DigitalKoans

When I began my digital publishing efforts 18 years ago, the global network environment was much more fragmented than it is today (for details, see The Matrix: Computer Networks and Conferencing Systems Worldwide), and the primary information access tools were e-mail, FTP, mailing lists, and USENET newsgroups. Gopher servers, which represented a significant advance in information access, would not become available until 1991, and NCSA Mosaic, an early Web browser that ignited interest in the Web, until 1993. You can get a good sense of the context of my digital publishing efforts by consulting the Hobbes’ Internet Timeline v8.2 and the Timeline of the Open Access Movement.

Below is an abbreviated chronology of my digital publishing efforts from June 1989 to June 2007.

• June 29, 1989. Established the PACS-L mailing list, acted as list owner and, later, as its first moderator. Sent the first PACS-L message welcoming subscribers.
• August 16, 1989. Established The Public-Access Computer Systems Review (PACS Review), a free scholarly e-journal, and acted as its first Editor-in-Chief (announcement).
• January 3, 1990. Published the first PACS Review issue. Articles were selected by the editors. They were distributed as ASCII files using the LISTSERV software (see example); table of contents messages were e-mailed to subscribers. Authors retained the copyright to their articles. Liberal copying was permitted for noncommercial purposes.
• March 5, 1990. Established and acted as co-editor of Public-Access Computer Systems News, a free electronic newsletter (first issue). Acted as co-editor until the end of 1992.
• August 30, 1990. Published the first version of "Library-Oriented BITNET Lists," a directory of mailing lists.
• August 26, 1991. Published a special PACS Review issue on "Network-Based Electronic Serials," including Stevan Harnad’s "Post-Gutenberg Galaxy: The Fourth Revolution in the Means of Production of Knowledge."
• October 29, 1991. Adopted a more flexible PACS Review publication schedule that took advantage of electronic publishing capabilities and reduced article publication time.
• November 11, 1991. Changed the PACS Review to a peer-reviewed journal.
• November 15, 1991. Announced that I was stepping down as PACS-L moderator. PACS-L had over 3,100 subscribers at the time.
• January 13, 1992. Established the PACS-P mailing list to distribute the UH Libraries electronic publications and Current Cites (announcement). See the PACS-P chronology for more details.
• April 6, 1992. Published the first peer-reviewed PACS Review article.
• January 18, 1994. Published my last version of "Library-Oriented Lists and Electronic Serials." Subsequently, Ann Thornton and Steve Bonario maintained the document, then Wei Wu maintained it as a searchable Web site until 2006.
• January 29, 1994. Made the PACS Review and PACS News available via a Gopher server.
• March 21, 1995. Published the first HTML version of the PACS Review and established a policy that allowed authors to update articles. This issue was composed of the first version of my "Network-Based Electronic Publishing of Scholarly Works: A Selective Bibliography." This article had 26 versions.
• September 12, 1996. Announced that I was stepping down as PACS Review Editor-in-Chief at the end of 1996. (See the PACS Review Wikipedia article for more details about it.)
• October 30, 1996. Published the first HTML version of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography (SEPB), a free, updated electronic book (announcement). See the "Evolution of an Electronic Book: The Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography" for a detailed history of the bibliography from 1996 to 2001.
• December 17, 1996. Published the first Acrobat version of SEPB.
• September 16, 1997. Published the first version of Scholarly Electronic Publishing Resources (SEPR).
• March 2001. Started contributing reviews to Current Cites (reviews).
• June 7, 2001. Began the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog (SEPW) (first posting at bottom).
• September 22, 2003. Established the SEPW@LISTSERV.UH.EDU mailing list and distributed the first ASCII version of SEPW.
• July 13, 2004. Put SEPB, SEPR, and SEPW under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License.
• March 2, 2005. The Association of Research Libraries published my Open Access Bibliography: Liberating Scholarly Literature with E-Prints and Open Access Journals (OAB). The book was published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License in print and PDF formats. In cooperation with ARL, I made the PDF version freely available.
• March 15, 2005. Added an RSS feed to SEPW using a mirror Blogger Weblog and FeedBurner.
• April 20, 2005. Established DigitalKoans on my new escholarlypub.com domain using WordPress for the Weblog and FeedBurner for the (RSS feed). DigitalKoans provides commentary on scholarly electronic publishing and digital culture issues (offered under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License).
• September 29, 2005. Made a SEPB archive Zip file available that contains all versions of the bibliography. This file is updated with each new SEPB version.
• January 8, 2006: Established the digital-scholarship.com domain to replace the escholarlypub.com domain.
• February 6, 2006. Published the Open Access Bibliography Author Index and the Open Access Bibliography Title Index.
• February 21, 2006. With Version 61 of SEPB, ceased publishing the Acrobat version.
• March 22, 2006. Published an HTML version of the OAB.
• October 25, 2006: Created a Google Custom Search Engine for the OAB.
• October 28, 2006. Created a Google Custom Search Engines for SEPB and SEPW.
• November 3, 2006. Migrated SEPB, SEPR, and SEPW from the University of Houston Libraries’ servers to escholarlypub.com. Discontinued the SEPW LISTSERV mailing list, and replaced it with a FeedBurner mailing list.
• December 14, 2006: Established the digital-scholarship.org domain on a second hosting service in order to mirror DigitalKoans and other files for increased reliability.
• December 18, 2006. Announced the digital-scholarship.org domain, branding it and digital-scholarship.com under the name "Digital Scholarship."
• December 31, 2006. There were over 4.2 million successful Gopher or Web file requests for PACS Review files since January 1994; LISTSERV use was unknown (see the PACS Review use statistics and the 2006 update). There were over 6.6 million successful Web file requests for SEPB since October 1996 (see the SEPB use statistics).
• January 8, 2007. Replaced the mirror Blogger SEPW Weblog with a new one on the digital-scholarship.org domain using WordPress and FeedBurner.
• February 11-12, 2007. Recoded the Digital Scholarship Web sites to give them a common look and feel. Published an HTML version of the "Open Access Webligraphy."
• March 14, 2007. Published the first annual PDF version of SEPB.
• April, 11 2007. With Version 67, recoded SEPB in XHTML and CSS.
• May 31, 2007. There were over 3.9 million Web file requests for the escholarlypub.com, digital-scholarship.com, and digital-scholarship.org domains since April 2005 (see the .com and .org use by countries reports).
• June 19, 2007. Published version 68 of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography.

Articles about These Electronic Publications

Bailey, Charles W., Jr. "Brought to You By . . ." Interview by Carol Ebbinghouse. Research & Education Networking 2 (March 1991): 12-15.

———. "Electronic (Online) Publishing in Action . . . The Public-Access Computer Systems Review and Other Electronic Serials." ONLINE 15 (January 1991): 28-35 (preprint).

———. "Evolution of an Electronic Book: The Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography." The Journal of Electronic Publishing 7 (December 2001).

———. "The Public-Access Computer Systems Forum: A Computer Conference on BITNET." Library Software Review 9 (March-April 1990): 71-74.

Crawford, Walt. "Talking About Public Access—PACS-L’s First Decade." Information Technology and Libraries 19 (September 2000): 112-115.

DeLoughry, Thomas J. "The Latest Scoop on Internet Resources." The Chronicle of Higher Education, 2 November 1994, A28.

Ensor, Pat, and Thomas Wilson. "Public-Access Computer Systems Review: Testing the Promise." The Journal of Electronic Publishing 3, no. 1 (1997).

Jacsó, Péter. "Peter’s Picks & Pans." Review of Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography, by Charles W. Bailey, Jr. ONLINE 27, no. 3 (2003): 73-76.

Jensen, Ann. Review of Open Access Bibliography: Liberating Scholarly Literature with E-Prints and Open Access Journals, by Charles W. Bailey, Jr. Issues in Science and Technology Librarianship, no. 43 (2005).

Moothart, Tom. "Charles W. Bailey, Jr.: Editor, Publisher, Innovator." Serials Review 23, no. 1 (1997): 59-62.

Wu, Wei. "Library-Oriented Lists and Electronic Serials." Texas Library Journal, 74, no. 1 (1998): 36-38.

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).

What was new and interesting during the week of 6/25/07? (Brief quotes follow article/Web page titles.)

• "At ALA, SPARC Forum Details Economic Stability of Open Access"
  

  Moderated by scientist Alma Swan, the panel featured speakers from three OA publishers with different backgrounds: Mark Patterson from the Public Library of Science, a non-profit start-up; Bryan Vickery from BioMed Central (BMC), a seven-year-old for-profit open access publisher; and Paul Peters of Hindawi, a relatively new publisher that this year transitioned from a subscription model to OA.

• "CC Canada Podcasting Legal Guide"
  

  Creative Commons Canada has just released their version of the Creative Commons Podcasting Legal Guide, ported specifically for Canadian laws and practices.

• "Digital Entertainment on Campus: Old Lawsuits and New Business Models"
  

  In this hour-long podcast, we present a session from the EDUCAUSE 2007 Policy Conference entitled, "Digital Entertainment on Campus: Old Lawsuits and New Business Models."

• "DRM for Books: Will Publishers Learn Anything from the Music Industry’s Mistakes?"
  

  As the music industry approaches the post-DRM era, it’s pretty clear that Digital Rights Management is one big mistake that book publishers would do themselves a favor by avoiding.

• "FTC Sides with Telecoms on Net Neutrality"
  

  The Federal Trade Commission has given the ‘Net Neutrality’ movement a serious slap in the face.

• "Gonzales: It’s Time to Punish ‘Attempted’ Piracy"
  

  If anyone doubted his seriousness about that dramatic plan, look no further than the text of a speech the official delivered in Seattle on Wednesday.

• "The ‘Google Five’ Describe Progress, Challenges "
  

  Their numbers have now swelled to 25, but what’s up with the five pioneering libraries that signed on with the ever-growing Google Book Search?

• "Hello? Is It Me You’re Looking For?"
  

  What’s going on here is part of the same tired syndrome I have remarked upon before. The substantial and growing segment of the open-access contingent that does not consist of librarians unfortunately shares with academia at large an underinformed condescension toward librarianship and its practitioners.

• "Is Google Planning to Become a Publisher?"
  

  A new Outsell, Inc. report on Google’s technology reveals that Google can enter the publishing industry at any time with the "flip of a switch."

• "Guide to Open Data Licensing"
  

  Over the last month we’ve been working to produce a Guide to Open Data Licensing. . . . The guide is currently located on the wiki so that anyone can edit and update it:

• "ISP as Copyright Cop: Aussie ISP Kills All User Multimedia Files Nightly"
  

  Envision a world where your ISP does the copyright policing at the behest of the movie studios, television networks, and music labels, where no copyrighted content stays up on a user’s account for more than 24 hours. It sounds like a dream for Big Content, but it’s also a nightmare for customers of Australian ISP Exetel.

• "GPLv3 Upgrade Set for Friday"
  

  A controversial update to the GNU GPL (General Public License) is set to be released Friday by the Free Software Foundation, a representative of the organization said on Tuesday.

• "Libraries as Digital Publishers: A New Model for Scholarly Access to Information"
  

  This panel featured six speakers who are involved in a new project to digitize books and make them available both online and print-on-demand via Amazon.

• "Net Neutrality on Congress’s Fall Agenda?"
  

  Never mind that federal regulators discouraged so-called Net neutrality regulations in a report unveiled Wednesday. Democrats in Congress say they still believe it’s necessary to enact a new law to clamp down on the perceived threat posed by broadband operators that want to charge content owners extra fees for priority placement.

• "New and Revised RDA Documents"
  

  In order to keep up with the development of RDA: Resource Description and Access, you’ll want to take a look at one revised document and two new documents just issued this month by the Joint Steering Committee for Development of RDA (JSC).

• "New Speak v. Old Speak"
  

  It seems to be a monthly occurrence; an editorial appears in a major news outlet advocating stricter copyright legislation and enforcement. This week it was the San Francisco Chronicle, which published on Monday an opinion piece from two attorneys who have just launched a class action lawsuit against Google over videos posted in YouTube.

• "Microsoft Announces Next Generation of Windows Live"
  

  Tonight Microsoft is launching two more products into its suite of Windows Live branded consumer web apps—Windows Live Photo Gallery Beta and Windows Live Folders Beta.

• "MPAA Sues ‘Gguerilla Video’ Nets, Aka ‘Indexing Websites’"
  

  The Motion Picture Association of America filed lawsuits in LA federal court Tuesday against "guerilla video" indexer sites YouTVpc.com and Peekvid.com.

• " PALINET and LibLime Partner to Offer Open Source Options"
  

  They’re also just finalizing an agreement with LibLime, a leader in open source solutions for libraries, to offer discounted setup and support for the Koha Classic, and Koha Zoom ILS software.

• "Podcast: Net Neutrality in Practice: What Would It Look Like?"
  

  In this 48 minute podcast from the EDUCAUSE 2007 Policy Conference, we present a panel discussion, "Net Neutrality in Practice: What Would It Look Like?."

• "Privatunes 0.9 Does Not Anonymize iTunes Plus Files"
  

  Privatunes 0.9 overwrites the user’s name and address. Unfortunately, the Privatunes coders didn’t read our last post about iTunes tracking data—aside from the name and email address, there are other fields that Apple, or a litigant that subpoenas Apple, could use to identify the purchasers of iTunes Plus files, even if they’ve been run through Privatunes 0.9.

• "A Provost and Librarian Walk Into a Meeting. . ."
  

  During "The Art of Persuasion: Strategies for Effective Communication with Chief Academic Officers," organized by the Association of College and Research Libraries, the provosts and vice presidents for academic affairs on the panel shared a list of their do’s and don’ts when approaching new college officials in their positions.

• "Publishers Fight Back—2"
  

  I don’t seem to hear too much about the Automated Content Access Protocol (ACAP), which is being developed by a group of content producers under the aegis of the World Association of Newspapers but they released a press release about the progress of the initiative. To refresh, the ACAP is new standard to allow on-line content providers to automatically communicate information to search engine operators and others on how their content can be used.

• "Two-tiered Net Could Be Coming"
  

  Net providers (ISPs) may start charging some websites for faster access to customers, a report has predicted

• "University of California Libraries Collaborate with OCLC on Next Generation Melvyl® Catalog"
  

  The University of California Libraries are working in collaboration with OCLC Online Computer Library Center to pilot a Next Generation Melvyl Catalog supported by OCLC’s WorldCat Local system.

• "University of Washington Will Aid RIAA"
  

  Several readers let us know that the University of Washington has announced that it will pass on RIAA settlement offer letters to students identified, presumably by IP address, as suspected file sharers.

• "U.S. Lags behind Other Nations in Broadband Speeds"
  

  The U.S. is lagging behind other industrialized nations in the availability and use of high-speed broadband connections according to a report released today by the Washington-based Communications Workers of America.

• "U.S. Panel Gets Earful over Royalty Rate Increase for Webcasters"
  

  A House committee tried to forge a compromise between the parties for and against a planned royalty rate increase set by the Copyright Royalty Board (CRB).

• "Victim of Dropped RIAA Lawsuit Sues RIAA, Alleges Illegal Investigation of US Citizens"
  

  Tanya Andersen, who had been defending herself against a debilitating RIAA lawsuit for about two years before the RIAA dropped its case, has launched a bigtime offensive against her former accusers, filing suit today against Atlantic Recording Corporation, Priority Records, Capitol Records, UMG Recordings, and BMG Music, the RIAA, MediaSentry, and Settlement Support Center.

• "Vista DRM Precludes Virtualization?"
  

  The problem is that virtualization, by accident, appears to break most of Vista’s DRM and antipiracy schemes.

• "When ‘Digital Natives’ Go to the Library"
  

  College and university librarians got some unconventional advice Saturday: Play more video games.

• "WorldCat Lists"
  

  WorldCat has a new feature that lets you create lists of bibliographic items.

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.

• 40+ Tooltips Scripts With AJAX, JavaScript & CSS
• 80+ AJAX-Solutions for Professional Coding
• 90+ Online Photography Tools and Resources
• AJAX, DHTML and JavaScript Libraries
• Analytics Toolbox: 50+ Ways to Track Website Traffic
• Blogging Toolbox: 120+ Resources for Bloggers
• Cheat Sheet Round-Up: Ajax, CSS, LaTeX, Ruby . . .
• CMS Matrix
• List of CSS Tools
• Tutorials Round-Up: Ajax, CSS, PHP and More
• The Ultimate RSS Toolbox—120+ RSS Resources
• Web 2.0: Buzz-Monitoring and Tracking

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.