New & Noteworthy

Citation

(2012), "New & Noteworthy", Library Hi Tech News, Vol. 29 No. 5. https://doi.org/10.1108/lhtn.2012.23929eaa.002

New & Noteworthy

Article Type: New & Noteworthy From: Library Hi Tech News, Volume 29, Issue 5

Barriers to adoption of online learning systems: new report from Ithaka S+R

A new Ithaka S+R report is a landscape review of important developments in online learning today. “Barriers to Adoption of Online Learning Systems in US Higher Education” is the first report in a series that will provide leaders in higher education with lessons learned from existing online learning efforts to help accelerate productive use of these systems in the future. The goal of this research was to understand what benefits colleges and universities expect from online learning technologies, what barriers they face in implementing them, and how these technologies might be best shaped to serve different types of institutions.

Even though there are many “online courses” in existence today, the environment for systems that support interactive learning online (ILO) – those that are full-featured and used by teaching institutions to assist in the effective delivery of credit-bearing courses – is at a very early stage of development. Ithaka S+R worked with leaders, administrators, faculty members, and other key stakeholders to investigate the potential for the use of these delivery systems.

Two important findings came out of this work:

1. 1.

   the need for open, shared data on student learning and performance that are created through ILO; and

2. 2.

   the need for investment in the creation of sustainable and customizable platforms for delivering interactive online learning instruction.

The authors hope this report will help to stimulate discussion and planning among leaders on these important topics.

This study complements Ithaka S+R’s online learning in public universities research project, which is testing the effectiveness of interactive online learning systems, and builds on Ithaka S+R’s experience with open courseware initiatives such as those profiled in Unlocking the Gates.

Barriers to adoption of online learning systems: www.sr.ithaka.org/research-publications/barriers-adoption-online-learning-systems-us-higher-education#

Unlocking the Gates: www.sr.ithaka.org/research-publications/unlocking-gates-how-and-why-leading-universities-are-opening-access-their#

Just-in-time information through mobile connections: research from Pew internet

The rapid adoption of cell phones and, especially, the spread of internet-connected smartphones are changing people’s communications with others and their relationships with information. Users’ ability to access data immediately through apps and web browsers and through contact with their social networks is creating a new culture of real-time information seekers and problem solvers.

The Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project has documented some of the ways that people perform just-in-time services with their cell phones. A new nationally representative survey by the Pew Internet Project has found additional evidence of this just-in-time phenomenon. Some 70 percent of all cell phone owners and 86 percent of smartphone owners have used their phones in the previous 30 days to perform at least one of the following activities:

• •

  Coordinate a meeting or get-together – 41 percent of cell phone owners have done this in the past 30 days.

• •

  Solve an unexpected problem that they or someone else had encountered – 35 percent have used their phones to do this in the past 30 days.

• •

  Decide whether to visit a business, such as a restaurant – 30 percent have used their phone to do this in the past 30 days.

• •

  Find information to help settle an argument they were having – 27 percent have used their phone to get information for that reason in the past 30 days.

• •

  Look up a score of a sporting event – 23 percent have used their phone to do that in the past 30 days.

• •

  Get up-to-the-minute traffic or public transit information to find the fastest way to get somewhere – 20 percent have used their phone to get that kind of information in the past 30 days.

• •

  Get help in an emergency situation – 19 percent have used their phone to do that in the past 30 days.

Overall, these “just-in-time” cell users – defined as anyone who has done one or more of the above activities using their phone in the preceding 30 days – amount to 62 percent of the entire adult population.

The results in this report are based on data from telephone interviews conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates International from March 15 to April 3, 2012, among a sample of 2,254 adults, age 18 and older. Telephone interviews were conducted in English and Spanish by landline (1,351) and cell phone (903, including 410 without a landline phone). For results based on the total sample, one can say with 95 percent confidence that the error attributable to sampling is ±2.4 percentage points. For results based on internet users (n=1,803), the margin of sampling error is plus or minus 2.7 percentage points.

Report (.pdf): http://pewinternet.org/∼/media//Files/Reports/2012/PIP_Just_In_Time_Info.pdf

Utopia Documents PDF viewer enables readers independently to enrich scientific PDFs and make them web-linkable

The new version of the free Utopia Documents scientific PDF-viewer has been released. It is freely downloadable from http://utopiadocs.com and currently available for Mac and Windows with a Linux version coming shortly.

The Utopia Documents PDF-viewer bridges the “linkability gap” between HTML and PDF, and makes the latter just as easily linked-in to the web as the former (as long as you are online, of course). Utopia Documents allows you, if you so wish, to experience dynamically enriched scientific articles. From whichever publisher, since Utopia Documents is completely publisher-independent, providing enrichment for any modern PDF*, even “informal” ones in made by authors of their manuscript (e.g. via “Save as PDF” in their word processing software) and deposited in institutional or other open repositories. (*Older, bitmap-only PDFs – essentially just image scans – are certainly readable with Utopia Documents, but link-outs to the web are mostly not possible.)

“Enrichment” means easy link-outs, directly from highlighted text in the PDF, to an ever-expanding variety of data sources and scientific information and search tools. It means the possibility to export any tables into a spreadsheet format, and a “toggle” that converts numerical tables into easy-to-read scatter plots. It means Altmetrics, whenever available, that let you see how articles are doing. It means a comments function that lets you carry out relevant discussions that stay right with the paper, rather than having to go off onto a blog somewhere. It means being able to quickly flick through the images and illustrations in an article.

With Utopia Documents, publishers, repositories, and libraries can offer enriched scientific articles just by encouraging the scientists and students they serve to use the free Utopia Documents PDF-viewer, and so make more of the scientific literature at hand. Utopia Documents is truly free, and not even registration is needed. (Only those who want to use the comment function need to register, because for reasons of maintaining the integrity of scientific discourse, Utopia Documents does not allow anonymous comments.)

Some journals, such as the Biochemical Journal published by Portland Press, and the Royal Society of Chemistry, provide extra tags in their PDFs that enable Utopia Documents to extend its functionality even further, for instance by rendering pictures of protein structures into dynamic, rotatable, manipulable 3D formats. Discussions are underway with other publishers to do the same.

Utopia Documents is usable in all scientific disciplines, but its link-out resources are currently especially optimised for the biomedical/biochemical spectrum.

Utopia Documents is free. Feedback is highly appreciated.

Utopia Documents: http://utopiadocs.com

TEI Boilerplate 1.0: lightweight solution for publishing styled TEI P5 content

The TEI Boilerplate Team at Indiana University has announced the release of TEI Boilerplate 1.0, a lightweight solution for publishing styled TEI P5 content directly in modern web browsers.

The typical method for publishing TEI on the web involves an often complex XSLT transformation from TEI to HTML, which results in the loss of much of the semantic richness of the original TEI document. TEI Boilerplate uses a relatively simple XSLT transformation to embed the entire TEI document inside an HTML5 shell, relying on CSS and JavaScript to format and process the TEI content. The TEI Boilerplate team hopes that this lightweight approach will provide a simple solution for publishing TEI content on the web, and it may be particularly useful in teaching contexts and in systems like Omeka. We further hope that this approach will foster innovation in the delivery and analysis of TEI content by exposing that content directly to the capabilities of modern web technologies: HTML5, CSS 3, JavaScript and the many popular JavaScript frameworks, such as JQuery and EXT JS.

TEI Boilerplate is open source and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

For more details, a demo file, download links, etc. please visit: http://teiboilerplate.org/

A crosswalk from ONIX Version 3.0 for books to MARC 21: report from OCLC research

A new report, “A Crosswalk from ONIX Version 3.0 for Books to MARC 21”, describes the crosswalk developed at OCLC for mapping the bibliographic elements defined in Version 3.0 of ONIX for books to MARC 21 with AACR2 encoding. It is an update to the previous report, Mapping ONIX to MARC, which was published in 2010 and focused on ONIX 2.1.

Written by Senior Research Scientist Carol Jean Godby, the report describes the layout of the crosswalk and a strategy for deriving ONIX 3.0 syntax from ONIX 2.1, including a note about how the translation logic is implemented at OCLC. It also builds a complex MARC record from ONIX 3.0 input, focusing on relationships that constitute an important source of shared value in the library and publisher communities, are newly introduced or extensively revised in ONIX 3.0, or illustrate unresolved conceptual problems with bibliographic description. In the process of creating this record, it becomes apparent that some of the concepts introduced in ONIX 3.0 are not easily expressed in a MARC record with AACR2 semantics. The report concludes by speculating about how the MARC output might be improved if the AACR2 semantics is replaced by RDA.

For a quick overview, watch the YouTube video of Carol Jean Godby summarizing the report. For more information about the work related to the report, see the Metadata Schema Transformation Services activity page on the OCLC Research web site.

Read the report, A Crosswalk from ONIX Version 3.0 for books to MARC 21 (www.oclc.org/research/publications/library/2012/2012-04r.htm).

Watch the video about the report (2:26): www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkMkd7Rm_1A

Metadata Schema Transformation Services: www.oclc.org/research/activities/schematrans/

Unglue.it launches with campaigns for books from five initial authors and publishers

Unglue.it is a crowdfunding platform which rewards rights holders for making their ebooks available to the world under a Creative Commons license (http://creativecommons.org). Unglue.it runs campaigns for previously published books, allowing book lovers to pledge toward giving them to the world. When rights holders’ target prices are reached, they receive funds in exchange for issuing an unglued ebook edition which can be freely read, copied, and shared, noncommercially, worldwide.

Unglue.it launched on May 17 with campaigns for books from five initial authors and publishers:

1. 1.

   Michael Laser, 6-321.

2. 2.

   Joseph Nassise, Riverwatch.

3. 3.

   Nancy Rawles, Love Like Gumbo.

4. 4.

   Budding Reader, Cat and Rat.

5. 5.

   Open Book Publishers, Oral Literature in Africa, by Ruth Finnegan.

Michael Laser (http://michaellaser.com) writes novels both for adults and young people, as well as short stories and nonfiction. His essays have been featured in The New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor, and Salon.com, among others.

Joe Nassise (http://josephnassise.com/) is the author of more than a dozen novels, including the TEMPLAR CHRONICLES series, the JEREMIAH HUNT trilogy, and the just-launched GREAT UNDEAD WAR series. He has written for both the comic and role-playing game industries and also served two terms as president of the Horror Writers Association, the world’s largest organization of professional horror and dark fantasy writers.

Nancy Rawles (www.nancyrawles.com) is the author of three critically-acclaimed and award-winning novels. Love Like Gumbo won an American Book Award for its portrayal of a lesbian daughter’s struggle for independence from her warm but suffocating family.

Budding Reader is an independent publisher which aims to make learning to read easier and more fun for all children, especially struggling readers. Their book sets incorporate research-based principles to build literacy skills. In addition, Budding Reader partners with literacy nonprofits to donate one ebook to a child in need for every book sold. Their non-profit partner, Worldreader, distributes e-readers and ebooks in the developing world.

Open Book is a scholarly publisher that is changing the nature of the traditional academic book. As a signatory of the Budapest Open Access Initiative, they offer free online editions of their books to benefit scholars worldwide, while also selling traditional print and electronic copies. This supports Open Book’s mission to spread educational materials to everyone, globally, not just to those who can afford it.

Unglue.it is a crowdfunding site that lets book lovers pay authors and publishers to make their already-published books free to the world under a Creative Commons license. If supporters pledge an amount chosen by the books’ rights holders before a given deadline, those books will be released as “unglued” ebook editions. For these campaigns, deadlines vary from approximately two to six months, and funding goals from approximately $5,000 to $25,000.

As the popularity of ebooks skyrockets, readers have been discovering both their convenience and their disadvantages. Proprietary formats and digital rights management (DRM) technology lock ebooks to specific devices and make it hard for people to keep reading their books as technology changes. Many ebooks cannot even be lent by libraries. Unglued ebooks solve these problems. They have no DRM and can be copied and shared without infringing copyright due to the Creative Commons license. Instead of receiving royalties, rights holders are paid one licensing fee of their choosing in advance. Book lovers pledge toward this fee using the Unglue.it platform.

“The ebook technology revolution creates new opportunities for innovative markets that support readers, authors, publishers, and libraries”, said Eric Hellman, President of Gluejar, Inc., the company behind Unglue.it. “Our crowdfunding platform will help the books that we love join the public commons for all to enjoy and cherish, while still respecting copyright and creators’ livelihoods”.

Unglue.it: https://unglue.it/

LexisNexis partners with OverDrive to debut digital library

LexisNexis Legal & Professional has announced an agreement with OverDrive, a global distributor of ebooks and other digital content to libraries and schools, to create the LexisNexis Digital Library.

LexisNexis Digital Library is an innovative new service that offers legal professionals access to the largest collection of authoritative legal ebook content on all major mobile devices and desktop platforms. It also enables organizations to share individual ebook titles among multiple users, purchase ebooks centrally and manage their library efficiently. With the service, organizations can significantly reduce the costs associated with storing, filing and distributing traditional print books.

“As today’s lawyers increasingly use tablets, smart phones and laptops as part of their everyday work, they need more flexible and cost-effective ways to use and share legal eBooks”, said Bob Romeo, CEO of Research & Litigation Solutions at LexisNexis Legal & Professional. Working with OverDrive, we have created LexisNexis Digital Library so our customers have quick mobile or desktop access to more trusted legal ebooks than any other source, along with the ability to economically expand and manage their library.

The core of LexisNexis Digital Library is a web site created by OverDrive and customized for each law firm or organization. A librarian or designated administrator serves as the manager of a virtual library, ordering titles and supervising lending of all electronic content. This arrangement is more efficient compared to each individual ebook user purchasing and managing his or her own digital content. Additionally, the site enables the administrator to generate detailed reports to better understand ebook usage patterns and to inform better digital content decisions for the firm or organization.

Legal professionals at organizations that have LexisNexis Digital Library access, check out, and return titles via the primary web site, a mobile-optimized version of the site or through a downloadable mobile application. In addition to simultaneous access to many titles for multiple users, users may also check out multiple copies of the same ebook depending on how many copies the library purchases. Additionally, each ebook title has a check out expiration deadline that automatically returns it to the library for use by others.

Users of the LexisNexis Digital Library have access to the largest collection of ebooks for legal professionals. LexisNexis offers more than 1,100 electronic legal titles itself and, as a result of the agreement with OverDrive, LexisNexis customers also have access to and the ability to purchase more than 700,000 titles from OverDrive’s Content Reserve collection development portal, which offers a variety of subjects from business and technology to travel and language learning.

LexisNexis ebooks are compatible with a wide variety of major devices, including Windows PC, Mac, iPod, iPhone, iPad, Kindle™ (US only), Sony Reader, NOOK™, Android™, BlackBerry and Windows Phone. Similarly, LexisNexis Digital Library web sites and mobile apps will work on all major devices. Additionally, because the new LexisNexis Digital Library is publisher agnostic, users can also add titles from other publishers and centrally manage their loan – eliminating the inefficiency of using multiple platforms or sites to manage an entire collection.

LexisNexis Digital Library is customized for each law firm, corporation or organization, with flexible licensing to fit the specific needs of each individual customer. The solution also offers significant cost savings by eliminating the cost of printed books and the need to replace books that users do not return. Digital libraries also reduce the costs associated with the physical management and shelving of books.

More information about LexisNexis Digital Library: www.lexisnexis.com/ebooks/lending/

iVerse media launches library initiative with Comicsplus Library Edition

iVerse Media, creators of some of the world’s most popular and widely used technologies for reading digital comics and graphic novels, have announced their new “ComicsPlus Library Edition” initiative. This is a pay-per-checkout program at libraries that allows patrons access to thousands of comic and graphic novel titles on demand. The program is unique among digital delivery systems offered to libraries in that it was actually designed in cooperation with librarians.

“The program is offered at no risk to libraries”, said Josh Elder, President and Founder of Reading with Pictures, a 501(c)3 nonprofit, and an industry specialist who is also leading iVerse’s efforts on the project. “And we do all the work and the libraries have complete control over the budget, so there’s no downside to their involvement”.

“We’ve worked very closely with the library community to ensure that this program more than meets expectations”, said iVerse CEO Michael Murphey. “Librarians have long recognized the importance of comics, graphic novels and manga in driving traffic into libraries and serving more patrons on a regular basis”.

While all publishers will find the program beneficial, mid-size and educational publishers may reap the greatest rewards with the opportunity to showcase a large catalog of content. That being said, Elder notes that some of the biggest publishers and most recognizable brands and properties will also be part of the ComicsPlus Library Edition.

The program is simple and invites library patrons to choose from a vast catalog of content. This content is accessed through a library’s web portal in much the same way other digital content offered by that library is accessed. Patrons are able to search, check out and engage with content on most major devices, including PC, Mac, iPad, Nook and Kindle Fire. Libraries are charged a small amount whenever a book or graphic novel is checked out; this revenue is split among participating publishers.

Patrons will find not only new releases, but also have the opportunity to read back list titles, which they might never have discovered otherwise. The program is customizable to provide local control of content and patron accessibility. “I’ve been working the non-profit world as an advocate for comics in schools and libraries and this is a natural extension of that”, said Elder. “We’re treating publishers fairly and offering the librarians the service they’ve been waiting for at a price they feel”. The ComicsPlus Library Edition is one of a number of digital delivery advancements and industry supportive initiatives announced by iVerse coming out of the recent Chicago Comics and Entertainment Expo.

iVerse Media (www.iversemedia.com) is a digital content distributor focused on the world of comics and popular culture. Founded in 2008, the company was one of the first to launch digital comics on Apple’s iOS platform. Over 8 million products in the iOS App Store have been downloaded that are powered by iVerse, making the “iVerse Engine” one of the most popular and widely used platforms for reading digital comics in the world.

More information: http://comicspl.us/iverse-media-launches-library-initiative-with-comicsplus-library-edition/

Library of Congress announces modeling initiative

The Library of Congress (LC) has announced that it has contracted with Zepheira to help accelerate the launch of the Bibliographic Framework Initiative. A major focus of the project is to translate the MARC 21 format to a Linked Data (LD) model while retaining as much as possible the robust and beneficial aspects of the historical format. Zepheira brings to the project extensive experience in LD technology for library applications.

Eric Miller, who was a leader in the Semantic Web Initiative in its early days for the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and who has also worked in the library and information science field, leads the Zepheira team. The company, under Mr Miller’s leadership, has been active in the development of Semantic Web and Library standards as well as open source tools to support LD technologies and library applications. These activities represent knowledge and experience that are instrumental for constructing a core data model and to support prototype services that will serve as a basis for a new bibliographic framework and related services.

The LC has asked Zepheira to provide a model (or models) that can serve as a strong starting point for discussion, and an analysis of related initiatives underway that will be useful to this effort. LC expects that the proposed model(s) will change and be further tuned based on valuable feedback from the community and a natural progression of requirements as they are addressed. The initial model(s) will serve as a basis for work focused on a demonstration system/service which will then, in turn, be used to further refine the model(s). The expectation is that such iterative feedback loops will eventually ensure a flexible bibliographic framework, a robust reference code, a supporting infrastructure for deployment, and an effective migration plan to support the community in making a transition from MARC to a new framework.

The LC will now proceed to organize various scenarios to enable community participation that will be broad and include international users and partners, various types of information agencies and libraries, and library suppliers. We will be posting information as it emerges from this initial work, especially relating to projected milestones at the Bibliographic Framework Transition Initiative web site (www.loc.gov/marc/transition).

The library intends to offer its plan of action for discussion and community input at the American Library Association Annual Conference in Anaheim, California. Eric Miller will join the library in this update session. (LC Bibliographic Framework Transition Update Forum, Sunday, June 24, 10:30am-12:00 noon, Anaheim Marriott Grand Salon A-C.)

Bibliographic Framework Transition Initiative web site: www.loc.gov/marc/transition

Virtual International Authority File service transitions to OCLC

Virtual International Authority File (VIAF), a project that virtually combines multiple name authority files into a single name authority service, has transitioned to become an OCLC service. OCLC will continue to make VIAF openly accessible and will also work to incorporate VIAF into various OCLC services.

This transition from an interim, shared-governance arrangement to OCLC having primary responsibility for maintenance of VIAF and offering it as an OCLC service is done in agreement with institutions participating in VIAF. The change has been made to assure that VIAF will be well-positioned to scale efficiently as a long-term, cooperative activity. The transition also assures that http://viaf.org will continue to have appropriate infrastructure to respond to rising levels of traffic as VIAF gains momentum and popularity as a resource for library authority work and LD activities.

The institutions contributing to VIAF will continue to help shape VIAF’s direction through participation in a newly-formed VIAF Council which will provide guidance on policies, practices and operation of VIAF. At present, 22 agencies from 19 countries have contributed data to VIAF. Data is contributed on a non-exclusive basis.

Concurrent with the change in governance structure, OCLC has begun transitioning operational responsibility for VIAF from OCLC Research to OCLC’s production areas. VIAF will continue to be made available through: http://viaf.org

“The Library of Congress is pleased to be part of this international service”, said Beacher Wiggins, Director for Acquisitions & Bibliographic Access, LC. “VIAF has already proven itself as a trusted source of authoritative data for the library community. We expect to see its importance to other communities grow in the coming years.”

“VIAF is strongly used by German libraries and its authority records are often integrated in the cataloging workflow”, according to Dr Elisabeth Niggemann, Director General, German National Library. “The Library is most grateful that OCLC will continue to operate VIAF on the basis of a new agreement and looks forward to an even closer cooperation with OCLC and the other VIAF contributors.”

“Matching national authority files for persons and corporate bodies enables their mutual consolidation at the international level”, commented Bruno Racine, President, National Library of France. “VIAF allows the exposure on the Web of highly trusted data, demonstrating the value of authority work done for so many years by national libraries and bibliographic agencies. The new Agreement confirms the free re-use of VIAF data, including the commercial re-use of data according to the ODC-By license. We expect that this broader opening of access to VIAF will encourage multilingualism and the creation of new services beyond the library world, including for data mining, intellectual property rights management, etc.”

A brief history of the organization of VIAF:

• •

  In April 1998, the United States LC, the German National Library (Deutsche Nationalbibliothek, or DNB) and OCLC embarked on a proof-of-concept project to test linking each other’s authority records for personal names.

• •

  The VIAF consortium was formed by written agreement of LC, DNB and OCLC signed on August 6, 2003, during the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) Conference in Berlin, Germany.

• •

  The National Library of France (Bibliothèque nationale de France, or BnF) joined the consortium with an agreement effective October 5, 2007.

• •

  These four organizations – LC, DNB, BnF, and OCLC – assumed the role of principals in the consortium, having joint responsibility for VIAF with OCLC hosting VIAF and supplying the software, and the participating institutions supplying the authority and bibliographic data content. Additional organizations later joined the consortium as contributors, providing source files and expertise to advance the state of VIAF.

• •

  With the successful proof of concept of VIAF, discussions begin in earnest among the principals in 2010 about a suitable long-term organizational arrangement for VIAF. After considering various options, the principals and contributors agreed to transition VIAF to an OCLC service. During 2011 details of the transition were discussed and agreed to.

More information about VIAF is available at: www.oclc.org/viaf/

NISO recommended practice PIE-J: presentation and identification of e-journals

The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) has released the draft recommended practice “PIE-J: Presentation & Identification of E-Journals” (NISO RP-16-201x) for public review and comment through July 5, 2012. This recommended practice was developed to provide guidance on the presentation of e-journals – particularly in the areas of title presentation, accurate use of International Standard Serial Number (ISSN), and citation practices – to publishers and platform providers, as well as to solve some long-standing concerns of serials librarians. In addition to the recommendations, the document includes extensive examples of good practices using screenshots from various publishers’ online journals platforms; a discussion of helpful resources for obtaining title history and ISSN information; an overview of the ISSN and key points for using it correctly; an explanation of the digital object identifier (DOIR), the registration agency CrossRef, and tips on using DOIs for journal title management; and a review of related standards and recommended practices.

Citations form the basis for much scholarly research. Connecting researchers with appropriate content is the goal of OpenURL linking and other reference linking systems. Unless journal web sites accurately and uniformly list all the titles under which content was published, user access to desired content is considerably diminished. For example, many e-journal publishers and aggregators now place digitized content originally published under an earlier title on the web site for the current title, using the current ISSN, thus seriously impeding the researcher’s ability to find or identify the content being sought. The PIE-J project was initiated to address these issues. The PIE-J recommended practice provides a clear and succinct list of guidelines that publishers can easily implement to facilitate long-term access to their e-journal content. This constructive advice will aid publishers with the presentation of born-digital content as well as supporting the continued digitization of content from journals originally published only in print”.

The PIE-J draft recommended practice and an online commenting form are available from the NISO PIE-J workroom at: www.niso.org/workrooms/piej/

DMPTool adds links to DataBib registry of repositories

A number of US funding agencies such as the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) require researchers to supply detailed, cost-effective plans for managing research data, called Data Management Plans.

Several universities and organizations are developing the DMPTool to help researchers meet these new requirements. In specific, the DMPTool will help researchers:

• •

  Create ready-to-use data management plans for specific funding agencies.

• •

  Meet requirements for data management plans.

• •

  Get step-by-step instructions and guidance for data management plan.

• •

  Learn about resources and services available at their institution to fulfill the data management requirements of their grants.

A group of major research institutions has partnered to create this flexible online tool to help researchers generate data management plans. This effort is in direct response to demands from funding agencies, such as the NSF and the NIH, that researchers plan for managing their research data. By joining forces the contributing institutions are able to consolidate expertise and reduce costs in addressing data management needs. The primary goal of the partnership is to simplify the process of creating plans while increasing the quality of decisions made by funders to pre-define policies and infrastructures that support research activities.

This is the list of original contributing institutions:

• •

  The University of California Curation Center (UC3) at the California Digital Library.

• •

  DataONE.

• •

  Digital Curation Centre (UK).

• •

  Smithsonian Institution.

• •

  University of California, Los Angeles Library.

• •

  University of California, San Diego Libraries.

• •

  University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

• •

  University of Virginia Library.

Contributing institutions can submit information pointing to their resources and services to aid researchers with data management. Institutions can also provide customized help and even suggest answers to the questions asked by funding agencies.

Persons affiliated with contributing institutions can login with their own institutional accounts. Persons not affiliated with contributing institutions can set up an account on the DMP Tool itself.

As recently announced on the DMPTool blog, DMPTool has added links to DataBib, a registry of repositories for research data. DataBib is collaboration between Purdue and Penn State, and the registry describes and links to hundreds of data repositories. Some repositories accept data submissions in particular disciplines, so if you are looking for an appropriate place for your data, DataBib may help you find repositories in your field.

DMPTool is a service of the University of California Curation Center of the California Digital Library.

Data Management Plan Tool home: https://dmp.cdlib.org/

More info on DataBib at their web site: http://databib.org

Mellon grant supports phase 2 of social networks and archival context (SNAC)

The California Digital Library (CDL) has announced that the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation is supporting a second phase of the SNAC project, which will dramatically expand the range of source data for research and demonstration purposes.

SNAC is a collaboration between project partners at the University of Virginia, Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities; UC Berkeley School of Information; and the CDL. The second phase of the project will span from 2012 to 2014.

The SNAC project is addressing a longstanding research challenge: discovering, locating, and using distributed historical records. Scholars use these records as primary evidence for the lives and work of historical persons and the events in which they participated. These records are held in archives and manuscript libraries, large and small, around the world, and scholars may need to search scores of different archives, following clues, hunches, and leads to find the records relevant to their topic (and it is likely that at least some records will remain undiscovered). SNAC aims to not only make the records more easily discovered and accessed but also, and at the same time, build an unprecedented resource that provides access to the socio-historical contexts (which includes people, families, and corporate bodies) in which the records were created.

The project uses a recently released Society of American Archivists communication standard for encoding information about persons, corporate bodies, and families, Encoded Archival Context-Corporate Bodies, Persons, and Families (EAC-CPF). EAC-CPF standardizes descriptions of people and groups who are documented in archival records.

The pilot stage of the project was funded by a 2010 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, which supported development of a prototype historical research and access system. This next stage encompasses a range of tasks: the project team will vastly expand the source data employed in the project; develop new methods and tools for extracting and assembling archival authority descriptions; enhance methods for matching and combining records describing the same entity; develop methods for accommodating descriptive data in languages other than English; add geographic coordinates to place names; develop timeline-map rendering of chronological biographies or histories (lists of dates, places, and events); enable scholarly users of the prototype to query social-professional networks; develop graphical displays of complex, dense networks; and develop graphical displays of organizational charts, and sequential displays of organizations merging or dividing.

Thirteen consortia and over thirty-five leading research repositories in the US, UK, and France are contributing source data, either finding aids or archival authority records. Among the contributing repositories are the US National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), Smithsonian Institution, LC, British Library (BL), Archives nationales (France), and the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF). OCLC WorldCat is contributing over one million MARC archival descriptions. OCLC VIAF and the Getty Vocabulary Program are contributing authority records to be used in match processing. By expanding the quantity and diversity of the data, the project will be able to further develop its processing, indexing, and display methods, public interface design, as well as address the challenge of scale.

SNAC project: http://socialarchive.iath.virginia.edu/

New DuraCloud digital preservation and archiving services

On May 1 the DuraSpace organization announced new DuraCloud subscription plans that offer three levels of cost effective digital preservation and archiving services in the cloud. Prices for the new subscription plans are competitive with commercial cloud providers and do not require additional transfer or variable costs.

DuraCloud customers of the managed service can now choose between three plans that offer various solutions for preservation and enterprise use cases. The DuraCloud Preservation Basic subscription is great for institutions that would like to have two redundant copies of their original content stored at one cloud data center. For added protection, the DuraCloud Preservation Plus plan is perfect for institutions that wish to have four redundant copies of their original content stored at two cloud data centers. The DuraCloud Enterprise subscription plan provides a full suite of configurable DuraCloud features and is ideal for institutions that need multiple DuraCloud sub-accounts for departments, research groups, cross institutional projects, or individuals. To ensure preservation of irreplaceable content DuraCloud now offers automated weekly content health checks, reporting, file repair and more.

For archiving digital library materials and research output from academic institutions, museums, government organizations and professional organizations DuraCloud is the only managed software service that archives content across more than one cloud provider so that documents, imagery and videos are always accessible. DuraCloud runs on Amazon AWS, Rackspace and, in the near future, on the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) Cloud – the largest academic-based cloud storage system in the US DuraCloud provides customers with:

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  Copies of content stored with multiple providers.

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  Automated health checking of content, so files are never corrupted or lost.

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  Automated repair of damaged files for Preservation Plus customers.

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  A full suite of reports that let you more effectively manage your content.

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  Online sharing and streaming to any internet-linked device.

For more information, including the full list of features for each plan, please visit: http://duracloud.org/pricing

DigCurV report on survey of training needs in digital preservation and curation

Last year, the EU project Digital Curation Vocational Education Europe (DigCurV) conducted a survey on the training needs in digital curation and preservation.

Stefan Strathmann and Claudia Engelhardt of the Goettingen State and University Library announce that the survey report is now available on the DigCurV web site.

“Thanks to the input of 454 survey participants, there was a broad basis for analysis. The report presents the results of the survey on training needs as well as the outcomes of a series of focus groups on the same topic and of an analysis of job advertisements for positions in the field”.

“Our research indicates that a great majority of organisations in the cultural heritage and education sectors are facing the challenge of digital preservation. However, there is a lack of qualified staff as well as a lack of training offers for existing staff in the area. The need for training is urgent with regard to digital preservation-specific as well as to general skills and competences”.

“The great demand for training in digital preservation and curation, which is suggested by our findings, calls for increased efforts in the development and extension of respective training measures”.

“The report on the survey of training needs together with the report on the DigCurV baseline survey on training opportunities and the DigCurV evaluation framework will be used as a background for developing a curriculum framework for vocational education and training in the field”.

Report available at:

www.digcur-education.org/eng/Resources/Report-and-analysis-on-the-training-needs-survey

More information about the activities of DigCurV: www.digcur-education.org/eng/About

CNI Spring 2012 membership meeting materials now available

Presentation materials and handouts for many of the Spring 2012 CNI membership meeting breakout sessions are now available from the project briefing (presentation) pages at the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) web site. Among the presentations:

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  Archiving large swaths of user-contributed digital content: lessons from Archiving the Occupy Movement (Howard Besser, New York University; David Millman, New York University; Sharon M. Leon, George Mason University; Kristine Hanna, Internet Archive).

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  LD for libraries: why should we care? Where should we start? (Jennifer Bowen, University of Rochester; Philip E. Schreur, Stanford University).

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  The CDL and the Public Knowledge Project Partnership: a New Model of Collaborative Institutional Repository Publishing Services Development (Lisa Schiff, University of California; Brian Owen, Simon Fraser University; Catherine Mitchell, University of California).

Interviews conducted by EDUCAUSE at the meeting are now beginning to come in, including a talk with David Weinberger, senior researcher at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University and author of the book Too Big To Know. The conversation with Weinberger is online at: www.educause.edu/node/250374; more interviews conducted at CNI’s spring meeting will published on Gerry Bayne’s EDUCAUSE blog at www.educause.edu/blog/gbayne as they become available.

Videos from selected sessions are coming soon. All meeting materials will be accessible from the meeting site as they become available.

CNI Spring 2012 meeting page: www.cni.org/mm/spring-2012/

Presentation pages: www.cni.org/mm/spring-2012/project-briefings-presentations/