Archiving System (DIAS) into the infrastructure of any institution. In particular, koLibRi organizes the creation and the import of Archival Information Packages into DIAS, and offers functions to retrieve and to govern them. Preservation methods like data customization and migration of data are part of the tasks of long term preservation. koLibRi Version 1.0 provides modules that manage future migration procedures. koLibRI Version 1.0 provides a completely functional and stable condition. Nevertheless, in the context of connecting new partners to the existing long term preservation system, the software will be constantly adjusted to the needs of different partners.
A documentation has been published with the conclusive release that describes the installation and the adjustment of a functional koLibRi-system and the basic internal layout to make individual development possible. The described release is offered for free download. . . .
The Storage Networking Industry Association has released the 100 Year Archive Requirements Survey. Access requires registration.
Here's an excerpt from the "Survey Highlights":
The Fedora Commons Website has gone live.
Here's an excerpt from the About Fedora Commons page:
Fedora Commons is a non-profit organization providing sustainable technologies to create, manage, publish, share and preserve digital content as a basis for intellectual, organizational, scientific and cultural heritage by bringing two communities together.
Communities of practice that include scholars, artists, educators, Web innovators, publishers, scientists, librarians, archivists, publishers, records managers, museum curators or anyone who presents, accesses, or preserves digital content.
Software developers who work on the cutting edge of open source Web and enterprise content technologies to ensure that collaboratively created knowledge is available now and in the future.
Fedora Commons is the home of the unique Fedora open source software, a robust integrated repository-centered platform that enables the storage, access and management of virtually any kind of digital content.
Here's an excerpt from the press release about the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation grant that helps fund the Fedora Commons:
Fedora Commons today announced the award of a four year, $4.9M grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation to develop the organizational and technical frameworks necessary to effect revolutionary change in how scientists, scholars, museums, libraries, and educators collaborate to produce, share, and preserve their digital intellectual creations. Fedora Commons is a new non-profit organization that will continue the mission of the Fedora Project, the successful open-source software collaboration between Cornell University and the University of Virginia. The Fedora Project evolved from the Flexible Extensible Digital Object Repository Architecture (Fedora) developed by researchers at Cornell Computing and Information Science.
With this funding, Fedora Commons will foster an open community to support the development and deployment of open source software, which facilitates open collaboration and open access to scholarly, scientific, cultural, and educational materials in digital form. The software platform developed by Fedora Commons with Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation funding will support a networked model of intellectual activity, whereby scientists, scholars, teachers, and students will use the Internet to collaboratively create new ideas, and build on, annotate, and refine the ideas of their colleagues worldwide. With its roots in the Fedora open-source repository system, developed since 2001 with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the new software will continue to focus on the integrity and longevity of the intellectual products that underlie this new form of knowledge work. The result will be an open source software platform that both enables collaborative models of information creation and sharing, and provides sustainable repositories to secure the digital materials that constitute our intellectual, scientific, and cultural history.
Nick Bostrom, Director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford, says in a New York Times article today:
“My gut feeling, and it’s nothing more than that,” he says, “is that there’s a 20 percent chance we’re living in a computer simulation.”
Bostrom thinks so because, barring a future prohibition on creating simulated worlds or disinterest in doing so, that our posthuman descendants are almost certain to create simulations of the past. The more simulations that are run, the more likely that you are in one.
By some estimates, there will be enough available computing power to create a simulated world by 2050.
However, there could be a recursive problem:
It’s also possible that there would be logistical problems in creating layer upon layer of simulations. There might not be enough computing power to continue the simulation if billions of inhabitants of a virtual world started creating their own virtual worlds with billions of inhabitants apiece.
I wouldn't count on it though.
Source: Tierney, John. "Our Lives, Controlled From Some Guy's Couch." The New York Times, 14 August 2007, D1, D4.
If you have ever purchased or rented a video from the Google Video Store, it will cease to function on August 15, 2007. That's because the Google Video Store is being shut down and along with it Google 's associated DRM system.
Customers will get credits in Google Checkout for what they spent on Google Video Store products, but not cash refunds, meaning that they must buy merchandise available via that service to recoup their losses. Of course, this does not compensate purchasers for the inconvenience of having to replace their videos (assuming that they can).
This fiasco underlines a key problem with DRM: it doesn't just restrict access, it restricts access using proprietary technologies, and, with few exceptions, those technologies cannot be legally circumvented under U.S. law.
Source: Fisher, Ken. "Google Selleth Then Taketh Away, Proving the Need for DRM Circumvention." Ars Technica, 12 August 2007.
The Berkeley Electronic Press (bepress) has acquired the Digital Commons institutional repository software from ProQuest. bepress was the original creator of the software.
Here's an excerpt from the press release:
ProQuest and The Berkeley Electronic Press ("bepress") today announced that they have reached an agreement for bepress to purchase ownership of Digital Commons, the world's leading hosted institutional repository solution. Bepress will be adding sales and marketing staff and augmenting its existing customer support and services in addition to the hosting and technology services that it has always provided Digital Commons customers.
Bepress Chairman, Aaron Edlin, said "Institutional Repositories are core to the bepress mission of furthering scholarly communication and thus bepress is excited at the opportunity to build a close relationship with Digital Commons customers. Developing successful and vibrant Institutional Repositories will be bepress's central focus."
Researchers at Penn State's College of Information Sciences and Technology's Cyber-Infrastructure Lab have developed open source software called TableSeer that can find, extract, search, and rank table data from PDF files. Source code will be available at the project's close.
Here's an extract from the press release:
Tables are an important data resource for researchers. In a search of 10,000 documents from journals and conferences, the researchers found that more than 70 percent of papers in chemistry, biology and computer science included tables. Furthermore, most of those documents had multiple tables.
But while some software can identify and extract tables from text, existing software cannot search for tables across documents. That means scientists and scholars must manually browse documents in order to find tables-a time-consuming and cumbersome process.
TableSeer automates that process and captures data not only within the table but also in tables' titles and footnotes. In addition, it enables column-name-based search so that a user can search for a particular column in a table.
In tests with documents from the Royal Society of Chemistry, TableSeer correctly identified and retrieved 93.5 percent of tables created in text-based formats. . . .
Information on TableSeer can be found in a paper, "TableSeer: Automatic Table Metadata Extraction and Searching in Digital Libraries," by Ying Liu, Kun Bai, Mitra and Giles of the Penn State College of Information Sciences and Technology.
In a blow to the SCO Group, Dale A. Kimball, a judge in the U.S. District Court for the District of Utah Central District, has ruled that Novell owns the disputed copyright to the UNIX operating system. The judge also ruled that SCO must drop its suits against IBM Corp and Sequant as well as pay Novell part of its licensing fees from Sun and Microsoft.
Here's an excerpt from "Novell Wins Right to Unix, Dismissing SCO":
The ruling is good news for organizations that use open-source software products, said Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation. "From the perspective of someone who is adopting open-source solutions to run in the enterprise, it proves to them that the industry is going to defend the platform, and that when organizations attack it from a legal perspective, that the industry collectively will defend it," he said.
Here's an excerpt from "Judge Says Unix Copyrights Belong to Novell":
The court's ruling has cut out the core of SCO's case and, as a result, eliminates SCO's threat to the Linux community based upon allegations of copyright infringement of Unix," said Joe LaSala, Novell's senior vice president and general counsel.
Sources: Gohring, Nancy. "Novell Wins Right to Unix, Dismissing SCO." InfoWorld, 10 August 2007; Markoff, John. "Judge Says Unix Copyrights Belong to Novell." The New York Times, 11 August 2007.
It’s time to decide how to focus my near-term publishing efforts and how to split them between unpaid and paid projects (including possibly shifting some energy into technical writing projects, such as computer books).
You can help by taking a short, multiple-choice survey (six required and two optional questions).
Thanks for your help.
What happens in Second Life is increasingly influencing real life and vice versa. Here are some recent highlights:
