New & Noteworthy

Citation

Hanson, H. and Stewart-Marshall, Z. (2015), "New & Noteworthy", Library Hi Tech News, Vol. 32 No. 7. https://doi.org/10.1108/LHTN-08-2015-0052

New & Noteworthy

Article Type: New & Noteworthy From: Library Hi Tech News, Volume 32, Issue 7

OldNYC: Developer maps New York public library photo archives

OldNYC is a website that provides an alternative way of browsing the New York Public Library’s (NYPL) incredible Photographic Views of New York City, 1870s-1970s collection. OldNYC’s goal is to help New Yorkers discover the history behind the places they see every day.

The images all come from the New York Public Library’s Milstein Collection. While many photographers contributed to the collection, the majority of its images are the work of Percy Loomis Sperr who documented changes to the city from the late 1920s to the early 1940s.

The Library retains the copyright for many of these images. The creators of OldNYC did not collect or digitize any of these images – credit for that massive undertaking belongs entirely to the Library.

OldNYC was built by software engineer Dan Vanderkam (@danvdk on Twitter) and NYPL Labs, an interdisciplinary team working to reformat and reposition the Library’s knowledge for the Internet age. The creators of the site associated latitudes and longitudes to the images in the Milstein collection. This process is known as geocoding. Doing this allows the images to be placed at points on a map, which enables new ways of exploring this collection.

They also detected individual photos on the original Milstein scans and extracted them. This reduced the appearance of large borders or multiple small images. The reverse side of the photographs often contains typewritten text, and this had to be processed with optical character recognition (OCR) to be incorporated into OldNYC. This was done using a custom-trained Ocropus model. Since the launch of OldNYC in May, users of the site have left comments and fixed thousands of typos in the OCR’s descriptions.

The collection, Photographic Views of New York City, 1870s-1970s, has over 80,000 original photographs (and their captioned versos) of New York City from around the 1870s to 1970, and it is the most outstanding resource in the New York Public Library’s Irma and Paul Milstein Division of USA History, Local History and Genealogy.

The New York City photograph collection began in the 1920s, not long after the opening of the new central library at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street. The goal was to document the changing face of New York City, with a particular emphasis on new building construction, and on the structures torn down and replaced. The method is clear in this 1937 progress report by librarian Sylvester L. Vigilante on obtaining photographs: “The old Union League Building and site was taken care of and the erection of the new building is being covered […]. Through the newspapers and tips from interested people, we get a line on demolitions, events and street changes”.

Historical photographs complemented contemporary images, as the collection continued to grow systematically through commissioned photographs, purchases, and gifts into the early 1970s. The original photographs in the collection are mounted on heavy paper with identifying address information. Extensive captions are provided on the reverse.

Among the well-known photographers represented are Berenice Abbott, Alexander Alland, A. Tennyson Beals and his wife Jessie Tarbox Beals, Ewing Galloway, Samuel H. Gottscho, Fay Sturtevant Lincoln and Irving Underhill, as well as photo agencies such as Brown Brothers, Culver Service, International Photos, Underwood and Underwood, and Wurtz Brothers. In addition, a Staten Island-based commercial photographer, Percy Loomis Sperr (1890-1964), working under contract and directed by Library staff, produced nearly 30,000 of the collection’s photographs to document changes in the City from the late 1920s to the early 1940s.

OldNYC: http://www.oldnyc.org/

More details about extracting the photos and processing the caption text can be found on Dan Vanderkam’s blog at: http://www.danvk.org/2015/06/04/launched-oldnyc.html

Source code for Old NYC is on github: https://github.com/danvk/oldnyc

Managing public video walls in an academic library: project briefing from CNI

Video walls in public spaces are an exciting development for academic libraries and digital scholarship centres. This visually impressive technology empowers the library to communicate, inspire and engage our library users in exciting new ways. Managing these video walls is another matter. This emerging opportunity brings a range of challenges requiring a new approach to engagement, staffing, planning and operating budgets. Video walls are permanent installations requiring permanent attention and ongoing content refreshment. These kinds of library installations require new roles and infrastructure to acquire, curate, develop, store and deliver multiple types of content, from static high-resolution imagery to interactive applications.

“Managing Public Video Walls in an Academic Library”, a project briefing session from Coalition for Networked Information’s (CNI) 2015 spring meeting, presents an overview of video walls, and articulates programmatic objectives, successes, lessons learned, future plans and recommendations for other institutions who may consider installing a video wall as well. Shawna Sadler (Deakin University), Mike Nutt (North Carolina State University) and Renee Reaume (University of Calgary) discuss the new roles and infrastructure needed for library installations of this type, and they describe some of the imaginative and interactive applications of this emerging resource.

This project briefing is now available online from CNI’s video channels on YouTube and Vimeo.

YouTube: https://youtu.be/9mlLpkg6KEM

Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/channels/cni/126282770

North Carolina State University Libraries video walls: http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/video-walls

Deakin University Library’s video walls: https://blogs.deakin.edu.au/library-digital-innovations/the-verge/

Using emulation for the provision of multimedia objects (EMiL)

Continuous technological change is threatening the long-term preservation of the content and functionality of digital objects for scientists and researchers. For complex interactive multimedia objects (e.g. multimedia objects, digital works of art, scientific simulations) and the related exacting user demands for authentic provision, the emulation process is much more suitable than migration as a preservation and provision strategy. A great deal of research has already been carried out on migration, and it is included as a separate module by a number of preservation repositories, whereas only limited practical experience has been gained in using emulation to provide digital archival objects to users as part of the services of memory institutions.

The German National Library, the Bavarian State Library, the University of Freiburg and the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design launched the “Emulation of Multimedia objects in Libraries (EMiL)” project in July 2014. EMiL is sponsored by the German Research Foundation and will run for two years.

The main aim of the project is to evaluate the proposals and components developed in previous emulation research projects, to assess their practicability and to optimise them with in-house developments for the purpose of creating a system which is perfectly adapted to the needs of the memory institutions and their users. Standardised interfaces to research and long-term preservation systems plus a high degree of user-friendliness should help to ensure that the resulting system can be re-used by interested institutions.

EMiL aims to create a functioning, productive and reusable prototype of a provision system for older multimedia objects. Concepts and components in the field of emulation which were developed in previous research projects will be evaluated in regard to their suitability for daily use. Moreover, results of previous projects will be optimized using EMiL developments so that a system can be established which perfectly meets the needs of users.

The prototype will consist of a framework which manages and regulates emulators, and automatically delivers digital archive objects to users in a suitable original environment. Additional components will be included from a software archive. In this way, it should be possible to integrate the provision system in existing information technology infrastructures (in particular, in catalogues and digital preservation systems), allowing users to move directly from the catalogue system to viewing and using the digital objects.

The system established by EMiL will provide a reusable solution for interested institutions which offers a high degree of usability and automation, standardised interfaces to catalogues and digital preservation services.

More information about the project (in English): http://www.dnb.de/EN/Wir/Projekte/Laufend/emulationMultimediaObjekte.html and (in German): http://www.multimedia-emulation.de/

Guide on the side version 1.0-beta4 released

The University of Arizona Libraries have announced the release of Guide on the Side 1.0-beta4. Guide on the Side (GotS) is an open-source, Web-based tool for making interactive tutorials.

For this release, the GotS development team focused on addressing “frame busting” by allowing creatorsto place GotS into popup mode when they find that the right frame starting URL is not working. The team also updated the placement of the navigation arrows (they are now closer to the text), and has made it so that users are able to click on images that are embedded in a tutorial to make them larger. Creators can now also delete quizzes from tutorials. A full list of changes and upgrade notes are available for more information.

Those installing for the first time may want to start on the GotS website: http://code.library.arizona.edu/gots

Full list of v. 1.0-beta4 changes: https://github.com/ualibraries/Guide-on-the-Side/blob/1.0-beta4/RELEASE.md

Upgrade notes: https://github.com/ualibraries/Guide-on-the-Side/blob/1.0-beta4/UPGRADE.md

LibraryBox v2.1 in public beta release

LibraryBox is an open-source, portable digital file distribution tool based on inexpensive hardware that enables delivery of educational, health care and other vital information to individuals off the grid. LibraryBox is a digital distribution tool for education, libraries, health care and emergency response. Anywhere there is a lack of open Internet access, LibraryBox can bridge the gap of information delivery.

The recent v2.1 Public Beta release of the LibraryBox code brings with it several important updates:

• Cascading style sheet (CSS)-styled directory listings that are fully responsive;

• The addition of the Mozilla L10n translation engine that allows for multi-language support for the LibraryBox interface. In the initial v2.1 release, 10 languages are supported: German, English, French, Spanish, Croatian, Swedish, Italian, Korean, Norwegian and Kiswahili;

• LibraryBox now has a built in miniDLNA server for media playback on Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA) clients;

• There is now an automated updater built-in to LibraryBox that will allow for future updates to be a matter of copying a file onto the USB key and rebooting […] no SSH necessary; and

• Even more hardware choices that you can use to build your own.

The v2.1 release will become official after a few weeks of testing the Public Beta release. Once the v2.1 becomes official, the v2.0 will remain available for download, but all sales will move over to the v2.1 only and the plan is to change from the MR3020 to the MR3040 as the supported “for sale” hardware.

This release is currently a Public Beta, which means that there may still be issues unresolved in the code as is. Do not use Beta code releases for mission-critical hardware. If you choose to update your existing LibraryBox to this Public Beta release be aware that while it has been tested extensively, it is possible that an issue during the upgrade could render your hardware difficult or impossible to recover.

Any issues with the v2.1 Public Beta code release that need to be fixed can be reported on the Github repository.

Build a LibraryBox v.2.1 Public Beta: http://librarybox.us/buildingv2.1.php

LibraryBox on Github: https://github.com/LibraryBox-Dev

Libraries are leaders, innovators in the digital revolution: new American libraries supplement

Moving ahead is the overarching theme of the new digital supplement Digital Futures from American Libraries magazine. This report from the American Library Association (ALA) features articles both on how libraries are innovating and leading, as well as paths ahead for taking the initiative.

“I’m so pleased to see story after story about librarians being proactive related to the opportunities and challenges presented by the digital revolution”, said ALA President Courtney Young.

“For example, the National Digital Platform proposed by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) will accelerate the necessary trend of increased sharing of technology tools and services across libraries, as discussed in an article by Maura Marx, IMLS acting director, and Trevor Owens, IMLS senior program officer”.

In the report, two articles focus on particular innovative projects. In “Click, Click, Read”, Micah May, director of business development at New York Public Library (NYPL), and James English, Library Simplified product owner at NYPL, tell the story of Library Simplified, a service under development that may ease ebook access for library users. Larra Clark, deputy director of ALA’s Office for Information Technology Policy (OITP), describes some of the digital innovation project ideas recently funded by the Knight Foundation in “Empowering Libraries to Innovate”.

A trio of articles hones in on future directions for libraries and ebooks. In “Building Out the Book Niches”, Shannon Okey, publisher of Cooperative Press, makes the case for heightened attention to smaller publishers, while Tim McCall, former vice president at Penguin Group USA, posit that the education market will be the next big disruption for libraries and ebooks in “Digital Library 2.0”. In “ALA’s DCWG, Ebooks and Directions”, Carolyn Anthony, director, Skokie (Ill.) Public Library, brings together these threads and other ALA priority directions.

“Being on offense includes both taking action and planning for future action”, said Alan S. Inouye, guest editor of the supplement and director of ALA OITP. “Thus, the final four articles articulate areas in which the library community has a particular opportunity and responsibility to emphasize in the near-term”. James G. Neal, university librarian emeritus at Columbia University, warns us that “we are in trouble” regarding born-digital materials and digital preservation in his article “Preserving the Born-Digital Record”. There are some specific actions that we can take to improve our management of digital privacy in libraries and upgrade the user experience, explains Eric Hellman, President of Gluejar, in “Toward the Post-Privacy Library?”

Sari Feldman, executive director of the Cuyahoga County Public Library (CCPL) and ALA president-elect, and Hallie Rich, director of communications and external relations at CCPL, urge us to reconsider how we can recruit the best and brightest into librarianship and what skills these students must possess in “Transforming the Library Profession”. Finally, Vailey Oehlke, director of the Multnomah County (Ore.) Library and president-elect of the Public Library Association and Alan S. Inouye conclude the supplement with “A Policy Revolution for Digital Content”, which lays out an overall framework for how the library community needs to be ever-more proactive in its national policy advocacy.

Digital Futures is the fifth American Libraries magazine supplement on ebooks and digital content. For more information about the ALA’s digital content activities, visit the American Libraries E-content blog.

Read Digital Futures: http://edition.pagesuite-professional.co.uk/Launch.aspx?EID=571167d0-6eca-4989-a66f-2b2bf2c40c97

American Libraries E-content blog: http://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/blogs/e-content/

New digital portal provides real-time visualization of reach of Kentucky research

Western Kentucky University (WKU) and the University of Kentucky have announced the launch of Kentucky Research Commons, a new digital portal that presents and provides access to the breadth and depth of research being conducted in the Commonwealth of Kentucky.

The portal features a real-time readership map that visualizes when and where content is being downloaded. The site illuminates the global reach and significance of the outstanding research from Kentucky institutions.

“It is exhilarating to see the scholarly endeavors in the Commonwealth hold broad appeal around the world. This new portal certainly helps researchers and the academic communities develop a clear picture of the reach and impact of their work”, said Adrian Ho, Director of Digital Scholarship at University of Kentucky Libraries.

The Kentucky Research Commons hosts a wealth of valuable scholarly materials, ranging from faculty publications, to online peer-reviewed journals, to conferences and events, to electronic theses and dissertations and to special archival collections. Users can browse content by institution, discipline or author. They can also type in search terms for easy discovery.

Hosted by bepress on its Digital Commons platform, the site aggregates contents from the institutional repositories of a growing number of Kentucky institutions, including Asbury Theological Seminary, Bellarmine University, Eastern Kentucky University, University of Kentucky, University of Louisville and WKU. Institutional repositories are playing an increasingly significant role in the way universities share, manage and preserve their scholarly outputs.

Connie Foster, Dean of Libraries at WKU, believes there is strength in numbers, stating, “The Kentucky Research Commons brings another dimension to open access, collaboration, and the intellectual output of universities in the Commonwealth through a shared research portal. Faculty can showcase their research; students can explore research and creative efforts across Kentucky; legislators, funding bodies, and all citizens of the Commonwealth and beyond can visualize the impact of educational outcomes in one place. The Readership Map highlights in real time the use of the portal and dramatically visualizes international reach. While each institution shown in this portal realizes individual growth and impact, the collective strength cannot go unnoticed in this endeavour. The continued commitment by bepress to create new and enhanced ways to support its user community is unparalleled”.

For more about Kentucky Research Commons: http://kentucky.researchcommons.us/

Brewster Kahle on universal access to modern materials: video from CNI

The Internet Archive (IA), an independent non-profit, provides access to digital materials (including books, websites, music, video, TV and software) on the Internet. The Internet Archive started by archiving the Web, but now works with hundreds of librarians and partners to create digital collections both centralized and distributed. The challenges of presenting modern materials yield different solutions for each media type.

In this plenary talk from the Coalition for Networked Information’s (CNI) 2015 spring meeting, digital library pioneer and IA founder Brewster Kahle describes the particular challenge of providing open access to modern materials, particularly in light of repeated admonishments by legal advisors that, in doing so, “bad things would happen”. Kahle shares his vision of how cooperation, shared technology and risk can result in many winners in the digital library world.

“Providing Universal Access to Modern Materials – and Living to Tell the Tale” is now available online from CNI’s video channels on YouTube and Vimeo.

YouTube: https://youtu.be/-bW0v2F9Rgc

Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/125044497

Digital cultural heritage in teaching and learning; metadata quality: two new reports from Europeana

A new document from Europeana proposes a set of recommendations for the use of digital cultural heritage in education and learning.

Europeana for Education and Learning concerns all forms and levels of education and learning, from formal classroom teaching in schools and universities to adult education and informal learning in, for instance, the context of associations or at home.

These recommendations are the work of policymakers from European Ministries of Culture and Education and experts in the field of education from 21 different countries. They were created at strategy meetings under the Italian and Latvian Presidencies (2014/2015), facilitated by the Europeana Foundation, European Schoolnet and The European Association of History Educators (EUROCLIO).

Read/download the report: http://pro.europeana.eu/files/Europeana_Professional/Publications/Europeana%20for%20Education%20and%20Learning%20Policy%20Recommendations.pdf

Europeana has also recently issued a report from the Metadata Quality Task Force, authored by Marie-Claire Dangerfield. This report looks at the factors that affect overall metadata quality and makes recommendations for its improvement.

Metadata quality is controlled by a set of processes which ensures that cultural heritage objects can be identified, discovered and seen in context by audiences, in a manner appropriate to the context in which the data provider created them. Metadata must include information on the potential re-use of cultural heritage objects.

This report looks at how data partners’ motivation, the technical requirements and the content of the metadata affect overall metadata quality. This document is relevant to the entire Europeana Network.

Read/download the Metadata Quality Report: http://pro.europeana.eu/files/Europeana_Professional/Publications/Metadata%20Quality%20Report.pdf

HathiTrust extracted features dataset now available for 4.8 million volumes

The HathiTrust Research Center has announced the release of its Extracted Features Dataset (v. 0.2), a dataset derived from 4.8 million public domain volumes totaling 1.8 billion pages currently available in the HathiTrust Digital Library collection. The dataset includes over 734 billion words, dozens of languages and spans multiple centuries. Features are informative, quantified characteristics of a text, and include:

1. Volume-level metadata;

2. Page-level features:

• Part-of-speech-tagged token counts;

• Header and footer identification;

• Sentence and line count; and

• Algorithmic language detection.

3. Line-level features:

• Beginning and end line character count; and

• Maximum length of the sequence of capital characters starting a line

These features allow for analysis of large worksets of volumes in the HathiTrust public domain collection, at scales previously intractable for most individual researchers. For example, page-level token (word) counts can be used tohelp build topic models, classifications and perform other text analytics. Similarly, features can be used to evaluate readability of a given volume or workset.

The entire dataset, as well as sample subsets and custom worksets, is available at: https://sharc.hathitrust.org/features

This feature dataset is provided under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

The HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC) is a collaborative research centre launched jointly by Indiana University and the University of Illinois, along with the HathiTrust Digital Library, to help meet the technical challenges of dealing with massive amounts of digital text that researchers face by developing cutting-edge software tools and cyberinfrastructure to enable advanced computational access to the growing digital record of human knowledge.

HathiTrust Research Center: https://sharc.hathitrust.org/

VocBench: open-source platform for collaborative development of multilingual thesauri

Vocbench is a Web-based, multilingual, editing and workflow tool that manages thesauri, authority lists and glossaries using SKOS (Simple Knowledge Organization System). VocBench is developed by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and its partners, and it is designed to meet the needs of semantic Web and linked data environments. VocBench provides tools and functionalities that facilitate both collaborative editing and multilingual terminology. It also includes administration and group management features that permit flexible roles for maintenance, validation and quality assurance.

The VocBench user community is growing, and, today, includes FAO’s Fisheries and Aquaculture Department and the data.fao.org project, the European Commission Publications Office, the European Environment Agency, the Italian Senate, and more organisations are joining. FAO’s instance of VocBench, hosted by FAO Centre of Excellence MIMOS Berhad, currently manages the AGROVOC thesaurus, the Biotechnology Glossary and other bibliographic metadata.

VocBench is a result of a joint effort with the ART (Artificial Intelligence Research at Tor Vergata) group of the University of Rome Tor Vergata. Armando Stellato, PhD, Researcher at the University of Rome, Tor Vergata, and consultant at FAO, announced the release of VocBench version 2.3 in April 2015. A webinar on VocBench, presented in March 2015 by Dr Stellato and Dr Caterina Caracciolo, Information Specialist at FAO, is now available for viewing on the FAO’s Agricultural Information Management Standards (AIMS) website.

VocBench project site: http://vocbench.uniroma2.it/

Full details on VocBench version 2.3: http://aims.fao.org/activity/blog/vocbench-23-released

Access the VocBench sandbox: http://202.73.13.50:55481/vocbench/

View the VocBench webinar: http://aims.fao.org/capacity-development/webinars/vocbench-20-web-application-collaborative-development-multilingual

OCLC’s WorldShare license manager API now available

OCLC has announced that the WorldShare License Manager API (application program interface) is now available in production.

The License Manager API provides developer-level access to institution-specific licensed resource information, enabling several heavily requested use cases, including:

• Combine license details with the WorldCat knowledge base API to display license “termof use” data alongside collections on a custom Database page.

• Create a “Permitted Uses” page to display the permitted rights yourpatrons can expect for a given collection or electronic title.

• Store-helpful user feedback collected from database trials and display those alongsidea given collection.

• Incorporate custom terms of use into your library’s internal workflows.

• Create a course pack page to highlight collections teaching faculty can reuse in classroomscenarios.

The WorldShare License Manager API provides a stable platform to allow libraries to incorporate electronic resource license terms into user workflows.

Learn more quickly by checking it out in the API Explorer: https://platform.worldcat.org/api-explorer/WSLMAN

WorldShare License Manager API: http://www.oclc.org/developer/develop/web-services/worldshare-license-manager-api.en.html

Koha version 3.20.0 released

Tomás Cohen Arazi, Koha ILS Release Manager, has announced the release of Koha 3.20, the latest major release of the Koha open source integrated library system.

Koha is the first free and open-source software library automation package (ILS). Development is sponsored by libraries of varying types and sizes, volunteers and support companies from around the world.

Koha 3.20 is a major release, including five new features:

1. Cataloging: Add ability for plugins to convert arbitrary files to MARC from record staging tool(bug 12412).

2. Hold requests: Move AllowOnShelfHolds and OpacItemHolds system preferences to the Circulation Matrix(bug 5786).

3. OPAC: Cover image from Coce, a remote image URL cache (bug 9580).

4. Patrons: Discharge management (bug 8007).

5. Tools: Batch modifications for records (bug 11395).

The new release also includes 114 enhancements and 407 bugfixes.

The Koha 3.20 tarball and install instructions can be found on the Koha download page. More install instructions and useful information can be found on the wiki and in the INSTALL files that come in the tarball.

Koha download page: http://koha-community.org/download-koha/

Koha community wiki: http://wiki.koha-community.org/wiki/Installation_Documentation

Ebsco announces new partnerships with data management PA, Archimed

EBSCO Information Services (EBSCO) and ILS vendor, Data Management PA, have announced a new partnership to provide expanded services to mutual customers. The partnership will enable mutual customers of EBSCO Discovery Services™ (EDS) and Data Management PA to access content that is important to them while customizing the discovery experience to their needs.

Data Management PA develops and sells integrated library system (ILS) Sebina and Web2.0 online public access catalog (OPAC) SebinaYOU. Based in Italy, Data Management PA is a national brand leader for all types of libraries and is active in France in collaboration with Décalog, a leading French software house for public libraries.

Donato Todisco, CEO of Data Management PA says:

“We are currently engaged in an ambitious R&D process in which open data and open technologies play a key role. This important agreement with EBSCO will enable the addition of EDS services to our Web2.0 OPAC. We’re looking forward to creating fluid and transparent interfaces to these services for our academic customers”.

With the option of using either EBSCO Discovery Service or a library’s current catalog user interface as the front end, EBSCO’s ILS partnerships allow libraries to take advantage of the benefits of both services. Through these partnerships, mutual customers will get better, easier access to the databases, journals, conference proceedings, magazines, newspapers, e-books, images, videos and other resources their libraries provide.

Archimed, a leading software and library solution vendor in the European Union (EU), has established a partnershipwith EBSCO Information Services to enrich the content searchable with Syracuse, its newly-released unified information system portal for libraries.

To best serve the diverse needs of their users, university libraries must make their collections easily available at anytime to patrons, this includes providing seamless access to all resources, such as print collections, e-collections, online digital resources and other valuable third-party content. To satisfy these emerging demands, Archimed sought to partner with EBSCO, provider of the leading discovery service to libraries of all sizes worldwide: EBSCO Discovery Service™ (EDS).

EDS creates a unified, customized index of library’s information resources, and offers an easy, yet powerful means of accessing all of that content from a single search box – searching made even more powerful by the quality of its relevance and value ranking technology.

Eric Délot, Archimed Marketing and Sales Director, remarked that “EBSCO’s high-speed Discovery service combined with the strength of Syracuse, a complete information system for librarians, provides access to a robust and unique search solution”.

More about Data Management PA’s Sebina ILS: http://www.sebina.it/SebinaNet/.do?cdArticle=Le_Biblioteche

More about Archimed’s library solutions (in English): http://www.archimed.fr/en/solutions-for-libraries/

EBSCO products and services: http://www.ebsco.com/products

Open access program SciELO partners with ReadCube to enhance scholarly articles

Scientific Electronic Library Online (SciELO) has announced the integration of ReadCube Connect’s Interactive PDF viewer for over 285 scientific journals and over 280,000 articles of the SciELO Brazil collection. SciELO is a Program of the São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP) for the cooperative publishing of open-access journals on the Internet. Especially conceived to meet the scientific communication needs of developing countries, it provides anefficient way to assure universal visibility and accessibility to their scientific literature published by nationallyedited journals. In addition, the SciELO model comprises quality control and integrated procedures for the measurement of usage and impact of scientific journals.

ReadCube Connect combines the familiar, print-like layout of PDFs with interactivity and a wealth of related content often lost when readers download the static PDF.

The core of ReadCube’s Enhanced Article technology includes annotation tools, bundled supplementary information, hyperlinked in-line citations and clickable author names that initiate searches to find related articles.

“SciELO strives toward visibility and accessibility of scientific content and impact”, says Abel Packer, director of SciELO. “Our partnership with ReadCube is a natural extension of this mission, offering innovative features to our readers to improve their reading, organization, and interaction with research. We hope to extend this partnership to all SciELO collections in the near future”.

Aside from on the SciELO platform, ReadCube Enhanced Articles are also available offline, through the companion ReadCube desktop (Mac/PC) and mobile tools (Android/iOS). Readers can save Enhanced Articles directly from SciELO platform, with their full complement of enhancements and annotations directly to any of the free ReadCube apps. The free tools also can automatically import, build and curate the researcher’s existing library of scholarly literature and help to discover other relevant articles via integrated search tools and personalized reading recommendations.

“We’re delighted to partner with SciELO, an organization that shares our mission of enabling seamless access”, said Robert McGrath, CEO of ReadCube. “The combination of our technology with SciELO’s vast collection of open access content accelerates the pace of research and empowers researchers around the world”.

SciELO was launched in 1998 by FAPESP with the technical cooperation of the Latin America and Caribbean Center on Health Sciences Information (BIREME/PAHO/WHO). Since 2002, the Project is also supported by the Brazilian National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq). Since its launching, the SciELO publishing model was progressively adopted by national research institutions of Ibero-American countries and South Africa comprising the SciELO Network.

View ReadCube Connect in action on SciELO: http://rdcu.be/cUiC

For more information on SciELO (English, Spanish, or Portuguese): http://www.scielo.org

Open preservation foundation releases JHOVE evaluation and stabilisation report

In February, the JHOVE (JSTOR/Harvard Object Validation Environment) format validation tool was transferred to Open Preservation Foundation (OPF) stewardship. JHOVE is an extensible software framework for performing format identification, validation and characterization of digital objects.

OPF completed the initial review of JHOVE in March, and has identified all of the resources that will be maintained or preserved. The report is available on the new JHOVE product page, along with an overview of current activity and links to the source code, documentation and downloads which have been transferred to OPF’s GitHub repository.

The main objective of the work to date has been to establish a firm foundation for future changes based on agile software development best practises.

Read the report at: http://openpreservation.org/public/OPF_JhoveEvaluationStabilisationPlan.pdf

JHOVE product page: http://openpreservation.org/technology/products/jhove/

New guide to audio preservation offers expert information for non-specialists

The Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR), in partnership with the Association for Recorded Sound Collections (ARSC) and the National Recording Preservation Board (NRPB) of the Library of Congress, has announced publication of the ARSC Guide to Audio Preservation.

The guide is an introduction to caring for and preserving audio collections, specifically for individuals and institutions that have recorded sound collections but lack the expertise in one or more areas to preserve them.

Our audio legacy is at serious risk because of media deterioration, technological obsolescence, and, often, lack of accessibility. This legacy is remarkable in its diversity, ranging from wax cylinders of extinct Native American languages to tapes of local radio broadcasts, naturalists’ and ethnographers’ field recordings, small independent record company releases and much more. Saving this irreplaceable treasure demands the joint effort of libraries, archives, museums, local history repositories, corporations and individuals.

“The ARSC Guide to Audio Preservation fills a critical need by drawing together contributions from an impressive team of authorities in audio preservation to address the needs of non-specialists who are responsible for managing collections of recordings without being able to rely on in-house professional preservation expertise”, said ARSC President Patrick Feaster. “In partnership with CLIR and the National Recording Preservation Board of the Library of Congress, we’re proud to build on our tradition of promoting the well-informed stewardship of recorded sound with the publication of this guidebook”.

Nine chapters, contributed by a range of experts, cover audio conservation and preservation, recorded sound formats and their associated risks, appraisal, related copyright issues and disaster preparedness. The guide also offers advice on making informed decisions about digitization, as well as strategies for managing digital content. An appendix to the guide focuses on fair use and sound recordings.

“Our recorded sound heritage – much of it unique, unpublished, and hidden – is held by thousandsof institutions and individuals. Ensuring that these collections survive and are accessible will be possible only with the collaboration of many institutions”, said CLIR President Chuck Henry. “We are proud to copublish the ARSC guide and hope that it will help support the collective action needed to meet this grand challenge”.

The guide was commissioned and sponsored by the National Recording Preservation Board of the Library of Congress.

Read/download the ARSC Guide to Audio Preservation at: http://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub164