DigitalKoans

Information Technology and Libraries has launched the ITALica Weblog.

Here's the announcement:

Hello friends, Information Technology and Libraries (ITAL), LITA's peer-reviewed quarterly journal, is about to launch a new weblog called ITALica at http://ital-ica.blogspot.com/. ITALica addresses a need we on the ITAL Editorial Board have long sensed, that is, an area for "letters to the editor", updates to articles, supplementary materials we can't work into the journal,. . . you-name-it. One of the most important features of ITALica will be a forum for readers' conversations with our authors: we'll ask authors to host and monitor discussion for a period of time after publication of their articles, so that you'll then have a chance to interact with them.

ITALica is currently a pilot project. For our first author-hosted discussion, we are very pleased to have as host Jennifer Bowen of the University of Rochester.

Many of you will know—either because you attended, or because you've heard the buzz about it since—about the 'Creating the Future of the Catalog and Cataloging', program at the ALA Annual Conference in Anaheim. This program, which was sponsored by ALCTS CCS, and co-sponsored by the LITA Next Generation Catalog Interest Group and the ALCTS Networked Resources and Metadata Interest Group, drew an overflow crowd of several hundred and featured as presenters—in addition to Jennifer—Diane Hillmann, Tim Spalding, Roy Tennant, and Martha Yee.

Jennifer's presentation was in large part based on her paper 'Metadata to Support Next-Generation Library Resource Discovery: Lessons from The eXtensible Catalog, Phase 1', just published in the June 2008 issue of ITAL. We on the ITAL Editorial Board believe that the eXtensible Catalog (XC) project at Rochester represents a significant contribution to the future development and directions of both library metadata and the library catalog as a discovery tool. Jennifer will host the first ITALica, contributing her thoughts about the ALA program, updating her ITAL paper with more recent developments in the XC initiative, and engaging in discussion with those of you who care to contribute. LITA members can access the full version of Jennifer's paper online, at the ITAL website . . . from where you can also then find a link to the ITALica discussion. You can also access ITALica directly (no membership in LITA required) at (http://ital-ica.blogspot.com/). Jennifer will be monitoring the discussion from 18 August to 15 September 2008.

Beginning with the September issue of ITAL, we plan to expand ITALica discussions to include all articles and other features in that and subsequent issues. We hope to see many of you online at ITALica for what promises to be the first in an ongoing series of very stimulating discussions!

cheers,
Marc Truitt, Editor, ITAL, for the Editorial Board

OpenCollection version 0.54-3 has been released.

Here's an excerpt from the Overview page:

OpenCollection is a full-featured collections management and online access application for museums, archives and digital collections. It is designed to handle large, heterogeneous collections that have complex cataloguing requirements and require support for a variety of metadata standards and media formats. Unlike most other collections management applications, OpenCollection is completely web-based. All cataloging, search and administrative functions are accessed using common web-browser software, untying users from specific operating systems and making cataloguing by distributed teams and online access to collections information simple, efficient and inexpensive.

See the Features page for more details about this open source software.

Fedora Commons has released version 2.2.3 of Fedora, which contains an important security fix.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

Today Fedora Commons released version 2.2.3 of the popular Fedora software that includes the repair of a serious security defect and several bug fixes. Dan Davis, Chief Software Architect, Fedora Commons, explained, "Every installation of Fedora 2 should update to 2.2.3 due to the security update. There have been no exploits that have been discovered but it is important to maintain repositories at the latest security update level." Fedora 2.2.3 is strictly a maintenance update; new features may be found in Fedora 3.0 which was released for general availability on July 29th . Also, the license has been changed to the familiar Apache License 2.0 for Fedora 2.2.3. Fedora 2 will be maintained until August 2009 and thereafter be placed in an "end of life" status. At least one more release of Fedora 2 is planned though there may be additional releases to fix critical defects.

An article in the Financial Times ("Why Sony Lost the Battle of the E-Book") suggests that, despite the Sony Reader's earlier market presence, the unique features of the Kindle (e.g., wireless access to e-books), its large e-book stock (145,000 titles), and its strong unit sales (240,000 units) and e-book sales (12% of all Amazon book sales) bodes ill for the Reader's ability to attain marketplace dominance.

Read more about it at "Amazon May Have Actually Sold a Bunch Of Kindles (AMZN)" and "We Know How Many Kindles Amazon Has Sold: 240,000."

In January 2008, Kenneth Crews became the founding director of the Copyright Advisory Office at Columbia University. There are a variety of useful resources at the CAO's web site about U.S. copyright law, especially fair use.

Of particular interest, are:

• [Fair Use] Court Case Summaries
• Fair Use Checklist
• Fair Use Guidelines
• Permissions (Use links at left)
• Podcasts

The Digital Curation Centre has released "Creative Commons Licensing" as part of its Legal Watch Papers series.

Here's an excerpt:

CC is of great relevance to digital curation in the way it simplifies and increases third party access to and usage of copyright works. Curation is dependant on a range of strategies that require the making of copies and modifications. Unhindered, copyright could impinge on digital curation considerably. However use of these licences may ameliorate the difficulties.

Robert Aymar, Director-General of CERN, has deposited a e-print of "Scholarly Communication in High-Energy Physics: Past, Present and Future Innovations" in the CERN Document Server.

Here's an excerpt from the abstract:

Unprecedented technological advancements have radically changed the way we communicate and, at the same time, are effectively transforming science into e-Science. In turn, this transformation calls for an evolution in scholarly communication. This review describes several innovations, spanning the last decades of scholarly communication in High Energy Physics: the first repositories, their interaction with peer-reviewed journals, a proposed model for Open Access publishing and a next-generation repository for the field.

Of particular interest is his description of the INSPIRE Project, "a fully integrated HEP information platform for the future," that will have "text- and data-mining applications, citation analysis and other tools, and Web 2.0 features."

For further information about INSPIRE, see "Information Systems in HEP get INSPIREd" and the INSPIRE Wiki.

Chris Rusbridge, Director of the Digital Curation Centre, has summarized responses that he has received to his proposed Research Repository System.

Here's an excerpt from "Negative Click, Positive Value Research Repository Systems," where he outlined the key features of the system.

The main elements that I think the RRS should support are (not in any particular order):

• web orientation
• researcher identity management
• authoring support
• object disclosure control
• data management support
• persistent storage
• full preservation archive, and
• spinoffs

OCLC Programs & Research has released The Impact of Digitizing Special Collections on Teaching and Scholarship: Reflections on a Symposium about Digitization and the Humanities.

Here's an excerpt:

University faculty and scholars demonstrated their uses of rare books and archives—in both digital and physical forms—to an audience of RLG Programs partners at a symposium in Philadelphia on June 4, 2008. Tony Grafton's recent article in The New Yorker provoked the theme of the symposium: we'll be travelling both the wide smooth road through the screen and the narrow difficult road of books and archives for a long time to come.

The audience of librarians, archivists, museum professionals and senior managers discussed administrative issues and opportunities for the use of digitized special collections. The academic speakers, however, spoke to us directly about their expectations of special collections and proposals for collaboration with scholars. These scholars emphasized the critical roles rare books, archives and other materials play in both teaching and research, and called for specific directions for libraries and archives to take in the near future. The primary users of primary resources presented clear imperatives for collections and custodians: work with faculty to understand current research methods and materials; go outside the library or archive to build collections and work with faculty; and continue to build digital and material collections for both teaching and research.