New & Noteworthy

Citation

(2005), "New & Noteworthy", Library Hi Tech News, Vol. 22 No. 10. https://doi.org/10.1108/lhtn.2005.23922jab.001

New & Noteworthy

Yahoo!Teams with Universities and Archives to Form Open Content Alliance

Yahoo! Inc. has teamed up with nine other contributors, including the Internet Archive, University of California, the University of Toronto, the National Archives (UK) and others, to collaborate on a project to help build a digital archive of global content for universal access. The Open Content Alliance (OCA) represents the collaborative efforts of a group of cultural, technology, nonprofit, and governmental organizations from around the world that will help build a permanent archive of multilingual digitized text and multimedia content. Contributors will donate collections, services, facilities, tools and/or funding to the OCA and must agree to a set of principles in order to participate. The OCA will be administered by the non-profit Internet Archive and governed by representatives of the contributing organizations.

OCA principles include (from the OCA web site):

1. 1.

   The OCA will encourage the greatest possible degree of access to and reuse of collections in the archive, while respecting the rights of content owners and contributors.

2. 2.

   Contributors will determine the terms and conditions under which their collections are distributed and how attribution should be made.

3. 3.

   The OCA need not be obligated to accept all content that is offered to it and may give preference to that which can be made widely accessible.

4. 4.

   The OCA will offer collection and item-level metadata of its hosted collections in a variety of formats.

5. 5.

   The OCA welcomes efforts to create and offer tools (including finding aids, catalogs, and indexes) that will enhance the usability of the materials in the archive.

6. 6.

   Copies of the OCA collections will reside in multiple archives internationally to ensure their long-term preservation and accessibility to all.

OCA web site: www.opencontentalliance.org

University of California press release: www.opencontentalliance.org/UC.pdf

European CommissionUnveils Plans for Digital Libraries

The European Commission has unveiled its strategy to make Europe's written and audiovisual heritage available on the internet. Turning Europe's historic and cultural heritage into digital content will make it usable for European citizens for their studies, work or leisure and will give innovators, artists and entrepreneurs the raw material that they need. The Commission proposes a concerted drive by EU Member States to digitize, preserve, and make this heritage available to all. It presents a first set of actions at European level and invites comments on a series of issues in an online consultation (deadline for replies 20 January 2006). The replies will feed into a proposal for a recommendation on digitization and digital preservation, to be presented in June 2006.

Making the resources in Europe's libraries and archives available on the Internet is not straightforward. On one hand, we are talking about very different materials books, film fragments, photographs, manuscripts, speeches and music. On the other, we have to select from very large volumes for example, 2.5 billion books and bound periodicals in European libraries and millions of hours of film and video in broadcasting archives.

The Commission communication sets out three key areas for action: digitization, online accessibility and digital preservation. At present, several initiatives exist in the Member States, but they are fragmented. To avoid creating systems that are mutually incompatible and duplicate work, the Commission proposes that Member States and major cultural institutions join EU efforts to make digital libraries a reality throughout Europe. Private involvement and public/private partnerships are a key element in achieving this goal.

Collaboration among Member States will be facilitated by an update of the Lund action plan (http://ftp.cordis.lu/pub/ist/docs/digicult/lund_action_plan-en.pdf), providing operational guidelines on digitization (2005), backed up by quantitative indicators to measure progress. The Commission will work together with cultural institutions, such as the national and deposit libraries, to ensure co-ordinated action at European level.

In addition, the Commission has made €36 million available for research on advanced access to European cultural heritage and digital preservation in the fifth call for proposals under the sixth research framework programme for R&D (2005). Under the seventh framework programme (FP7), the research on digitization, digital preservation and access to cultural content will be considerably stepped up, inter alia through a network of Centres of Competence in the fields of digitization and preservation (2007), and between 2005 and 2008, the eContentplus programme will contribute €60 million towards making national digital collections and services interoperable and facilitating multilingual access and use of cultural material.

i2010 Digital Libraries: http://europa.eu.int/information_society/activities/digital_libraries/index_en.htm

MergerTwo Major e-Learning Companies to Merge

Two leading providers of enterprise software and services to the education community, Blackboard Inc. and WebCT, Inc., announced in October a definitive agreement to merge. Under terms of the agreement, Blackboard will acquire WebCT. Currently, more than 3,700 higher education, K-12, corporate, government and commercial academic institutions utilize e-learning software offered by the two organizations.

Both companies' Boards of Directors have approved the merger. Subject to regulatory approval and other customary closing conditions, the transaction is expected to close late this year or in early 2006. The combined companies will operate under the Blackboard name and brand with corporate headquarters located in Washington, DC. Operations will continue in WebCT's facilities in Massachusetts and Canada. Michael Chasen will continue to serve as President and CEO.

Blackboard plans to enhance and support the existing products of both WebCT and Blackboard. New releases and ongoing software maintenance for WebCT and Blackboard will continue to be a key focus of the combined company. At the same time, Blackboard will leverage the Blackboard Building Blocks(R) architecture and WebCT's PowerLinks framework as the joint foundation for these enabling interfaces that will allow the existing product lines to interoperate with one another and with other applications. Over time, Blackboard will incorporate the best features and usability characteristics from the two product lines into a new, standards-based product set that will incorporate a scalable, architecture, the use of web services, ease of use, and flexible customization features.

To track information about the merger: www.blackboard.com/webct/

NSFNext-Generation Cybertools Awards go to Cornell and University of Chicago

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has announced the first awards in its Next-Generation Cybertools program – an initiative designed to extend the boundaries of social and behavioral research and lead to fundamental advances in cyberinfrastructure – will go to research teams at Cornell University and the University of Chicago.

The cybertools initiative will serve two purposes. First, it will help social and behavioral scientists push their research through the use of "cyberinfrastructure" – vast new webs of computers, networks and data resources that are becoming increasingly important to science as a whole, and to the activities of NSF in particular. Second, the scientists' efforts will guide the development of future computational tools that will advance cyberinfrastructure itself.

The two awards will amount to about $2 million each and will last for approximately two years:

• •

  The Cornell project, headed by sociologist Michael Macy, will attempt to create a novel laboratory for social-science research based on the vast Internet Archive. The 40 billion pages of the archive represent snapshots of the web that have been captured and stored every two months for nearly ten years – everything from corporate web pages to news groups and blogs. The archive is thus a remarkably rich and detailed record’of societal events and dynamics’over that time. The challenge is to access that record and make sense of it. To meet that challenge, the Cornell team plans to build an intelligent front-end for searching the archive, an effort that will require cutting edge research in natural language processing and machine learning algorithms, as well as next-generation technology in privacy preservation. These front-end cybertools, operating on Cornell's NSF-funded Petabyte Data Storage facility infrastructure, represent an entirely new scale and new methodology for social science research.

• •

  The Cornell group will develop, test, and refine their search tools through one specific research topic,’the diffusion of innovation. But they foresee many other uses of this ability to study social life in cyberspace, ranging from pure research to practical applications for business and government. Some notable examples include the identification of market trends, the rise and fall of demand, and the spread of consumer opinion. Likewise, community watchdog groups would be able to track the spread of "hate sites," and government agencies would be able to trace past and current uses of the web for organizing and coordinating terrorist attacks.

• •

  The Chicago project, headed by psychologist Bennett Bertenthal, will develop tools for collecting and analyzing human behavioral data on an unprecedented scale and level of sophistication. In their "SuperLab," the multidisciplinary team of researchers will be able to track human behavior in both individual and group settings, while collecting exquisitely detailed’data on the participants in real time. These data, in turn, will help the Chicago group address’research questions that far exceed the capacity of any laboratory today. How is social behavior correlated with the participants' neural activity, for example? How is it connected with their movements, postures, gestures, facial expressions and speech – or for that matter, their state of development, environmental context and cultural norms? Central to the Chicago group's effort will be the creation of a distributed data warehouse known as the Social Informatics Data Grid (SID Grid): a piece of cyberinfrastructure that will encourage data sharing and accelerate the development of standards for collecting and coding physiological and behavioral data. The SID Grid will be deployed as part of the larger TeraGrid, a suite of grid computing resources available to the scientific community at large.

The Chicago group will develop, test, and refine their data collection and analysis tools through research in three areas of inquiry: multimodal communication, neurobiology of social behavior, and cognitive and social neuroscience. But they foresee many other uses for the tools they will create. Most notably, their efforts will contribute to research on how human behavior can be automatically extracted, and even interpreted, from media like audio and video recordings. Such research may open the way towards mining the truly vast amounts of data on human behavior that are recorded every day.

OCKHAM InitiativeOffers New Services

The OCKHAM Initiative seeks to promote the development of digital libraries via collaboration between librarians and digital library researchers. By promoting simple, open approaches and standards for digital library tools, services, and content, the gap between digital library development and the adoption of digital library systems by the traditional library community will be bridged. Two new services being developed and offered by OCKHAM are the Ockham Alert and the Ockham Spell Web Service.

Ockham Alert is a sort of current awareness service. It demonstrates a standards-based method for collecting content, providing access to it, and disseminating it on a regular basis in the form of an alerting service. On a daily basis it harvests "new" OAI content from the primary National Science Foundation data repository, and everyday it deletes "old" content. An SRU (Search/Retrieve via URL) interface is then put on top of the underlying content allowing you to get output as HTML pages, RSS feeds, and/or email messages. The software and techniques in Ockham Alert could be applied to other OAI repositories or sets of "new" MARC records.

http://alert.ockham.org/

Given a word and an optional dictionary, Ockham Spell Web Service will return alternative spellings of the word in an XML stream. This XML stream is intended to be incorporated into search engines to suggest alternative queries (a la Google's Did You Mean? service). Developers are encouraged to explore the possibility of integrating the Spell Web Service into their applications. Three really simple clients have been created to demonstrate the service – one of them interfaces with the British Library catalogue – and can be tried out at the Ockham Spell home page.

http://spell.ockham.org/about/

OCKHAM initiative: www.ockham.org/

Data Fountains ProjectAwarded $1 Million Grant

The Institute for Museums and Library Services (IMLS) has awarded a grant to the University of California, Riverside, for the project entitled, "iVia Research on Automated Metadata Generation Services and Tools." Libraries wish to provide users with searchable databases, catalogs, indexes, and other tools to enable information discovery, but using human labor to create these resources is not feasible on a large scale in today's vast online environment. The University of California Riverside Library will conduct research aimed at producing better machine-based, automatically generated metadata to improve the search and retrieval of online content. This project will refine and augment services and accompanying software tools supported with previous IMLS funding in order to expand their automated and semi-automated textual data mining, data extraction, and metadata generation capabilities. The project will create free open source software and will address organizational and sustainability issues relating to metadata generation service(s) for digital libraries.

http://ivia.ucr.edu/

LC GrantGiven for Development of Electronic Archiving Service

The Library of Congress' National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP) announced in October that it is making a $3 million grant award for the development of Portico, a non-profit electronic archiving service being developed by Ithaka. Ithaka is a nonprofit organization with offices in New York City and Princeton, NJ, that provides a range of services to assist in the creation and development of promising new projects that benefit higher education.

This award from the Library of Congress will be used to support Portico's development of the archives' technical infrastructure and an economically sustainable business model for a continuing archiving service for scholarly resources published in electronic form, beginning with electronic scholarly journals. The library award will be matched dollar-for-dollar by Ithaka, which has also received funding for Portico from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and JSTOR, whose broad mission is to help the scholarly community take advantage of advances in information technology and whose activities include responsibility for digitizing, preserving and providing access to an extensive archives of research literature.

The award advances two fundamental goals of the library's digital preservation program, which was mandated by Congress: to develop a technical infrastructure to support long-term preservation of digital content and to foster the development of new business models for digital preservation services. Portico is developing a new community-based approach to solving the problem of preserving important electronic scholarly resources.

About Portico: www.portico.org

NDIIPP web site: www.digitalpreservation.gov/

Ithaka web site: http://www.ithaka.org

$17.3 MillionAwarded to Advance Innovation and Service at US Museums and Libraries

The Institute of Museum and Library Services, the primary source of federal funds for US museums and libraries, announced in September the recipients of its prestigious National Leadership Grants for 2005. More than $17 million ($17,349,361) is being awarded to 41 museums and libraries throughout the country. The recipients will match the awards with an additional $15,522,757.

There are three categories of National Leadership Grants for both museums and libraries: advancing learning opportunities, building digital resources, and research and development. Collaborations among libraries, museums and other organizations are strongly encouraged.

Grant projects include, among others, a collaboration led by the Oklahoma Department of Libraries that will produce a series of educational workshops as part of the state's centennial celebration; the Missouri Botanical Garden's creation of public resource computing application that digitizes and automatically indexes vast amounts of scientific literature; the Civil Rights Digital Library Initiative, a partnership led by the University of Georgia that will enhance understanding of the civil rights movement; and Syracuse University's expansion of its successful program to promote information literacy in high school and college.

Institute of Museum and Library Services: www.imls.gov">www.imls.gov">www.imls.gov

List of Grant Awardees and Project Descriptions: www.imls.gov/resultsasp?keyword=&inst=&city=&state=&year=10&program=gt_1026,%20gt_1024,%20gt_1028,%20gt_1025,%20gt_1006,%20gt_1027description=on&sort=year

Wikibooks

Wikibooks is a collection of open content textbooks, manuals, and other texts, with supporting book-based texts that are being collaboratively written. The Wikibooks site is a wiki, meaning that anyone can edit any book module by clicking on the "edit this page" link that appears in every Wikibooks module. The project was started on July’10, 2003, and there are over 11,400 modules currently being worked on.

Wikibooks is a collaborative project and its founders and contributors have a common goal: developing free, open content textbooks, manuals and other texts. All of the site's content is covered by the GNU Free Documentation License. Contributions remain the intellectual property of their creators, while the copyleft licensing ensures that the content will always remain freely distributable and reproducible.

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Main_Page

ALPSPReleases New Study on Open Access Publishing

The Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP) has announced the release of a substantial research study into the quickly evolving landscape of Open Access publishing. A freely available pdf version of the full report is available on their website together with the overview section (the first 32 pages of the report) and a press release. The priced printed version of the report (which is 128 pages long) can also be ordered online. The study "The facts about open access: a study of the financial and non-financial effects of alternative business models for scholarly journals" was sponsored by ALPSP with the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and HighWire Press, with additional data from the Association of American Medical Colleges. The research was conducted by the independent consultants Kaufman-Wills Group LLC. The objective of the study was to determine the impact of open access on scholarly journals' financial and non-financial factors and to establish a substantial body of data about different forms of Open Access publishing, and a baseline of comparison with traditional subscription publishing.

In the first phase of the study, the researchers surveyed 495 journals from four groups: ALPSP member journals (128), AAMC member journals (34), a subset of journals hosted by HW (85) and 248 journals from the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). In the second phase of the study in-depth interviews were conducted with 22 scholarly journal publishers of all types and sizes, representing more than 4,000 journals. The survey covered the full spectrum of business models being used in scholarly publishing from traditional access provided primarily via subscriptions (subscription access) through Delayed Open Access to Optional (author-side payment) and Full Open Access.

PDF version of report: www.alpsp.org/publications/FAOAcomplete.pdf

ALPSP web site: www.alpsp.org

CREEProject Reports and Results Available

The Contextual Resource Evaluation Environment (CREE) project has announced the availability of the full collection of reports and results from the work undertaken by the project. The CREE project was funded by JISC to explore the user requirements for the presentation of internet search tools within institutional environments (e.g. a local web environment, a VLE/course management system or an institutional portal). Technical investigation of the JSR 168 and WSRP portlet standards was also carried out to examine their potential for enabling such presentation.

All reports and results are available through the project website together with a range of presentations and publications describing the work. The reports newly released are as follows:

• •

  Summary overview of the project, its work and conclusions.

• •

  User testing report and results spreadsheet: over 70 people across three institutions took part in a series of user testing sessions with three fully functional interactive demonstrators, based on one of the institutional environments listed above. The results provide feedback on the use of search tools within each of these environments (generally very positive) as well as providing valuable comments on the role of searching to back up findings from earlier reports on the survey and focus groups carried out. Screenshots of the demonstrators are also available.

• •

  Final reports on the investigation of JSR 168 and WSRP portlet standards: The final reports from the technical partners in the CREE project capture much of the experience gained from the adaptation of existing search tools for use within a portlet, as well as provide tips and leads for others wishing to explore these technologies. An article in the next issue of Ariadne will provide an overview of the technical development to complement the D-Lib article.

• •

  Literature review: a wide-ranging literature review has informed the work of the project throughout its lifetime. It addresses the functional aspects of searching as well many of the technologies behind searching.

• •

  Communications and collaboration tools feasibility study: to complement the investigation of the presentation of search tools within institutional environments, a survey and series of interviews were carried out to investigate user requirements for the presentation of communication and collaboration tools within the same environments and the capability of JSR 168 and WSRP to enable this, respectively.

• •

  The final report of the project.

CREE web site: www.hull.ac.uk/esig/cree/

Managing and Supporting Long-Lived Data CollectionsNew Report from NSB

The National Science Board (NSB) has released a new report on managing and supporting long-lived digital collections entitled "Long-lived data collections: enabling research and education in the 21st century". The report provides the findings and recommendations that arose from an analysis of the policy issues relevant to long-lived digital data collections under taken by the NSB Long-lived Data Collections Task Force. For purposes of the report, the definition of "long-lived" is that provided in the Open Archival Information Systems (OAIS) standard a period of time long enough for there to be concern about the impacts of changing technology.

The Task Force held two workshops to gather the opinions of relevant communities NSF and other Federal agencies and the NSF grantee community. Those workshops shaped the board's analysis of the issues. The outcomes of the workshops included (excerpted from the report):

• •

  Long-lived digital data collections are powerful catalysts for progress and for democratization of science and education. Proper stewardship of research requires effective policy to maximize their potential.

• •

  The need for digital collections is increasing rapidly, driven by the exponential increase in the volume of digital information. The number of different collections supported by the NSF is also increasing rapidly. There is a need to rationalize action and investment in the communities and in the NSF.

• •

  The NSB and the NSF are uniquely positioned to take leadership roles in developing a comprehensive strategy for long-lived digital data collections and translating this strategy into a consistent policy framework to govern such collections.

• •

  Policies and strategies that are developed to facilitate the management, preservation, and sharing of digital data will have to fully embrace the essential heterogeneity in technical, scientific, and other features found across the spectrum of digital data collections.

Report: www.nsf.gov/pubs/2005/nsb0540/start.jsp

PRIMOPeer-Reviewed Instructional Material Online

The Emerging Technologies in Instruction Committee of the ACRL Instruction Section invites submissions of online information literacy tutorials, virtual tours, or other online library instruction projects for review and possible inclusion in PRIMO (Peer-Reviewed Instructional Materials Online). PRIMO is the new name for the Internet Education Project. This name emphasizes both the peer-reviewed nature of the project and the first-rate instruction models found in the project database. It also reflects how the project has evolved from teaching about the internet to teaching that uses the internet as a medium. Site submissions are accepted continually, but are reviewed for possible inclusion twice a year. The PRIMO web site features the PRIMO database of instruction resources as well as a site of month in-depth profile of a project and selection criteria and process information.

PRIMO web site: www.ala.org/ala/acrlbucket/is/iscommittees/webpages/emergingtech/primo/index.htm

i-ConferenceBridging Disciplines to Confront Grand Challenges

More than 250 deans, faculty members and students representing 18 i-schools from across the country converged at the Penn State University on September 28-30, 2005, for the First i-Conference of the i-School Community. Conferees addressed five conference objectives: to celebrate the transformational power of the i-School Community; to develop the essentials of the information field; to address the grand challenges for research and curricula; to explore i-School academic challenges and opportunities; and to discuss the i-School identity: Who Are We and What Makes Us Unique? Conference papers and session notes are available at the conference web site at: http://iconference.ist.psu.edu/

IWAW055th International Web Archiving Workshop (IWAW05) Papers Now Available

The 5th International Web Archiving Workshop (IWAW05) was held in conjunction with the 8th European Conference on Research and Advanced Technologies for Digital Libraries on September 22-23, 2005, in Vienna, Austria. The workshop was designed to provide a cross domain overview on active research and practice in all domains concerned with the acquisition, maintenance and preservation of digital objects for long-term access, with a particular focus on web archiving and studies on effective usage of this type of archives.

It is also intended to provide a forum for interaction among librarians, archivists, academic and industrial researchers interested in establishing effective methods and developing improved solutions for data acquisition, ingest, and accessibility maintenance.

Papers and presentation materials are now available at: www.iwaw.net/05/

iPRESPreservation of Digital Objects Conference Proceedings Available

The live recordings of the presentations at the International Conference on Preservation of Digital Objects (iPRES) held in September 2005 in Gottingen, Germany, as well as the respective pdf documents are now online and can be viewed at the conference website. Windows Media Player version 9 or higher is required to view the video streams.

Conference web site: rdd.sub.uni-goettingen.de/conferences/ipres/programme