DigitalKoans

Dan Cohen has created a Digital Humanities Wiki in response to "a common need expressed at the digital humanities centers summit at NEH in April, 2007."

It currently includes sections on:

• Centers
• Discussion Groups
• Journals and Series
• Professional Societies, National and International Organisations
• Tools

In this podcast ("Content Recruitment and Development: A Proactive Approach to Building an Institutional Repository"), Marjorie Hassen describes the University of Pennsylvania Libraries’ strategy for developing and supporting the ScholarlyCommons@Penn, an institutional repository based on the Digital Commons platform.

In the latest issue of RLG DigiNews, Jim Michalko and Lorcan Dempsey announce significant changes to this journal. RLG DigiNews has been a five-star journal that has been essential reading for digital library and preservation specialists. I’d encourage my readers to voice support for its continued excellence as indicated in the below excerpt from the article:

The issue in front of you is the last of RLG DigiNews in its current form. As RLG continues to shape its combination with OCLC and create the new Programs and Research division, we are rethinking the publication program that will support our new agenda while providing readers and authors with the kind of vehicle that supports the re-invention of cultural institutions in the research, teaching, and learning process. RLG DigiNews will be an important part of this program. Expect to see it back with a renewed editorial direction. There’s much to do and coordinate but we’ve committed both the talent and the resources to make this happen. Watch for your next RLG DigiNews no later than January, 2008.

Thank you for your support. Let those responsible know that you’re looking forward to the future.

Presentations from Friday’s sessions of the 5th Workshop on Innovations in Scholarly Communication in Geneva are now available.

Here are a few highlights from this major conference:

• Doctoral e-Theses; Experiences in Harvesting on a National and European Level (PowerPoint): "In the presentation we will show some lessons learned and the first results of the Demonstrator, an interoperable portal of European doctoral e-theses in five countries: Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden and the UK."
• Exploring Overlay Journals: The RIOJA project (PowerPoint): "This presentation introduces the RIOJA (Repository Interface to Overlaid Journal Archives) project, on which a group of cosmology researchers from the UK is working with UCL Library Services and Cornell University. The project is creating a tool to support the overlay of journals onto repositories, and will demonstrate a cosmology journal overlaid on top of arXiv."
• Dissemination or Publication? Some Consequences from Smudging the Boundaries between Research Data and Research Papers (PDF): "Project StORe’s repository middleware will enable researchers to move seamlessly between the research data environment and its outputs, passing directly from an electronic article to the data from which it was developed, or linking instantly to all the publications that have resulted from a particular research dataset."
• Open Archives, The Expectations of the Scientific Communities (RealVideo): "This analysis led the French CNRS to start the Hal project, a pluridisciplinary open archive strongly inspired by ArXiv, and directly connected to it. Hal actually automatically transfers data and documents to ArXiv for the relevant disciplins; similarly, it is connected to Pum Med and Pub Med Central for life sciences. Hal is customizable so that institutions can build their own portal within Hal, which then plays the role of an institutional archive (examples are INRIA, INSERM, ENS Lyon, and others)."

(You may want to download PowerPoint Viewer 2007 if you don’t have PowerPoint 2007).

What was new and interesting during the week of 4/16/07? (Brief quotes follow article/Web page titles.)

• "Adobe Unveils Desktop Media Player"
  

  The Adobe Media Player is a standalone desktop version of Adobe’s ubiquitous Flash Player browser plug-in.

• "Books Are Technology Too"
  

  In some of the more reflective discussion I am interested to see a particular strand emerge. And that is the acknowledgement that the book, in its material form, is itself a designed and evolved technology, rather than a permanent or unchanging feature of our experience.

• "CIL2007: Digitization Workshop Resources"
  

  This post provides supplementary material to a full-day workshop I led at the Computers in Libraries conference on April 19 entitled ‘Digitization 101: The Workshop.’

• "College Advises Students to Push Back Against the RIAA"
  

  The students of North Carolina State University (NCSU) are being advised to stand their ground against the RIAA, according to a report in the NCSU student paper, Technician Online.

• "Configurable Browse System Released"
  

  The most exciting thing today is that I have finally finished the release candidate code for the new Browse system for DSpace.

• "Congress Takes New Stab at Patent System Overhaul"
  

  Politicians from both parties of the U.S. Congress on Wednesday unveiled a new proposal designed to make the most sweeping changes to the nation’s patent system in decades.

• "Consumers, Librarians, and Innovators Tell EU ‘We’re Not Criminals’"
  

  The Second Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive (IPRED2)—set for vote in the European Parliament early next week—makes "aiding, abetting, or inciting" intellectual property infringement on a "commercial scale" a criminal offence. However, IPRED2 defines criminal offences so vaguely that creators of legitimate websites, Internet service providers, and even librarians could be investigated by the police and face criminal records as well as fines of hundreds of thousands of euros.

• "Despite Revenue Slump, RIAA Still Not Getting the Big Picture"
  

  The unfortunate fact for the RIAA that Bainwol doesn’t seem to grasp is that the game has fundamentally changed forever, and there’s no going back to the days of year-over-year revenue growth, at least not for the next five years or so. CD sales are on a downward slope and they’re taking the industry’s revenues with them.

• "E-Books: Plugging and Playing in Toronto"
  

  Furthermore, U Toronto’s existing subscriptions to e-book packages show that electronic use is more than print use in 58% of cases where a book exists in both formats.

• "Google Book vs Microsoft Live Search"
  

  Microsoft have definitely learned from Google in the way Google approached the presentation and the management of the publishers’ content. The display is visually more appealing in the Live case and they have incorporated a number of widgets that allow outbound linking which will be very useful to users and publishers.

• "Internet Radio Loses Royalty Appeal"
  

  The judges on the Copyright Royalty Board, the people from the Library of Congress who determine copyright royalty fees, denied a call a for a rehearing on their March decision to up the royalties payed out by internet radio broadcasters.

• "IPDF: Give Us Feedback on Our E-Book Format and Related Matters"
  

  The International Digital Publishing Forum is seeking input on its OPS 2.0 e-book format and related matters . . .

• "Microsoft Aims to Double PC base"
  

  Microsoft software will sell for just $3 (£1.50) in some parts of the world in an attempt to double the number of global PC users.

• "New Data on U.S. Libraries Shows Almost Two Billion Served: Predicted Demise Due to Internet Fails to Materialize"
  

  According to the 2007 State of America’s Libraries report, there were nearly two billion visits to U.S. libraries in fiscal year 2004. The study was released today by the ALA as the nation begins its observance of National Library Week, April 15-21. In the case of academic libraries, the number of visits exceeded more than one billion for the first time in 2004, up more than 14 percent in just the previous two years.

• Participative Web: User-Created Content
  

  Questions addressed include: What is user-created content? What are its
  key drivers, its scope and different forms? What are new value chains and business models? What are the
  extent and form of social, cultural and economic opportunities and impacts? What are associated
  challenges? Is there a government role and what form could it take?

• "Peter Shepherd Reports on Usage Factor Study"
  

  The UKSG sponsored a Project COUNTER study into the feasibility of developing a new metric for assessing journal quality, which is based on the electronic traffic on a journal’s site. The “Usage Factor” is envisioned as a ratio of downloads of articles (measured by COUNTER-compliant statistics) and the number of articles available.

• "Samizdat Express"
  

  Since 1993 B+R, run by Barbara and Richard Seltzer of West Roxbury, Massachusetts, has been selling bundles of plain text (ASCII) digital literature scooped from Project Gutenberg and arranged by theme, genre or period into anthologies — first on floppy disc, and now on CD-ROM and DVD.

• "Schmidt Says YouTube ‘Very Close’ to Filtering System"
  

  Google is very near enacting a filtering service that would prevent copyright content from being uploaded to video-sharing site YouTube, CEO Eric Schmidt said Monday.

• "Silverlight: Microsoft Launches Flash Competitor"
  

  Silverlight is a media player that can run web applications on both Windows and the Mac in IE, Firefox and Safari (Opera users are apparently out of luck).

• "Rethinking Personal Use"
  

  Reading, listening, viewing, and their modern cousins watching, playing, running, and building, are central to the copyright scheme. We knew that once, but forgot it sometime within the past generation as the rhetoric of copyright increasingly characterized personal uses as piracy and theft.

• "Senator Plans to Revise Web Labeling Bill"
  

  The U.S. senator behind a controversial proposal requiring labels on racy Web sites and limiting access to social-networking sites appears to be backing away from the idea.

• "Sony Blunders with DRM Again"
  

  It appears that Sony’s (NYSE: SNE) zeal to prevent pirates from copying its media products has backfired again. Consumers are now up in arms because copyright protection included on the discs prevents several of the company’s DVDs from working in some players.

Presentations from Thursday’s sessions of the 5th Workshop on Innovations in Scholarly Communication in Geneva are now available.

Here are a few highlights from this major conference:

• Business Models for Digital Repositories (PowerPoint): "Those setting up, or planning to set up, a digital repository may be interested to know more about what has gone before them. What is involved, what is the cost, how many people are needed, how have others made the case to their institution, and how do you get anything into it once it is built? I have recently undertaken a study of European repository business models for the DRIVER project and will present an overview of the findings."
• DRIVER: Building a Sustainable Infrastructure of European Scientific Repositories (PowerPoint): "Ten partners from eight countries have entered into an international partnership, to connect and network as a first step more than 50 physically distributed institutional repositories to one, large-scale, virtual Knowledge Base of European research."
• On the Golden Road : Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics (RealVideo): "A working party works now to bring together funding agencies, laboratories and libraries into a single consortium, called SCOAP3 (Sponsoring Consortium for Open access Publishing in Particle Physics). This consortium will engage with publishers towards building a sustainable model for open access publishing. In this model, subscription fees from multiple institutions are replaced with contracts with publishers of open access journals where the SCOAP3 consortium is a single financial partner."
• Open Access Forever—Or Five Years, Whichever Comes First: Progress on Preserving the Digital Scholarly Record (RealVideo): "The current state of the curation and preservation of digital scholarship over its entire lifecycle will be reviewed, and progress on problems of specific interest to scholarly communication will be examined. The difficulty of curating the digital scholarly record and preserving it for future generations has important implications for the movement to make that record more open and accessible to the world, so this a timely topic for those who are interested in the future of scholarly communication."

(You may want to download PowerPoint Viewer 2007 if you don’t have PowerPoint 2007).

The OpenDOAR project has announced the availability of an API for accessing digital repository data in their database.

Here’s an excerpt from the press release:

OpenDOAR, as a SHERPA project, is pleased to announce the release of an API that lets developers use OpenDOAR data in their applications. It is a machine-to-machine interface that can run a wide variety of queries against the OpenDOAR Database and get back XML data. Developers can choose to receive just repository titles & URLs, all the available OpenDOAR data, or intermediate levels of detail. They can then incorporate the output into their own applications and ‘mash-ups’, or use it to control processes such as OAI-PMH harvesting. . . .

OpenDOAR is a continuing project hosted at the University of Nottingham under the SHERPA Partnership. OpenDOAR maintains and builds on a quality-assured list of the world’s Open Access Repositories. OpenDOAR acts as a bridge between repository administrators and the service providers who make use of information held in repositories to offer search and other services to researchers and scholars worldwide.

A key feature of OpenDOAR is that all of the repositories we list have been visited by project staff, tested and assessed by hand. We currently decline about a quarter of candidate sites as being broken, empty, out of scope, etc. This gives a far higher quality assurance to the listings we hold than results gathered by just automatic harvesting. OpenDOAR has now surveyed over 1,100 repositories, producing a classified Directory of over 800 freely available archives of academic information.

Presentations from Wednesday’s sessions of the 5th Workshop on Innovations in Scholarly Communication in Geneva are now available.

Here are a few highlights from this major conference:

• MESUR: Metrics from Scholarly Usage of Resources (PowerPoint): "The two-year MESUR project, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, aims to define and validate a range of usage-based impact metrics, and issue guidelines with regards to their characteristics and proper application. The MESUR project is constructing a large-scale semantic model of the scholarly community that seamlessly integrates a wide range of bibliographic, citation and usage data."
• OAI Object Re-Use and Exchange (PowerPoint): "In this presentation, we will give an overview of the current activities, including: defining the problem of compound documents within the web architecture, enumerating and exploring several use cases, and identifying likely adopters of OAI-ORE."
• OpenDOAR Policy Tools and Applications (RealVideo): "OpenDOAR has developed a set of policy generator tools for repository administrators and is contacting administrators to advocate policy development."
• State of OAI-PMH (PowerPoint): "The OAI-PMH was released in 2001 and stabilized at v2.0 in 2002. Since then there has been steady growth in adoption of the protocol. Support for the OAI-PMH is assumed for base-level interoperability between institutional repositories, and is also provided for many other collections of scholarly material. I will review the current landscape and reflect on some milestones and issues."

(You may want to download PowerPoint Viewer 2007 if you don’t have PowerPoint 2007).

Library Journal has published its annual review of serials prices. This year, its title is "Serial Wars."

There is considerable discussion of open access issues in the article, and Peter Suber has commented: "This is an excellent picture of where OA stands today. If you have colleagues who want to know what’s been happening and only have time for one article, give them this URL."

As usual, the big bucks in serials are for STM journals (see the table below from the article), and, no surprise, the country with the highest average price per title is the Netherlands.

TABLE 1 AVERAGE 2007 PRICE FOR SCIENTIFIC DISCIPLINES

Discipline	Average Price Per Title
Chemistry	$3,429
Physics	2,865
Engineering	2,071
Biology	1,676
Technology	1,502
Astronomy	1,426
Geology	1,424
Food Science	1,345
Math & Computer Science	$1,313
Zoology	1,308
Health Sciences	1,199
Botany	1,179
General Science	1,139
Geography	1,050
Agriculture	898

What about next year?: "Expect overall price increases to be in the seven percent to nine percent range for 2008 subscriptions."