New & Noteworthy

Library Hi Tech News

ISSN: 0741-9058

Article publication date: 1 November 2011

445

Citation

(2011), "New & Noteworthy", Library Hi Tech News, Vol. 28 No. 9. https://doi.org/10.1108/lhtn.2011.23928iaa.001

Publisher

:

Emerald Group Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2011, Emerald Group Publishing Limited


New & Noteworthy

Article Type: New & Noteworthy From: Library Hi Tech News, Volume 28, Issue 9

Digital Public Library of America “Beta Sprint” Review Panel announces results

In May 2011, the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) Steering Committee announced a “Beta Sprint” that aimed to surface innovations that could play a part in the building of a digital public library. The Beta Sprint sought ideas, models, prototypes, technical tools, user interfaces, etc. – put forth as a written statement, a visual display, code, or a combination of forms – that demonstrate how the DPLA might index and provide access to a wide range of broadly distributed content. The Beta Sprint also encouraged development of submissions that suggest alternative designs or that focus on particular parts of the system, rather than on the DPLA as a whole.

Following review of nearly 40 submissions, the DPLA Steering Committee has invited the creators of the following projects to present at the public plenary meeting taking place on October 21, 2011 in Washington, DC:

  • Digital Collaboration for America’s National Collections. The Digital Collaboration demonstrates the ability of three disparate, major national institutions to work together through one unified search tool. Submitted by the National Archives, the Library of Congress, and the Smithsonian Institution.

  • DLF/DCC: DPLA Beta Sprint. The DLF/DCC Beta Sprint project serves as a search tool for the DCC’s collection of cultural and scientific heritage resources, presenting unique ways of organizing and presenting materials and metadata. Submitted by CLIR: Digital Library Federation and the University of Illinois – Urbana Champaign, School of Information, Science and Center for Informatics Research in Science and Scholarship.

  • extraMUROS. extraMUROS proposes to shape the DPLA into a multimedia-library-without-walls through an open source, HTML5 platform. Submitted by metaLAB (at) Harvard, the Harvard Library Lab, and Media And Place Productions.

  • Government Publications: Enhanced Access and Discovery through Open Linked Data and Crowdsourcing. The Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC) has been leading a coordinated effort to digitize government documents. The project continues with an approximate target of digitizing a total of 1+ million print documents. Submitted by the University of Minnesota, the CIC, and HathiTrust.

  • Metadata Interoperability Services. Metadata Interoperability Services (MINT) is a web-based platform that enables the aggregation of rich and diverse cultural heritage content and metadata. Submitted by MINT at the National Technical University of Athens.

  • ShelfLife and LibraryCloud. ShelfLife is intended to provide users with a rich environment for exploring the combined content of the DPLA, discovering new works, and engaging more deeply with them via social interactions. LibraryCloud is the backend metadata server that supports ShelfLife. Submitted by the Harvard Library Innovation Lab and multiple partners.

The six selected projects were invited on the basis of recommendations made by an independent review panel composed of public and research librarians and experts in the fields of library science and information management. The panel met in Cambridge, MA on September 18, 2011 to discuss the 38 final Beta Sprint submissions.

“We are deeply grateful for the Beta Sprint Review Panel’s work,” said John Palfrey, Chair of the DPLA Steering Committee:

We are excited to have such creative, innovative projects and ideas – many of them already put into code – off of which we will build a Digital Public Library of America. We congratulate all sprinters on their tremendous effort and encourage everyone to continue building networks and see their inspired ideas forward, whether through this project or otherwise.

The Steering Committee has also invited the creators of three projects – Bookworm, DPLA Collection Achievements & Profiles System, and WikiCite – A Universal Citation Platform – to participate in a “lightning round” of presentations at the plenary, featuring submissions that may serve as useful additions to the DPLA’s initial technical foundation.

Each project was evaluated independently according to criteria adapted from the review criteria for the National Endowment for the Humanities’ (NEH) Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants program.

For more information about the review process and results, visit: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/dpla

Ithaka S+R/SCA case studies in sustainability: final report

Ithaka S+R, with funding from the JISC-led Strategic Content Alliance (SCA), has released “Revenue, Recession, Reliance: Revisiting the SCA/Ithaka S+R Case Studies in Sustainability,” a report that reviews the impact of tumultuous times on the business models of 12 digital projects first profiled by S+R in 2009.

Some of the projects profiled include the UK’s National Archives’ Licensed Internet Associates program, which has shown major revenue growth in recent years despite budget cuts felt by the entire institution; Cornell University’s eBird, which has experimented with partnerships to develop new revenue generating offerings for users; and the University of Southampton’s Library Digitisation Unit, which has made strategic choices to better align its mission with that of the university.

Nearly all of the projects profiled live under the umbrella of larger institutions. One of the key findings to emerge is that many of these projects are relying on their host institutions for support to an even greater extent than two years ago. Whether this is a good arrangement and what this means for their future remains to be seen. “While some project leaders have pursued an aggressive awareness-building strategy within their host institutions as a way of ensuring ongoing support, others have preferred to fly under the radar,” commented co-author and Ithaka S+R Program Manager, Nancy Maron. “Either way, where host support is a major part of the sustainability plan, aligning project goals with the host’s mission is especially important.”

The report notes that difficult economic times have called for deep across-the-board spending cuts at many organizations, which can deny digital resource projects the capital investment they need just as they are beginning to grow. Many of the projects studied had the intention of contributing revenue to their host, but only some were successful in doing so, and even those were unable to fully support their ongoing costs. “This research concentrates on organizations coming to terms with the long-term liabilities incurred in digital projects and post grant funding,” stated Stuart Dempster, Director of the JISC-led SCA:

It’s not just the actions the project teams have taken but the reasoning behind those choices that will help others start to determine which strategies, or parts of them, might serve as models for their own projects.

The projects that had the most success did not follow one particular business model but rather spent a tremendous time understanding all of their stakeholders – from their users to university administrators and volunteers. “There is no single path to sustainability,” stated Kevin Guthrie, President of ITHAKA. “Successful projects understand the value they offer to their most important constituents and are able to adjust their approaches to meet new challenges and changing conditions.”

The cases covered include scholar-led initiatives (Electronic Enlightenment, eBird, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, the Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College London, the National Science Digital Library MSP2: Middle School Math and Science Pathway, the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae), library and museum projects (The National Archives, L’Institut national de l’audiovisuel, the University of Southampton Library Digitisation Unit, V&A Images), and publishing projects (Hindawi, DigiZeitschriften) with a diverse range of revenue models (e.g. subscription-based projects, endowment-funded resources, and open access digital libraries).

These case studies form part of a long-term commitment by the SCA to provide empirically based evidence freely to education, research and cultural bodies in the development of digital content. This research is ongoing with the development of a new digital entrepreneurship syllabus due for delivery in summer 2012.

“Revenue, Recession, Reliance” – read the report at: www.ithaka.org/ithaka-s-r/research/case-studies-in-sustainability-2011

Frick Art Reference Library Photoarchive records, digital images now accessible online

Scholars in multiple disciplines around the world have long heralded the Photoarchive of the Frick Art Reference Library as uniquely valuable to research that relates to object-oriented study of works of art. Without this repository of an estimated 1.2 million images of works created by more than 40,000 artists, curators, art dealers, and authors of monographic catalogues would be hard pressed to find visual documentation of unpublished art and the preparatory studies, versions, copies, or forgeries that relate to those and even to more famous works. In recent years, the Frick’s Photoarchive has also played a key role in helping researchers compile provenance information about art looted during Second World War. Lynn Nicholas, the highly respected author of The Rape of Europa: The Fate of Europe’s Treasures in the Third Reich and the Second World War (New York, 1994), recently noted that “to do provenance research, of course, one of the very first places to go is the Frick […]” Until now, online access to these valuable resources has been limited to searches for the artists’ files, the results of which indicate the amount of material the Photoarchive has for a given artist, but no specific information about individual works of art. For that, researchers had to visit the library premises, and manually browse the photographs stored on file.

The Frick Art Reference Library and its partners in the New York Art Resources Consortium (NYARC) – the libraries of The Museum of Modern Art and the Brooklyn Museum – are pleased to announce that through a complex process of data migration, all of the Photoarchive’s research database records created since 1996 (and all future records created both for the existing collection and for new acquisitions) may now be accessed via NYARC’s online catalog arcade. These online records in arcade offer detailed historical documentation for the works of art, including basic information about the artist, title, medium, dimensions, date, and owner of the work, as well as former attributions, provenance, variant titles, records of exhibition and condition history, and biographical information about portrait subjects. Andrew W. Mellon Chief Librarian Stephen Bury comments:

For us the incorporation of the Photoarchive records in Arcade means that the richness of all of the Frick’s research collections will be available to scholars everywhere and the image collection will be discoverable as easily as our other special collections of auction catalogues and exhibition ephemera through a single search in Arcade. We know that the road that will take us to full digitization of the archive is long (currently online access is possible to only 125,000 items in the archive, but the Frick is committed to the digital future of this exceptional resource).

In addition to global access to the historical documentation for works of art recorded in the Photoarchive, a new interface, the Frick Digital Image Archive (http://images.frick.org) has been created to link the images of 15,000 works of art captured during the Frick’s photography expeditions throughout the USA from 1922 to 1967 to the documentation in arcade. Researchers can retrieve images by keyword or field searching, display large preview images, download small jpeg image files, and link to the matching arcade records. This image archive, which may be accessed via the web site of The Frick Collection (www.frick.org), was made possible by funding from the NEH and the Henry Luce Foundation. The NEH also designated the project as part of its “We the People” initiative to encourage and strengthen the teaching study and understanding of American history and culture. Through this two-year project, the Frick digitized 15,000 endangered negatives within the larger collection of 60,000 library negatives and developed the interface to make the images freely available online. The negatives were the products of photography expeditions during the first half of the twentieth century to Alabama, California, Connecticut, Delaware, Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Missouri, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Vermont, Virginia, and Washington, DC. In many cases, the images record early states of the works of art, prior to restoration or deterioration, and in some instances, they remain the only record of a work that has been subsequently lost or destroyed. Much of the documentation for these works is also uniquely recorded at the Frick because it was obtained from the owners (particularly true of the provenance and portrait subject information) or from scholars who consulted the images years after they were captured by the library’s photography team. During the course of the NEH project, library staff updated the ownership and attribution information for nearly 1,500 works, relying on notations by researchers of the past and on the Inventories of American Paintings and Sculpture online database. Access to these images will complement the collection of 25,000 Frick Library negatives earlier digitized with the support of ARTstor and the Carl and Lily Pforzheimer Foundation and available through subscription to ARTstor.

With this new online access to the Frick Photoarchive research database records and the digital image archive, the Frick is now poised to incorporate a growing number of documented images from its visual resource holdings. These images complement other visual resources contributed by the NYARC partners, thereby ensuring that a broader community of researchers will have access to these unique collections.

Search the Frick Art Reference Library’s Photoarchive: http://arcade.nyarc.org/search∼S7

Frick Digital Image Archive: http://images.frick.org/

University of Rochester releases v2.1 of IR+ open source institutional repository

The University of Rochester has announced the release of its open source institutional repository, IR+, version 2.1. Following a successful production launch at the University of Rochester on August 16, 2011, IR+2.1 is now available to the entire community.

The IR+ system is based on extensive user research. With portfolios, personal workspaces, and publication listings, it offers useful tools for researchers and extends the role of the repository into the authoring process. IR+ is a fully featured digital repository management solution, whose goals are to meet the needs of any organization that needs to author, publish and preserve digital information.

The new version has many new features and updates. These include:

  • Support for MARC21 file import and export. IR+ can now import MARC21 (.mrc) files, and export MARCXML and MARC21 (.mrc) files.

  • MARCXML information can now be harvested from IR+ through OAI.

  • The following types of files: jpg, tiff, tif, jpeg, png, gif and bmp in institutional publications are now automatically opened in the browser.

The download and documentation can be found at: www.irplus.org

SAA endorses practice for putting digitized collections of unpublished materials online

The “Well-intentioned practice (WIP) for putting digitized collections of unpublished materials online,” prepared by OCLC Research, has been endorsed as a standard by the Society of American Archivists (SAA) Council.

This practice provides the framework for an assertive approach to digitisation of unpublished archival materials, such as photographs, letters, or the records of an organization’s work, whose rights holders are often difficult to identify and contact. It promotes a practical approach to identifying and resolving rights issues that is in line with professional and ethical standards and emphasizes a collective approach to the management of the copyright responsibilities involved in large-scale digitisation projects.

This approach is the output of a 2010 seminar in which OCLC Research convened a group of experts in archives, special collections and law to develop streamlined, community-accepted procedures for managing copyright in the digital age that would cut costs and boost confidence in libraries’ and archives’ ability to increase access to unpublished materials online.

The group acknowledged that, although there is risk in digitizing materials that may be in copyright, this risk should be balanced with the harm to scholarship and society inherent in not making collections fully accessible. Based on this premise, they identified a practical approach to selecting collections, making decisions, seeking permissions, recording outcomes, establishing policy and working with future donors, which was outlined in the “Well-intentioned practice” document. Since then, a community of practice has been forming around the WIP that will increase and significantly improve access to collections of unpublished materials for the purpose of furthering research and learning.

SAA’s Intellectual Property Working Group (IPWG), which tracks intellectual property issues of concern to archivists and drafts responses or position papers as needed, provided a preface for SAA’s endorsement of this practice. Both the preface and the endorsement are available on SAA’s standards portal. The “Well-intentioned practice for putting digitized collections of unpublished materials online” document is available online.

“We’re delighted that SAA and the archival community have embraced the document,” said Merrilee Proffitt, Senior Program Officer with OCLC Research:

The practices described articulate a common-sense approach already resident within the community. The preface SAA has approved to accompany the document includes some excellent information and resources, and that’s a definite plus. I think it will encourage others to take a look at the document and will hopefully lead to more materials being made accessible. That’s what excites me.

The IPWG was pleased with the document because it approaches copyright questions collectively and encourages movement away from a work-by-work analysis in some situations. In our preface, we emphasized that to be well-intentioned, archivists and their institutions first must be well-informed about the choices and the risks involved. Ultimately, to be valuable to the profession, the WIP and its preface need to be adopted and used by practitioners. SAA recognition as a standard will help to encourage these steps,

said Heather Briston, Head of Public Services for UCLA Library Special Collections and IPWG Chair.

By endorsing WIP as a standard, SAA joins a distinguished group of organizations and individuals that support the practices outlined in the WIP. Other organizations that have joined the community of practice by endorsing these procedures include the Rare Books and Manuscripts Section of the American Library Association (ALA), the Joint National Committee on Archives, Libraries and Museums, and the Art Libraries Society of North America (ARLIS/NA).

Read/download the document at: www.oclc.org/research/activities/rights/practice.pdf

More information at the SAA’s standards portal: www2.archivists.org/standards/well-intentioned-practice-for-putting-digitized-collections-of-unpublished-materials-onlin

Library of Congress expands Library of Congress Control Number (LCCN) Permalink Service for authorities data

The Library of Congress has announces an expansion of its LCCN Permalink Service for the library’s name and subject authority records. These persistent URLs are based on the LCCN. As with bibliographic records, LCCN Permalinks are displayed on authority record entries in LC authorities (http://authorities.loc.gov).

An LCCN Permalink retrieves a MARCXML-formatted record using the Z39.50/SRU protocol. Both valid and cancelled LCCNs (MARC21 fields 010a and 010z) are searched. Authority record displays for LCCN Permalink follow the labelled display found in LC authorities. MARCXML and MADS versions of the records are also available. Displays link to entries in LC authorities (http://authorities.loc.gov) and the LC Online Catalog (http://catalog.loc.gov) – and, where appropriate, to entries in the Virtual International Authority File (http://viaf.org) and LC authorities and vocabularies (http://id.loc.gov/).

To create an LCCN Permalink, simply begin your URL with the LCCN Permalink domain name – http://lccn.loc.gov/ – then add an LCCN. Examples:

LCCNs should be formatted according to the info:lccn URI specification (http://info-uri.info/registry/OAIHandler?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=reg&identifier=info:lccn/).

Instructions and additional information are also available in the LCCN Permalink FAQ: http://lccn.loc.gov/lccnperm-faq.html

Keepers Registry Beta release launches

EDINA and the ISSN International Centre have announced the Beta release of the Keepers Registry, the e-journals preservation registry service.

The Keepers Registry renames and replaces the PEPRS Beta service which was launched in April 2011. The Keepers Registry is the product of JISC-funded project activity and provides freely available means to discover which e-journals are being preserved by the leading archival organizations. The metadata from an additional agency, HathiTrust, has been included in this release of the Keepers Registry, as well as new functionality to support browsing by journal title and publisher.

The PEPRS project was initially funded as a two-year project to scope, design and build a prototype, during which user requirements were gathered from librarians and preservation agencies. The present funding, until July 2012, is geared towards implementation of a service-quality system. Suitable developments from the PEPRS project activity will be implemented into the Keepers Registry.

The work of the PEPRS project and the launch of the Beta release of the Keepers Registry will be discussed at the annual meeting of the Directors of the ISSN National Centres to be held in Sarajevo, Bosnia Herzegovina, from October 5 to 7, 2011.

The idea for the registry was mooted in various reports since 2003 and the findings of a JISC-commissioned report carried out by the University of Loughborough and Rightscom and published in 2008.

The six archiving agencies which have been participating in the project and have made metadata available to the PEPRS Beta service include the British Library, CLOCKSS Archive, e-Depot at the Konjinklijke Bibliotheek, Global LOCKSS Network, HathiTrust, and Portico.

It is planned to extend the scope of the service by including metadata from other archiving agencies. Additional functionality will also be added to the service throughout 2011 and 2012 and details of this are set out in the FAQ section on the service.

A program to test new functionality is being developed and the project team would welcome offers from users to assist in the testing process. If you would like to get involved, contact the project team at: edina@ed.ac.uk

The Keepers Registry is available online at: http://thekeepers.org

Further information and relevant reports are available on the PEPRS project web site at: http://edina.ac.uk/projects/peprs/

TERMS: techniques for electronic resource management

Jill Emery, collection development librarian at Portland State University, and Graham Stone, Information Resources Manager at the University of Huddersfield, have launched a blog titled “TERMS: Techniques for ER management”, and have invited librarians to join them in developing recommendations for best practices in e-resource management. From the blog:

Two decades after the advent of electronic journals and databases, librarians are still grappling with ways to best manage these resources in conjunction with their print resources. In addition, economic pressures are resulting in librarians having to justify all expenditure on collections and resource management. Furthermore, ebooks are becoming yet another stream of purchasing and management with the added complexity of patron driven acquisitions. All this results in the need to codify the management of electronic resource management more than ever.

There has been a lot of discussion about the implementation of ERM systems in recent years, however, use of these systems is still far from ubiquitous and many academic libraries have yet to implement or even purchase a system.

Recent research around workflow management has shown that over 1/3 of academic libraries put workflow management at the top of their prioritization list. This area has also been highlighted as a gap by the National Information Standards Organization ERM Data Standards and Best Practices Review.

Over the next three months TERMS will look at each of the stages in the e-resources cycle on our blog:

  • investigating new content for purchase/addition;

  • acquire new content;

  • implement;

  • evaluation and ongoing access;

  • annual review; and

  • cancellation and replacement.

We will add a new TERM every two weeks and invite you to review and comment on each of them. If you have any suggestions and tips from your workplace, please feel free to add your experiences. In this way we hope to crowd source TERMS through open peer commentary with a view to providing a first definitive draft in early 2012. However, we plan to keep the TERMS blog going after this date so that TERMS will become a reference point to those who are new to e-resource management and for those who may want to implement its recommendations of best practice.

“You can follow us on twitter at: www.twitter.com/6terms or join the Facebook group: TERMS.”

TERMS blog: http://6terms.tumblr.com

TERMS Facebook group: www.facebook.com/groups/174086169332439/

31 percent of text message users prefer texting to voice calls: new report from Pew

Some 83 percent of American adults own cell phones and three-quarters of them (73 percent) send and receive text messages. The Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project asked those texters in a survey how they prefer to be contacted on their cell phone and 31 percent said they preferred texts to talking on the phone, while 53 percent said they preferred a voice call to a text message. Another 14 percent said the contact method they prefer depends on the situation.

Heavy text users are much more likely to prefer texting to talking. Some 55 percent of those who exchange more than 50 messages a day say they would rather get a text than a voice call.

Young adults are the most avid texters by a wide margin. Cell owners between the ages of 18 and 24 exchange an average of 109.5 messages on a normal day – that works out to more than 3,200 texts per month – and the typical or median cell owner in this age group sends or receives 50 messages per day (or 1,500 messages per month).

These results come from a nationally representative phone survey of 2,277 adults ages 18 and older conducted from April 26 to May 22, 2011, including 755 cell phone interviews.

Overall, the survey found that both text messaging and phone calling on cell phones have leveled off for the adult population as a whole. Text messaging users send or receive an average of 41.5 messages on a typical day, with the median user sending or receiving ten texts daily – both figures are largely unchanged from what we reported in 2010. Similarly, cell owners make or receive an average of 12 calls on their cells per day, which is unchanged from 2010.

Read or download the full report: http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2011/Cell-Phone-Texting-2011.aspx

Research Support Services for Scholars: new program from Ithaka S+R

Ithaka S+R has announced a new program, Research Support Services for Scholars, that will comprise a series of discipline-specific research projects aimed to provide critically needed research about the evolving behavior and needs of scholars to the information support service providers who work with them. Based on this research, Ithaka S+R will make recommendations regarding the future of support services for scholars and how information service providers – such as libraries, computing support centers, scholarly societies, and publishers – can support their needs.

Ithaka S+R begins this international research program with two projects: a research project in chemistry, with support from JISC and an emphasis on the needs of UK chemists, and a research project in history, with support from the National Endowment of the Humanities and an emphasis on US historians.

If you are a scholar in chemistry or history, or an information service provider to these fields, Ithaka S+R invites you to provide feedback during the research process at the project web site at: www.researchsupportservices.net

Ithaka S+R is a strategic consulting and research service that focuses on the transformation of scholarship and teaching in an online environment, with the goal of identifying the critical issues facing our community and acting as a catalyst for change. Ithaka S+R is part of ITHAKA, a not-for-profit organization that helps the academic community use digital technologies to preserve the scholarly record and to advance research and teaching in sustainable ways. JSTOR, a research and learning platform, and Portico, a digital preservation service, are also part of ITHAKA.

More about the program and projects: www.ithaka.org/ithaka-s-r/research/research-support-services-for-scholars

Ithaka S+R: www.ithaka.org/ithaka-s-r

Ex Libris Partners with OCLC, will use WorldCat API for discovery and delivery

Ex Libris Group® and OCLC and have signed an agreement that will enable Ex Libris to incorporate the WorldCat Search API into several Ex Libris discovery and delivery services, providing OCLC member libraries access to WorldCat through the Ex Libris Primo® and MetaLib® solutions.

Ex Libris will integrate the WorldCat Search API, which provides machine-to-machine access to WorldCat bibliographic records and holdings data, into its applications to make the collections of OCLC libraries discoverable. Libraries will be able to activate this functionality by registering their key to the WorldCat Search API within their Ex Libris system.

“This cooperative agreement makes it easier for Ex Libris users and OCLC members to take full advantage of the rich discovery experience that the WorldCat API can provide,” said Jay Jordan, OCLC President and CEO:

Both organizations are adopting an open approach that will improve services for the libraries that we mutually serve, as well as foster collective innovation. We will continue to work with library service providers to create partnerships that add value for members of the OCLC cooperative.

Matti Shem-Tov, President and CEO of Ex Libris Group, commented:

As we implement our strategy of transforming both resource discovery and library management, extending access to shared services such as WorldCat is an important step. The integration of the Search API into Ex Libris unified discovery and delivery services demonstrates our commitment to providing a content-neutral solution that ensures the broadest possible coverage of the resources which are most important to libraries. We are pleased to be able to expose the rich bibliographic information in WorldCat to our mutual customers and to offer end-users yet another option for expanding the scope of their search beyond the resources of their local institution.

Full press release at: www.oclc.org/news/releases/2011/201151.htm

Ex Libris Group: www.exlibrisgroup.com/

HathiTrust and OCLC sign agreement to make HathiTrust content discoverable in WorldCat

OCLC and HathiTrust have signed an agreement that will allow OCLC to integrate the HathiTrust full-text index into OCLC services, enabling member libraries and their users to more easily discover resources from this important digital collection through WorldCat.

Under this new agreement, OCLC will be able to integrate the full-text index of HathiTrust collections into services such as WorldCat.org and WorldCat Local. Following integration of the full-text index, users will be able to search beyond bibliographic records to include the full text of these cooperatively built library collections in their searches.

Content from the HathiTrust Digital Library complements member libraries’ collections already in WorldCat. Through a single search of WorldCat.org or WorldCat Local, users will easily find HathiTrust resources and other materials available in their own collections, and in the collections of thousands of libraries around the world that are part of the OCLC cooperative.

As a digital repository for the nation’s great research libraries, the HathiTrust Digital Library brings together the massive digitized collections of partner institutions. HathiTrust offers libraries a means to archive and provide access to their digital content, whether scanned volumes, special collections, or born-digital materials. The representation of these resources in digital form offers expanded opportunities for innovative use in research, teaching and learning.

“For HathiTrust, access is a key part of our preservation mission,” said John Wilkin, Executive Director of HathiTrust:

Resources that remain hidden will not be effectively preserved. While we will continue to support a standalone full-text search of HathiTrust (maintained by HathiTrust), we believe that getting our content into the flow of where our users are is critically important. We are pleased to see the addition of OCLC’s services in exposing the HathiTrust content.

“OCLC and HathiTrust have worked together for several years on behalf of our member libraries to provide easy access to these valuable resources,” said Chip Nilges, OCLC Vice President, Business Development:

OCLC includes 4.7 million records in WorldCat representing the HathiTrust Digital Library, and we continue to synchronize with the HathiTrust daily. This new agreement is an important next step to providing discoverability and easy access to this significant collection.

Earlier this year, OCLC and HathiTrust began testing a unique WorldCat Local user interface for discovery of items accessible through the HathiTrust Digital Library. The WorldCat Local prototype for the HathiTrust Digital Library, available to anyone on the web, was designed and implemented by both organizations in close cooperation as a means to further develop a shared digital library infrastructure. HathiTrust Digital Library records are discoverable through the separate WorldCat Local interface, as well as through WorldCat.org, available on the web at: www.worldcat.org

OCLC and HathiTrust continue to work together to increase online visibility and accessibility of the digital collections by creating WorldCat records describing the content and linking to the collections via WorldCat.org and WorldCat Local.

HathiTrust was launched in 2008 by the then 12-university consortium, known as the CIC, and the University of California system. It has grown to more than 60 partners including Columbia, Princeton, Yale, Duke and Johns Hopkins. In the past two years, those partners have contributed more than 9.5 million volumes to the digital library, digitized from their library collections. More than 2.5 million of the contributed volumes are in the public domain and freely available on the web.

More about HathiTrust at: www.hathitrust.org/

Copyright Clearance Center Partners with cSubs to help streamline content licensing process

Copyright Clearance Center, Inc. (CCC), a not-for-profit organization and provider of licensing solutions, has partnered with cSubs, a provider of subscription, book, newspaper and e-content management services, to integrate RightsLink Basic, CCC’s point-of-content licensing solution, directly into the cSubs subscription management workflow.

CCC works with leading application vendors, publishing platform providers and content aggregators to provide mutual customers with easy-to-use rights licensing and advisory tools within their applications’ workflow. Integration with CCC’s Web Services enables users to search, price and obtain copyright permissions directly within the web sites and applications they use every day. “Our goal is to simplify the process of obtaining copyright permissions,” said Diane Pierson, Vice President, Marketing, CCC. “The combination of cSubs services and CCC’s simple-to-use copyright licensing solutions offers cSubs’ customers the ability to get the permissions they need without interrupting their workflow.”

“In today’s multifaceted, dynamic media environment the risk of unauthorized use and distribution is greater than ever for our clients,” said Julie Sue Auslander, President and Chief Cultural Officer of cSubs:

The addition of CCC’s trusted, highly respected service is the result of cSubs’ strategic decision to protect our clients from the rapidly growing risk of copyright infringement through the unauthorized reproduction and distribution of multiple media content.

cSubs: www.csubs.com/

CCC: www.copyright.com/

Atlas Systems offers ILLiad users training for GIST planning and implementation

Atlas Systems has announced an agreement with the Information Delivery Services (IDS) Project to provide training to any ILLiad user who is interested in implementing the Getting It System Toolkit (GIST). GIST merges and streamlines acquisitions and ILL request workflows using ILLiad, leveraging systems to do more work while reducing the staff time necessary to make informed decisions and process materials.

Atlas developed the ILLiad Resource Sharing Management Software which is now distributed exclusively by OCLC. GIST was developed by the GIST Team at SUNY Geneseo and is partially funded by a grant from the Rochester Regional Library Council.

According to Ed Rivenburgh, IDS Project Director:

We are seeing interest in GIST from ILLiad users around the country and even outside the U.S. Providing the support and training for all these libraries is beyond the scope of what IDS can manage. Atlas has been a terrific partner for us and, because they are the developers of ILLiad, they are the logical people to help us maintain high standards for resource sharing by working with GIST users. We are delighted that they will be playing an active role in helping IDS fulfill our mission to advance the sharing of library resources through collaboration, innovation, and efficiency.

Under the terms of the agreement Atlas will offer training and support for GIST implementation to any ILLiad user. “Atlas Systems recognizes the tremendous value GIST provides to the resource sharing community and we welcome the opportunity to help IDS serve GIST users wherever they are,” said Stephanie Spires, Atlas Training & Library Solutions Manager:

Not all libraries have the technical expertise to implement GIST. Atlas can bridge this technical gap by incorporating GIST Implementation Services into our training lineup. We can help libraries develop a project plan and then implement and support it.

Atlas Systems: www.atlas-sys.com/

Details about GIST can be found at: http://gist.idsproject.org/

Rivers of Data, Currents of Change: materials from LITA Forum 2011 now available

The Library and Information Technology Association (LITA) held its 2011 National Forum in St Louis, Missouri, September 29-October 2, 2011. The theme of the 2011 LITA Forum was “Rivers of Data, Currents of Change”, and the keynote speakers, concurrent sessions and poster sessions addressed topics including digital humanities, mobile technology, linked data, semantic web, cloud-based resources, ebooks, preservation, data management, and more.

To highlight projects that are experimental or involve risk taking, this year the forum featured a “Risky Business” contest in which forum attendees voted for the presentation that best exemplifies these qualities. The first “Risky Business” award went to Margaret Heller and Nell Taylor of the Read/Write Library for their session “Social Networking the Catalog: A Community Based Approach to Building Your Catalog and Collection,” a theoretical and practical discussion and demonstration of a unique community-based cataloging system that illuminates and builds connections.

Materials from the 2011 LITA National Forum presentations are now available for download at ALA Connect: http://connect.ala.org/node/155759

NKOS 2011 Workshop presentations now available

Knowledge Organization Systems (KOS), such as classification systems, thesauri, lexical databases, ontologies, and taxonomies, play an increasingly important role in digital information management and systems. Carrying semantics in a well controlled and documented way, KOS serve a variety of functions: tool for representation and indexing of information and documents, knowledge-based support to information searchers, semantic road maps to domains and disciplines, communication tool by providing conceptual framework, and conceptual basis for knowledge-based systems, e.g. automated classification systems.

The 10th European Networked Knowledge Organization Systems/Services (NKOS) workshop explored the potential of KOS. These tools attempt to model the underlying semantic structure of a domain for purposes of information retrieval, knowledge discovery, language engineering, and the semantic web. The workshop provided participants an opportunity to report and discuss projects, research, and development related to NKOS in next-generation digital libraries.

The presentations from the 10th European NKOS workshop, held in Berlin on September 28-29, 2011, are now available at the workshop program page: www.comp.glam.ac.uk/pages/research/hypermedia/nkos/nkos2011/

NKOS: http://nkos.slis.kent.edu/

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