New & Noteworthy

New & Noteworthy

Article Type: New & Noteworthy From: Library Hi Tech News, Volume 31, Issue 3

Kuali OLE System Partners receive $882,000 Mellon Foundation grant

Indiana University, on behalf of Kuali OLE System Partners, has received a $882,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for the Kuali Open Library Environment (OLE), an open-source, community-based library software system created by a partnership of some of the nation’s leading university libraries.

Kuali OLE is a library management system designed by and for research and academic libraries to oversee and provide access to their growing collections. These include vast amounts of print and licensed digital content, as well as an ever-increasing amount of local, “born digital” content. The OLE project was launched in 2009 with a $2.3 million grant from the Mellon Foundation and matching funds from the Kuali OLE founding partners. With this latest grant, Indiana University (IU) has now received > $4 million from Mellon for the OLE project.

With this grant, the OLE team will work to expand the community of libraries partnering with the project, while also continuing to fine-tune software with an eye toward the version 2.0 release later this year. The University of Chicago and Lehigh University will be the first implementers of OLE in summer 2014.

“The Kuali Foundation has always had as a core principle that we could reduce costs and increase system flexibility by applying a community development model and open-source licensing to large administrative systems”, said Bruce Taggart, Vice Provost for Library and Technology Services at Lehigh University and current OLE Board Co-chair. “With Kuali OLE, we are opening this opportunity to all libraries”.

“Collaboration is an essential means for universities to achieve new economic efficiencies in higher education, and OLE accelerates the rich tradition of leading university libraries as they serve students and faculty in an increasingly digital age”, said Brad Wheeler, Indiana University’s Vice President for Information Technology and Chief Information Officer (CIO) and Chair of the Kuali Foundation Board. “This Mellon investment in libraries follows the success of multiple collaborative investments in the Kuali Foundation for big software systems among colleges and universities”.

Kuali OLE was founded by a partnership of research libraries, led by Indiana University, and now includes the Bloomsbury Library Management System consortium, Lehigh University, Duke University, North Carolina State University, University of Chicago, University of Florida, University of Maryland, University of Michigan, University of Pennsylvania and Villanova University. The partners have pooled resources and expertise with investments from the Mellon Foundation to develop this next-generation library system.

The Kuali Foundation is a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping educational and nonprofit institutions solve problems through approaches that benefit from collective action and coordination. In addition to Kuali OLE, software offered via Kuali includes Kuali Finance, Kuali Coeus for research administration, Kuali Student, Kuali People Management, Kuali Mobility and Kuali Ready. Kuali software is available, without fee, for anyone to use or modify under the Educational Community License.

Kuali open library environment: http://www.kuali.org/ole

HiPSTAS project at the University of Texas at Austin receives NEH grant

To increase access to recordings of significance to the humanities, Tanya Clement at the University of Texas School of Information in collaboration with David Tcheng and Loretta Auvil at the Illinois Informatics Institute at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign, have received $250,000 of funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities Preservation and Access Office for the HiPSTAS Research and Development with Repositories (HRDR) project. Support for the HRDR project will further the work of HiPSTAS, which is currently being funded by an NEH Institute for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities grant to develop and evaluate a computational system for librarians and archivists for discovering and cataloging sound collections.

The HRDR project will include three primary products:

1. a release of automated recognition with layered optimization (ARLO) that leverages machine learning and visualizations to augment the creation of descriptive metadata for use with a variety of repositories (such as a MySQL database, Fedora or CONTENTdm);

2. a Drupal ARLO module for Mukurtu, an open-source content management system, specifically designed for use by indigenous communities worldwide; and

3. a white paper that details best practices for automatically generating descriptive metadata for spoken word digital audio collections in the humanities.

HiPSTAS Web site: https://sites.google.com/site/nehhipstas/

HiPSTAS forum: https://groups.google.com/forum/forum/hipstas

Building a global digital library for mathematics research: NRC Committee report

Over the past two years, a US National Research Council (NRC) Committee, co-chaired by Clifford Lynch from the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) and Professor of Mathematics Ingrid Daubechies from Duke University, has been exploring the possibilities for building a global digital library to support mathematical research. The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation commissioned the study from the National Academies.

The Committee and many outside experts looked at how the literature and the scholarly knowledge base in one specific discipline should evolve to take advantage of the capabilities of the digital environment and to offer new ways to advance scholarship in that discipline. Substantial parts of the report will be of interest to those interested in scholarly communication in the digital age, not just those concerned with the mathematical sciences.

A preprint version of the report, entitled Developing a 21st Century Global Library for Mathematics Research, is now available for free download from the National Academies Press Web site, at: http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=18619

There is also a brief abstract of the report (under the “overview” tab) and a short PDF summary of the report’s major findings (under the “related resources” tab).

Open Access electronic theses and dissertation portals grow

The Open Access Theses and Dissertations (OATD) index recently announced that it crossed the 2 million record mark in March 2014. OATD’s goal is to index only graduate-level theses and dissertations published from around the world that are freely available to download and read.

The metadata records used in the index are harvested from participating institutions’ repositories, from regional or national Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETD) consortia or from a set of ETD catalog records provided by OCLC WorldCat. For the most part, records are harvested from sites using the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting. Records come from > 800 colleges, universities and research institutions.

In Europe, DART-Europe is a partnership of research libraries and library consortia working together to improve global access to European research theses. DART-Europe is endorsed by Ligue des Bibliothèques Européennes de Recherche, and it is the European Working Group of the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD).

The DART-Europe partners help to provide researchers with a single European portal for the discovery of ETDs, and they participate in advocacy to influence future European e-theses developments. DART-Europe offers partners a European networking forum on ETD issues and may provide the opportunity to submit collaborative funding applications to achieve DART-Europe’s vision for ETDs.

DART: http://www.dart-europe.eu/basic-search.php

OATD: http://oatd.org/

Networked digital library of theses and dissertations: http://www.ndltd.org/

ZENODO open digital repository service from CERN

In February 2014, 67 participants from 25 countries attended an OpenAIRE webinar on ZENODO with Lars Holm Nielsen from the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). ZENODO is a repository service that enables researchers, scientists, European Union projects and institutions to share and showcase multidisciplinary research results (data and publications) that are not part of existing institutional or subject-based repositories.

ZENODO enables researchers, scientists, projects and institutions to:

* easily share the long tail of small research results in a wide variety of formats including text, spreadsheets, audio, video and images across all fields of science;

* display and curate their research results and get credited by making the research results citable and integrate them into existing reporting lines to funding agencies; and

* easily access and reuse shared research results.

ZENODO assigns all publicly available uploads a digital object identifier to make uploads easily and uniquely citable.

View a recording of the webinar: http://www.instantpresenter.com/eifl/EB50DA818546

Download the slides (PDF): http://www.eifl.net/system/files/201402/zenodo_webinar_feb_20142.pdf

View the SlideShare slides: http://www.slideshare.net/EIFL/openaire-webinar-on-zenodo-31753964

ZENODO Web site: http://zenodo.org/

International Digital Curation Conference materials now available

Materials from the International Digital Curation Conference held in February 2014 in San Francisco are now available online. The opening keynote from Atul Butte, Chief of the Division of Systems Medicine at the Stanford University School of Medicine, takes a look at how new biomedical research practices are emerging in a world of shared data. In April 2012, Butte delivered a TEDMED talk describing his laboratory’s development of techniques using massive amount of publicly available biomedical research data to make new discoveries without running a wet laboratory and actually outsourcing experiments using assaydepot.com. The closing keynote by Clifford Lynch of CNI covers some reflections on the conference and the key topics that emerged, as well as the next round of emerging challenges for data curation.

The presentations can be found at: http://www.dcc.ac.uk/events/idcc14/programme-presentations, and there is a collection of videos at: http://www.dcc.ac.uk/events/idcc14/video-gallery

New report from Pew on the digital future: hopeful and worrying expert predictions

Asked to predict how technology will change over the next decade, hundreds of experts agree that trends now underway will make the Internet more important even as it becomes less visible in daily life. They believe it will become more “like electricity” and produce vastly greater human and machine connectivity that will change everything from personal interactions to the decisions made by governments around the world.

This report, part of a series titled “Digital Life in 2025”, is a compilation of imaginings by nearly 1,500 experts who responded to an online canvassing by the Pew Research Center in association with Elon University’s Imagining the Internet Center. The experts were asked an open-ended question about how technology will impact life by the year 2025. While most experts agreed on the trajectory of technological change that lies ahead, there was considerable disagreement about its ramifications. Most say by the year 2025 there will be:

* a global, immersive, invisible and ambient networked computing environment;

* a continued proliferation of smart sensors, cameras, software, databases and massive data centers in a world-spanning information fabric known as the Internet of things;

* portable/wearable/implantable technologies that will allow people to “augment reality”;

* disruption of business models established in the 20th century, most notably impacting finance, entertainment, publishers of all sorts and education; and

* tagging, databasing and intelligent analytical mapping of the physical and social realms.

Technology trends that are evident today are expected to continue, with both positive and negative effects on health, education, work, politics, economics and entertainment. Most say they believe the results of extreme connectivity will be primarily positive. However, when asked to describe the good and bad aspects of the future, many experts also clearly identified areas of concern, some of them extremely threatening.

“It is striking how much consensus there is among these experts on what will change, and equally striking how varied their answers are when they are asked how those changes will impact and influence users in good and bad ways”, noted Elon University Professor Janna Anderson, a primary author of the report. “This is the sixth ‘Future of the Internet’ survey we have conducted since 2004, and for the first time most people are seeing and vividly describing as many potential negatives as they are identifying positives. They worry about interpersonal ethics, surveillance, terror and crime and the inevitable backlash as governments and industry try to adjust”.

The predictions can be grouped into 15 themes about the digital future – eight hopeful, six worrisome and another as a neutral source of advice about choices that must be made.

Mostly hopeful 2025 scenarios identified by the experts:

* Information sharing over the Internet will be so effortlessly interwoven into daily life that it will become invisible, flowing like electricity, often through machine intermediaries.

* The spread of the Internet will enhance global connectivity, fostering more positive relationships among societies.

* The Internet of things, artificial intelligence and big data will make people more aware of their world and their own behavior.

* Augmented reality and wearable devices will be implemented to monitor and give quick feedback on daily life, especially in regard to personal health.

* Political awareness and action will be facilitated, and more peaceful change and more public uprisings like the Arab Spring will emerge.

* The spread of the “Ubernet” will diminish the meaning of borders, and new “nations” of those with shared interests may emerge online and exist beyond the capacity of current nation-states to control.

* The Internet will become “the Internets” as access, systems and principles are renegotiated.

* An Internet-enabled revolution in education will spread more opportunities, with less money spent on buildings and teachers.

The 2025 scenarios that raise concerns:

* Dangerous divides between haves and have-nots may expand, resulting in resentment and possible violence.

* Abuses and abusers will “evolve and scale”. Human nature is not changing; there is laziness, bullying, stalking, stupidity, pornography, dirty tricks and crime, and the offenders will have new capacity to make life miserable for others.

* Pressured by these changes, governments and corporations will try to assert power – and at times succeed – as they invoke security and cultural norms.

* People will continue – sometimes grudgingly – to make tradeoffs favoring convenience and perceived immediate gains over privacy, and privacy will be something only the upscale will enjoy.

* Humans and their current organizations may not respond quickly enough to challenges presented by complex networks.

* Most people are not yet noticing the profound changes today’s communications networks are already bringing about; these networks will be even more disruptive in the future.

The experts’ advice: make good choices today. Foresight and accurate predictions can make a difference; “The best way to predict the future is to invent it”.

“A modern adage is that change isn’t best measured when a small number of people try a new thing; the biggest disruption comes when adoption is ubiquitous”, said Lee Rainie of the Pew Research Center and a co-author of the report. “These experts are convinced that the spread of connectivity will yield changes that people will really appreciate and changes they might hate”.

The report about these predictions comes in the sixth canvassing of experts done by the Pew Research Center in association with the Imagining the Internet Center at Elon University. It is the first report generated out of the results of a Web-based survey fielded from late November 2013 to early January 2014. It gathered opinions on eight Internet issues from a select group of experts and the highly engaged Internet public.

Read/download the full report: http://www.pewinternet.org/files/2014/03/PIP_Report_Future_of_the_Internet_Predictions_031114.pdf

The full set of expert predictions, for-credit and anonymous can be found here: http://www.elon.edu/e-web/imagining/surveys/2014_survey/2025_Internet_Impact.xhtml

Integrated Digital Scholarship Ecosystem initiative launched in Canada

The Integrated Digital Scholarship Ecosystem (IDSE), an initiative to advance research in Canada by understanding the complexity of the digital landscape and by seeking opportunities to align key stakeholders and providers around a series of shared objectives, launched in February 2014. The ecosystem combines capabilities and infrastructure beyond content to seamlessly harness the work of diverse organizations that contribute to digital scholarship.

Under the leadership of the Canadian Research Knowledge Network (CRKN), the IDSE initiative brings together many key participants (e.g. CANARIE, Compute Canada, Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL), Canadian University Council of Chief Information Officers (CUCCIO), CRKN, the funding councils, Vice Presidents for Research (VPRs) and leading researchers) to focus on vision, policy, roles and actions with respect to research data and the overarching digital infrastructure (DI). There is much work occurring around DI, research data and the state of scholarly communications in Canada. The IDSE project hopes to make those activities and initiatives more visible and to highlight the interconnected and interdependent nature of the ecosystem. Collaboration and coordination are at the center of the project, and alignment is a key objective.

Objectives include the following:

* advance research capacity and innovation in Canada;

* create an integrated digital scholarship eco-system by coordinating and complementing a number of existing and emerging Canadian initiatives; and

* build on demonstrated success in leveraging investment to the Canadian academic community with an agile organizational structure and outside funding.

IDSE Web site: http://crkn.ca/about/strategic-planning/strategic-plan-2013-2016/integrated-digital-scholarship-eco-system

Launch of Open Access workflows for academic librarians (OAWAL)

Given the rapid expansion of open-access (OA) content both by commercial entities and academic institutions, Graham Stone, University of Huddersfield and Jill Emery, Portland State University, have created a wiki/blog encapsulating the major building blocks of OA management in the academic library setting.

The intention of OAWAL is that it will be an openly accessible wiki/blog site for librarians working on the management of OA content. The hope is that librarians can build on OAWAL to create context-sensitive workflows at their given institutions. The wiki is currently set up with six sections – advocacy, workflows, standards, library as publisher, creative commons and discovery – to serve as the building blocks for organizing the information.

Crowdsourcing is being used to gather feedback from the scholarly communication community currently working with OA management, to see if these concept overviews are of value and if there are others that should be included. Feedback can be submitted to the project via the comments sections of their blog or directly via email to Graham Stone (mailto:G.Stone@hud.ac.uk) or Jill Emery (mailto:Jill.Emery@gmail.com). Additionally, anyone who has existing workflows in place is encouraged to share them to help build a repository of OA management examples.

OAWAL Web site: https://library3.hud.ac.uk/blogs/oawal/

Navigating cultural heritage collections: PATHS project issues final report

Personalised Access to Cultural Heritage Spaces (PATHS) is funded by the European Commission FP7 under Digital Libraries and Digital Preservation program. The three-year project started on January 1, 2011, and the final project report summing up PATHS’ activities over the three years of the project is now available for download.

Significant amounts of cultural heritage material are now available through online digital library portals. However, this vast amount of cultural heritage material can also be overwhelming for many users who are provided with little or no guidance on how to find and interpret this information. The situation is very different in museums and galleries where items are organized thematically and users are guided through the collection.

The goal of the PATHS project is to create a system that acts as an interactive personalized tour guide through existing digital library collections. The system will offer suggestions about items to look at and assist in their interpretation. Navigation will be based around the metaphor of a path through the collection. A path can be based around any theme, for example artist and media (paintings by Picasso), historic periods (the Cold War), places (Venice) and famous people (Muhammad Ali). Users will be able to construct their own paths or follow predefined ones.

Throughout the three years of the project, PATHS has researched, developed and evaluated techniques to improve the presentation of digital library content to end users. The team has worked to develop understanding of user profiles, needs and requirements and to bring this user focus into the development cycle. Specific research objectives included the following:

* developing a system that enables users to navigate cultural heritage collections by using pathways, connections between objects and tools that visualize the topic content of the whole collection;

* advancing techniques to analyze and enrich the content metadata available for information retrieval and allowing relevant background information to be offered;

* working with users to identify their requirements and to evaluate the system to inform the development of a user-driven information retrieval system;

*developing tools to enable users to create pathways and to make connections between content items that are of interest; and

* establishing an exploitation plan for PATHS results.

One of the major achievements of the PATHS project has been to demonstrate the practical benefits and technical feasibility of enriching the metadata for cultural heritage collections as a means of improving content retrieval, supporting innovative discovery and exploitation. This addresses a critical issue for cultural heritage institutions across Europe, which hold vast quantities of quality content in digital libraries that are currently never found unless explicitly sought. Positive feedback from users involved in the evaluation of the PATHS prototypes confirmed that the project achieved its objective of developing tools that add value to digital libraries and enrich user experiences. The interactivity offered by PATHS tools and the potential for expert and non-expert users to use content to create narratives, tell stories and make personal collections has the potential to have real impact on the development of the next generation of cultural heritage services.

PATHS has worked with Europeana and Alinari 24 ORE in exploring the potential to enrich content metadata to demonstrate the potential to offer user recommendations and contextual information. The natural language processing techniques developed in PATHS have had a significant impact in the user interface by enabling novel browsing and improved information discovery. The knowledge developed through the project will be invaluable in the development of the next generation of portals.

PATHS Web site: http://www.paths-project.eu/eng

Download the PATHS final report: http://www.paths-project.eu/eng/Resources/D8.1-Final-report

Europeana 1914-1918 collection launches

In Berlin, Germany, in January, the Deputy Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and Media, Günter Winands, launched Europeana 1914-1918, an online resource that opens up hidden stories of the First World War and shows the tragedy that shaped Europe from different sides of the conflict.

Europeana 1914-1918 is the most important pan-European collection of original First World War source material. It is the result of three years of work by 20 European countries and will include the following:

* 400,000 rare documents digitized by ten state libraries and two other partners in Europe;

* 660 hours of unique film material digitized by audiovisual archives; and

* 90,000 personal papers and memorabilia of some 7,000 people involved in the war, held by their families and digitized at special events in 12 countries.

Hermann Parzinger, the President of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation to which the Berlin State Library belongs, said, “The launch of the Europeana 1914-1918 is a visionary start to the commemoration year ‘1914.Aufbruch.Weltbruch’ run by the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation and all its related institutions. The outcomes of the new Web site will be of long-lasting value. The worldwide access to this tremendous collection of highly relevant documents from the First World War offers a great basis for researchers and the general public to understand the events one hundred years ago”.

Europeana 1914-1918 is full of original source material – digitized photographs, maps, diaries, newspapers, letters, drawings and other content that can be used by teachers, historians, journalists, students and interest groups to create new resources. Already the site is providing content for a new exhibition called The First World War: Places of transition and a new multilingual educational site developed by the British Library in London.

Jill Cousins, Executive Director of Europeana, said, “It’s a unique collection of raw materials – rare, fragile and hardly seen before. We’re encouraging everyone – history teachers, Wikipedians, apps developers – to use it in new ways. Most of the content is under an open licence, because we want people to re-use it to help broaden everyone’s understanding of our European past”.

Read more about the launch: http://pro.europeana.eu/pressrelease/29jan

Europeana 1914-1918: http://www.europeana1914-1918.eu

Getty Images releases new embed feature

In March 2014, Getty Images announced a new embed feature that will allow people to access and share photos from its extensive library of images for non-commercial purposes. Their new embed feature makes it easy, legal and free for anybody to share their images on Web sites, blogs and social media platforms. All embedded images are automatically attributed and include the photographer’s name as well as the collection from which the image came. The image will link back to its page on the Getty Images Web site. For more information on how Getty Images may be used, please read their terms of use.

Embed: http://www.gettyimages.com/Creative/Frontdoor/embed

Read the terms of use: http://www.gettyimages.com/Corporate/Terms.aspx

OCLC WorldCat infrastructure delivering linked data previewed

In February 2014, OCLC technology evangelist Richard Wallis and colleague Ted Fons announced the preview of two upcoming significant announcements on the WorldCat data front:

1. the release of 194 Million Open Linked Data Bibliographic Work descriptions and

2. the WorldCat Linked Data Explorer interface.

This is the first production release of WorldCat infrastructure delivering linked data. The first step is to provide interconnected linked data views of the rich entities (works, people, organizations, concepts, places and events) captured in the shared collection of bibliographic records that makes up WorldCat. Mining those, > 311 million, records is not a simple task, even to just identify works. One of the key steps in this process is to identify where there exist connections between works and authoritative data hubs, such as The Virtual International Authority File (VIAF), Faceted Application of Subject Terminology (FAST), Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH), etc. In this preview release, it is some of those connections that are not yet in place.

Even though it was announced as a preview, the data is live, and most importantly, the work uniform resource identifiers (URIs) are persistent. It is also available under an open data license (ODC-BY).

In the next steps, once the next update to the WorldCat-linked data has been processed, OCLC expects to enhance the linking within the descriptions and provide links from the OCLC numbered manifestations. From then on, both WorldCat and others will start to use WorldCat Work URIs and their descriptions, as core stable foundations to build out a web of relationships between entities in the library domain.

Full announcement in the data liberate blog: http://dataliberate.com/2014/02/oclc-preview-194-million-open-bibliographic-work-descriptions/

Additional information from Roy Tennant in the OCLC research blog: http://hangingtogether.org/

NISO members approve new work item on codes for names of countries

National Information Standards Organization (NISO) voting members approved a new work item to develop a US profile of ISO 3166, Codes for the Representation of Names of Countries and their Subdivisions. A working group is being formed for the project. This proposed standard will transition the Geopolitical Entities, Names, and Codes (GENC) Standard, developed by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency in 2012, from a government standard to a US national standard. The GENC standard replaced Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) Publication 10-4, Standard for Countries, Dependencies, Areas of Special Sovereignty, and Their Principal Administrative Divisions, which was withdrawn by the National Institute of Standards and Technology in 2008.

“The current GENC standard is itself a ‘profile’ of the ISO 3166-1 standard”, explains Trent Palmer, Geographer with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, who submitted the proposal to NISO. “It incorporates some needs specific to the USA, such as national sovereignty recognition policy restrictions; the requirement to use names of geopolitical entities that have been approved by the USA Board on Geographic Names (USA Public Law 80-242), but which may not be recognized by the body that manages ISO 3166; and the need to identify and recognize geopolitical entities not identified in ISO 3166”.

“Because the GENC is a government standard, its current consensus body does not include any non-governmental voting members”, states Nettie Lagace, NISO’s Associate Director for Programs. “By moving this standard to NISO and making it an American National Standard, its approval consensus body and ongoing development and maintenance can include a wider base of stakeholders – industry, libraries beyond the Library of Congress, academia, and system vendors – many of whom are impacted by the standard. Adoption of such a profile will ease technical communications between industry, the federal government, and the international community in the transmission of country-related data”.

More background on the GENC standard and the need to differentiate some codes from ISO 3166 can be found in the new work item proposal on the NISO Web site at: http://tinyurl.com/pcq4o89

NISO recommended practice on demand-driven acquisition of monographs open for public comment

The NISO is seeking comments on the draft recommended practice Demand-Driven Acquisition of Monographs (NISO RP-20-201x). Launched in June 2012, the NISO Demand Driven Acquisition (DDA) Working Group was charged with developing a flexible model for DDA (also referred to as patron-driven acquisition) that works for publishers, vendors, aggregators and libraries. The draft Recommended Practice discusses and makes recommendations about key aspects of DDA, goals and objectives of a DDA program, choosing parameters of the program, profiling options, managing MARC records for DDA, removing materials from the consideration pool, assessment of the program, providing long-term access to un-owned content, consortial considerations for DDA and public library DDA.

“Libraries have embraced DDA because it has the potential to rebalance the collection away from possible use toward immediate need”, stated Michael Levine-Clark, Associate Dean for Scholarly Communication and Collections Services at the University of Denver Libraries and NISO DDA Working Group Co-chair. “It is important that, regardless of the model used, the program be sustainable for publishers, vendors, and libraries, that there is some free discovery without triggering purchase, and that discovery is integrated in some way with other tools in use by the library. This Recommended Practice addresses all those issues and more”.

“The guidelines in this draft Recommended Practice will allow libraries to develop DDA plans for both electronic and print books that meet differing local collecting and budgetary needs while also allowing consortial participation and cross-aggregator implementation”, explained Barbara Kawecki, Director of Sales, Western USA at YBP Library Services and NISO DDA Working Group Co-chair. “Although DDA has been adopted primarily by academic libraries, greater interest in and use of DDA by public libraries is expected in the future and these recommendations should work equally well for them”.

The draft recommended practice is open for public comment through April 24, 2014. To download the draft or submit online comments, visit the DDA Working Group webpage at: http://www.niso.org/workrooms/dda/