From the introduction:

With this site, Library and Archives Canada (LAC), in co-operation with the Canada Gazette Directorate, Public Works and Government of Services Canada, will make the Gazette available online, in its entirety, for the first time.

Current issues of the Canada Gazette have been available to Canadians at most libraries and through subscription, and the Canada Gazette Directorate has a searchable database on its website of all issues since 1998 (http://canadagazette.gc.ca/index-e.html). However, an online database that includes all issues of the Canada Gazette dating back to 1841 and searchable by keyword is a major achievement that allows even greater access to this very important resource.

By the end of 2008, visitors to this site will be able to access all issues of the Canada Gazette, from its beginning in 1841 until 1998. For those issues currently available on this site, please go to Search the Canada Gazette.

The database comprises images taken from microfilm, microfiche and rare original copies of the Gazette held by LAC. The digitization of this material, which began in 2007, is still underway. By the end of 2008, visitors to this site will be able to access all issues of the Canada Gazette, from its beginning in 1841 until 1998. For those issues currently available on this site, please go to Search the Canada Gazette.

Source: Library and Archives Canada

The National Diet Library of Japan (NDL) has announced the publication of “Ensuring long-term preservation and usability of digital information” on its website. This page describes the needs to ensure long-term preservation and accessibility of digital information, including Internet resources and packaged digital publications such as CDs, DVDs and software.

Direct to Full Text Report (in English)

Source: National Diet Library of Japan

PubChemSR: A search and retrieval tool for PubChem

Background: Recent years have seen an explosion in the amount of publicly available chemical and related biological information. A significant step has been the emergence of PubChem, which contains property information for millions of chemical structures, and acts as a repository of compounds and bioassay screening data for the NIH Roadmap. There is a strong need for tools designed for scientists that permit easy download and use of these data. We present one such tool, PubChemSR. Implementation PubChemSR (Search and Retrieve) is a freely available desktop application written for Windows using Microsoft .NET that is designed to assist scientists in search, retrieval and organization of chemical and biological data from the PubChem database. It employs SOAP web services made available by NCBI for extraction of information from PubChem. Results and Discussion: The program supports a wide range of searching techniques, including queries based on assay or compound keywords and chemical substructures. Results can be examined individually or downloaded and exported in batch for use in other programs such as Microsoft Excel. We believe that PubChemSR makes it straightforward for researchers to utilize the chemical, biological and screening data available in PubChem. We present several examples of how it can be used.

+ Full Paper (PDF; 670 KB)
Source: Chemistry Central Journal

From the article:

Will the world’s biggest book seller become the world’s biggest book publisher? Authors hope so.

What would this mean for libraries, cataloging, and bibliographic control?

Source: Forbes

The National Archives has published its Strategy for Digitizing Archival Materials, 2007–2016.

Direct to Full Text

Source: NARA

Articles include:

+ PREMIS With a Fresh Coat of Paint: Highlights from the Revision of the PREMIS Data Dictionary for Preservation Metadata

+ A Year of Selective Web Archiving with the Web Curator Tool at the National Library of New Zealand

+ Considering the User Perspective: Research into Usage and Communication of Digital Information

+ Adding Value to the Library Catalog by Implementing a Recommendation System

Articles include:

+++ Library Research Skills: A Needs Assessment for Graduate Student Workshops
by Kristin Hoffmann, Fred Antwi-Nsiah, Vivian Feng, and Meagan Stanley,
The University of Western Ontario

+++ Providing Information Literacy Instruction to Graduate Students through
Literature Review Workshops
by Hannah Gascho Rempel, Oregon State University and Jeanne Davidson,
Arizona State University

+++ Evolution of Reference: A New Service Model for Science and Engineering
Libraries
by Marianne Stowell Bracke, Purdue University, Sainath Chinnaswamy,
University of Arizona, and Elizabeth Kline, University of Arizona

+++ Does Chemistry Content in a State Electronic Library Meet the Needs of
Smaller Academic Institutions and Companies?
by Meghan Lafferty, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities

Turner Entertainment is offering a new system intended to pair commercials with relevant moments in the shows they interrupt.

TV in Context involves combing through the thousands of properties in the Turner Entertainment library, cataloging scenes by subject matter and tracking the commercials that agencies deliver to the networks to run. The first placements are available in the fall.

Source: NY Times

Direct to announcement:

What our president said to the nation, what the nation said to the universe, and a cornucopia of musical milestones highlight the major themes of the 2007 National Recording Registry. Librarian of Congress James H. Billington today named 25 additions to the National Recording Registry of the Library of Congress as part of its efforts to preserve the nation’s aural history.

Read the rest of this entry »

Direct to Abstract and Full Text Link
by: Quinn, A., Hu, C., Arisaka, T., Rose, A., Bederson, B. (May 2008)
Readability of scanned books in digital libraries. In Proceeding of the Twenty-Sixth Annual SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Florence, Italy, April 05 - 10, 2008). CHI ‘08. ACM, New York, NY, 705-714.

Source: Human Computer Interation Lab, University of Maryland

Adapting Web Archive Catalogues for Dynamic Change.
Wu, Paul H-J and Ichsan, Tamsir P. and Nguyen, Ngoc Giang (2007)
In Julien, Masanes and Andreas, Rauber, Eds. Proceedings The Seventh International Workshop of Archiving Web, Vancouver, Canada.

Web archives are an important source of information. However, before a Web archive can be properly utilized, it needs to be catalogued. This is to ensure that the accessed materials yield the historical understanding intended by the researcher. At the same time, the dynamic nature of the Web will easily render these catalogues outdated, and there is a constant need to monitor when the Web catalogues become irrelevant upon change of the Web content. This means a substantial amount of human effort is required to maintain the catalogue records for the Web archives, adding additional burden to any institutions that maintain it. In this paper, we propose an automatic mechanism to monitor changes in Web content, so that human workload can be reduced. The system combines two component technologies to make this possible: (1) a contextualized annotation module and (2) an evidence change detection module. Contextualized annotation enables the cataloguing process to link content on the Web page (the evidence), to the value assigned for an element of a metadata schema. Thus, the metadata is “supported” by certain Web content that functions as evidence for a cataloguing decision. Regardless of changes in the webpages outside of the evidence, the metadata remains valid as long as all the evidence remains the same. In order to achieve evidence-specific change detection, we need to extend the traditional Longest Common Subsequence (LCS) based Diff engine using a Page Coordinate translation algorithm, which we argue, through a survey, is the first among many other Web content monitoring approaches.

Source: (via d-LIST)

From the article:

Laura N. Gassaway, a law professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who thinks a lawsuit against Georgia State University’s electronic reserve system has implications for other colleges.

Source: Wired Campus

Articles include

+ Custom-built Search Engines

+ Metadata for Learning Resources: An Update on Standards Activity for 2008

+ South African Repositories: Bridging Knowledge Divides

+ Towards an Application Profile for Images

+ Intute Integration

+ Research Libraries and the Power of the Co-operative

+ Digital Lives: Report of Interviews with the Creators of Personal Digital Collections

Library of Congress Digital Preservation Newsletter

In this issue:

* Digital Preservation Pioneer: Caroline Arms
* Information about open sustainable formats
* Updates from digital preservation partners

Source: LC

From the post summary:

A US software developer, Jake Luciani, has determined the best days and times to publish blog posts, analyzing the connection between timing and popularity on social bookmarking sites such as Del.icio.us, Digg, Reddit and Mixx.The conclusions are straightforward: Thursdays are the best day, and the best times are between 1pm and 3pm PST (after lunch) or between 5pm and 7pm PST (after work). The worst times to post are between 3pm and 5pm PST on weekends.Although these results are intuitive, this informal study can serve as a useful reminder to bloggers. On the other hand, it can also further lead to popularity-driven editing.For his experiment, Luciani used popularity ranking engine AideRSS. For more details about the methodology, which is subject click below.Times in the graphs are GMT.

Sources: ReadWriteWeb, Journerdism, Editors Weblog
Thanks Pete W.