DigitalKoans

Walt Crawford has published Public Library Blogs: 252 Examples.

Here's an excerpt from his posting about the book:

Public Library Blogs: 252 Examples is now available at Cites & Insights Books. Price: $29.50 plus shipping and handling.
The 299-page 6×9 trade paperback (x+289 pages) features descriptions and sample posts for a wide range of blogs from 196 public libraries of all sizes, in the United States, Canada, Australia, Ireland and New Zealand.

If your library is considering a blog, this book should help you find blogs from comparable libraries to consider as examples. If your library has a blog and is considering more (or revising the ones you have), this book should help you find interesting examples–the public library blogging community is remarkably diverse!

For now, Public Library Blogs is only available from the Cites & Insights Books store at Lulu.com, printed on 60lb. cream book stock. In a few days, a version on bright white paper and with an ISBN will be available from CreateSpace–and, a couple of weeks after that, from Amazon.com

KRUU has a series of digital audio interviews with copyright and other activists in the "open" movement. Here's a sample:

• Cory Doctorow, Sci-Fi Author, Copyright Reform Activist
• David Lipman, National Institutes of Health
• John Wilbanks, Science Commons
• Mark Patterson, Virginia Barbour, Public Library of Science
• Mike Linksvayer, CTO CreativeCommons.org
• Melissa Hagemann, Open Society Institute
• Mike Linksvayer, Vice President, CreativeCommons.org
• Prayas Abhinav, Creative Commons India
• Richard Poynder
• Ronaldo Lemos, Lead of CreativeCommons Brazil
• Siva Vaidhyanathan, Author and Historian
• Vera Franz, OSI
• Wendy Seltzer, OpenLaw.org

What was new and interesting during the week of 8/20/07?

Copyright

• "Behind the Scenes at the Copyright Determinator"
• "Big Webcasters Agree to Royalty Cap Deal, DRM to Be 'Discussed' Later"
• "Foundation on which RIAA Builds Cases in Danger of Being Undermined"
• "Microsoft: We're Not Google, and We're Proud of It"
• "More Authors, Less Copyright"
• "Online CD Seller Fights Universal's Bogus Infringement Allegations"
• "RIAA Targets 503 New Students at 58 Colleges & Universities; Continues to Avoid Tangling with Harvard"
• "U of Tennessee Student Says RIAA Subpoena Violates Federal Privacy Law"

Digital Rights Management

• "Are Digital Music Watermarks a Blessing or a Curse?"
• "Is It a DMCA Violation to Tell People to Delete Some Files from Their Hard Drive?"
• "New DRM Scheme Will Let Consumers Stream Cable TV over Home Networks"
• "Wal-Mart Offers DRM-Free Music Downloads"
• "Where Can You Get DRM-Free Tracks?"

Digital Technology

• "Google Exec Touts Universal Search Model"
• "Japanese Researchers Aim to Replace the Internet"
• "Microsoft Uses Silverlight for Experimental Search Site"
• "A New Competitor to Second Life"
• "Paramount to Drop Blu-Ray HD DVDs"
• "The Road to WiMAX"

Other

• "Oklahoma Library Meets the BOSS"
• "I-Schools Form iCaucus to Brand the Field"
• "WHOIS Privacy Reform Reaches Dead End"

Scholarly Communication

• "And while I’m Being Cranky"
• "Anthropological Growing Pains"
• "AnthroSource Moves to Wiley-Blackwell"
• "Bentham Open Access "
• "Dispelling Five Myths about E-books "
• "Electronic Books with Musty Book Smell Launched"
• "The Google Exchange"
• "JASIS Pushing to Liberalize Author Agreements"
• "Library Literature: Academic and Generally Useless?"
• "Making Digital Books into Page Turners "
• "The Metrics of Social Scholarship"
• "Publishers Launch an Anti-OA Lobbying Organization"
• "Publishing and Values"
• "SciVee Launch = Scientific Publication and Video Presentation"
• "Washington U Reaffirms Its BMC Membership"

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:

• Best Practice and Guidelines for Managing Digital Information
• Copyright Policy
• University Digital Conservancy Preservation Policy
• University Digital Conservancy Services

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 of 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.