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GAO — National Archives: Progress and Risks in Implementing its Electronic Records Archive Initiative

Friday, November 6th, 2009

National Archives: Progress and Risks in Implementing its Electronic Records Archive Initiative (PDF: 154 KB)
From Highlights (PDF; 45 KB):

NARA has completed two of five planned increments of ERA, but has experienced schedule delays and cost overruns, and several functions planned for the system’s initial release were deferred. Although NARA initially planned for the system to be capable of ingesting federal and presidential records in September 2007, the two system increments to support those records did not achieve initial operating capability until June 2008 and December 2008, respectively. In addition, NARA reportedly spent about $80 million on the base increment, compared to its planned cost of about $60 million. Finally, a number of functions originally planned for the base increment were deferred to later increments, including the ability to delete records and to ingest redacted records. In fiscal year 2010, NARA plans to complete the third increment, which is to include new systems for Congressional records and public access, and begin work on the fourth.

Source: Government Accountability Office (David A. Powner, director, information technology management issues, before the Subcommittee on Information Policy, Census and National Archives, House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform)

Posted in Access to Information, Archives and Special Collections, Government Documents and Political Information, Info Management and Retrieval, Search News, Technology and Internet | No Comments »

Learn About and Try OpenCalais (a Free Service from Thomson Reuters)

Friday, November 6th, 2009

OpenCalais (OC) is a free service that we first mentioned six months ago and have mentioned several times since. This post from June, 2009 mentions some of the organizations using the service from Thomson Reuters.

In a nutshell, OpenCalais uses semantic technology and natural language processing to analyze text and add metadata by drawing out entities from documents, blog posts, news stories, etc. In some cases, ths type of data can identify or help identify relationships between people, businesses, etc.

A visualization tool might make OpenCalais even more powerful. For example in might be interesting for visualization tools like Muckety or NNDB Mapper and to quickly “see” relationships that might go unnoticed without OpenCalais or other services.

Sure, it would be wonderful if all web content could be analyzed by a human and then have high quality metadata associated with it.

However, that’s far from possible given the massive amount of content generated each minute of each day.

You can try OpenCalais yourself by typing or pasting text into the viewer box.

We entered the full text of last Saturday’s Weekly Presidential Address and got back lots of stats and commentary.

+ Topic (Labor) Worth noting that we did not put the title of the address in the viewer box. The title is, “President Obama Says Recovery Act Creating Jobs and Strengthening Economy”

+ Social Tags Labor, Unemployment, Presidency of Barack Obama, etc.

+ Entities including: Cities (Arcadia, FL) is mentioned in speech Holiday (He ends by wishing everyone a Happy Halloween

+ Continent America (well we’ll got it some slack, close but incorrect) +Industry Terms Clean energy, Less Energy (Good)

+ Province or State Florida, again accurate Finally, Events & Facts

+ Generic Relations (announce, Florida,United States, the largest set of) First we were puzzled. Then, by cursoring over the entry, we see that it’s Florida having the largest set of clean energy projects.

Btw, if you cursor over any of the entities you’ll find additional info.

For example, with Florida we find a relevance score and the lat/long for Arcardia, FL, the town mentioned in the address.

Although we did see it in our document, OC might also provide direct links to Wikipedia, CIA World Factbook, etc.

Overall, very good. But, it’s just one example and one example search does not make a service.

One question that we would we would like to get an answer to is why ThomsonReuters is providing free access to OpenCalais? Does it plan to charge for additional services in the future?

UPDATE: Krista Thomas from OpenCalais sent along the following goals in a Twitter message.
1) Better software faster.
2) Connect all the worlds’ business information.

For bloggers, OC offers a WordPress plug-in, a service for Drupal users and more. The WordPress tool analyzes blog postings, suggests, and even images from Flickr.

Other services have technology that draws out indexing terms, descriptors, etc. but OpenCalais appears to be much more sophisticated. Somewhat similar is Silobreaker news search Silobreaker’s algorithm draws out entities from stories and then make them clickable or searchable. It also offers a couple of cool visualization tools.

Krista Thomas from OpenCalais recently gave a presentation to the San Diego Software Industry Council. Krista’s slides are available online. The charts on pages 4 and 5 are difficult to read so we’re trying to get copies to share..

At the present time

+ 18,000 Developers
+ 20+ Publishers
+ 50 Apps and Services Created
+ 4 million docs processed daily

Again, you can try OpenCalais yourself by typing or pasting text into the viewer box.

Finally, here’s one more OC example using the content from this post.

Overall, it’s easy to see how this service could be of value to both the individual blogger but even more so to publishing companies with a non-stop stream of of content.

Posted in Cataloging and Metadata, Digital Preservation, Info Management and Retrieval | No Comments »

Digital Preservation: ACM Will Partner with Portico and CLOCKSS for Preservation of Its Digital Library Resources

Friday, November 6th, 2009

From an Announcement:

ACM (the Association for Computing Machinery) announced today that it is providing its institutional library customers with advanced electronic archiving services to preserve their valuable electronic resources. These services, provided by Portico and CLOCKSS, address the scholarly community’s critical need for long-term solutions that assure reliable, secure, deliverable access to their burgeoning digital collection of scholarly works. ACM is offering these services to protect the vast online collection of resources in its Digital Library (DL), which are used by over 1 million computing professionals and students worldwide.

“By partnering with Portico and CLOCKSS, we are able to meet a growing demand in the library community for a trusted, reliable third-party archive, and to ensure that digital collections remain accessible to future scholars, researchers, and students,” said Scott Delman, ACM Group Publisher. “Scientific discovery and the educational process are not possible without reliable access to the accumulated scholarship of the past and secure preservation of the scholarly record, and these agreements are a clear step forward with the relationship between the ACM and the library community.”

By investing in long-term digital preservation of content, ACM’s aim is to make it easier for libraries to accelerate their transition away from print and free up resources invested in print collections in favor of new and innovative electronic products and services.

Much More After a Click
(more…)

Posted in Digital Preservation, Information Industry | No Comments »

New Video on Web Archiving

Friday, November 6th, 2009

From the Description:

Web content changes all the time. If we don’t save that content before it disappears, a major part of our cultural history will be lost.

The Library of Congress is working to provide permanent access to web content of historical importance. It selects websites for collection, requests permissions from the website owners, addresses the technology of collecting websites and preserves the websites and makes them available.

This video examines those four challenges.

Access the Video (embedded here)

A text transcript is also available (PDF)

Source: National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program

Posted in Archives and Special Collections, Digital Preservation, Info Management and Retrieval, Webcasts and Podcasts | No Comments »

Open Book Alliance Releases Baseline Requirements for Revised Google Book Settlement Proposal

Friday, November 6th, 2009

On Monday (November 9th), a revised proposed settlement (aka Settlement 2.0) from Google, the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publisher will be released. The Open Book Alliance (OBA) has posted on its web site what they call “baseline requirements” for the Settlement 2.0.

The Special Libraries Association and The New York Library Association are members of the OBA.

From the Blog Post:

The Open Book Alliance is issuing the following baseline requirements that the new settlement proposal must meet if it is to achieve those critical objectives. These requirements reflect the collective expression of concerns by the U.S. Department of Justice, authors, publishers, academics, libraries, foreign nations, state Attorneys General, consumer advocacy groups, and many others, and thus we think it appropriate to review the revised settlement within this framework.

[Snip]

+ The settlement must not grant Google an exclusive set of rights (de facto or otherwise) or result in any one entity gaining control over access to and distribution of the world’s largest digital database of books.

+ Authors and other rights holders must retain meaningful rights and the ability to determine the use of their works that have been scanned by Google.

+ The settlement must result in the creation of a true digital library that grants all researchers and users, commercial and non-commercial, full access that guarantees the ability to innovate on the knowledge it contains.

+ All class members must be treated equitably.

+ The settlement cannot provide for competition by making others engage in future litigation.

+ Congress must retain the exclusive authority granted by the U.S. Constitution to set copyright policy.

+ All rights holders impacted by the settlement must have a meaningful ability to receive notice, understand its terms and opt-out.

+ The parties that negotiated the settlement must live under the terms to which they seek to bind others, rather than their own separately negotiated arrangements.

Access the Complete Blog Post

Source: Open Book Alliance

See Also: Press Review: Judge Chin Sets Nov. 9 Deadline For Revised Google Book Settlement (via ResourceShelf, October 7, 2009)

Posted in Digitization Projects, Information Industry, Intellectual Property | No Comments »

New Research Paper from Stanford InfoLab: A Dynamic Navigation Guide for Webpages

Thursday, November 5th, 2009

Ed. Note: One thing that we used to do more of on ResourceShelf was to occasionally link to new and hopefully interesting research papers that we came across . Granted, the papers could sometimes get very technical (even for the editors) but those readers who could read the technical content appreciated the material while non-techies could get a good idea about the research by reading the abstract and usually the first several paragraphs of the paper. So, let’s restart this feature again with a new paper the InfoLab at Stanford Univesity.

A Dynamic Navigation Guide for Webpages (4 pages; PDF)
by Jawed Karim and Ioannis Antonellis and Varun Ganapathi and Hector Garcia-Molina
Note: This version of the paper has been submitted for publication

Navigating websites is often a frustrating process: Website visitors, despite their widely varying and individual information-seeking needs, must contend with static, general-purpose link structures that have been set in place by website owners. Because many visitors tend to browse for the same content, they are individually repeating the same navigation activity. Visitors would benefit from being able to take advantage of the collective search and discovery work that has already been performed by other visitors. Although many attempts have been made to improve website navigation by tapping into the “wisdom of the crowds”, the currently available approaches suffer from maintenance, usability, and user interface integration issues. We present a navigation guide for websites that provides visitors with helpful suggestions based on their browsing activity and the browsing activity of prior, similar visitors. Our navigation guide does not require any downloads, can be easily added to websites by website owners, and automatically remains up-to-date.

Sections of the Paper Include:

+ Introduction
+ Current Methods
+ The Wisdom of Crowds
+ A Dynamic Navigation Guide
+ How it Works
+ Related Work
+ Conclusion and Future Work

Source: Stanford InfoLab

Posted in Info Management and Retrieval, Information Seeking, Social Media, Technology and Internet | No Comments »

Webcast: Preserving OSTI’s Printed Archive

Thursday, November 5th, 2009

Webcast: Preserving OSTI’s Printed Archive
A three minute video from the Office of Scientific and Technical Information at the U.S. Department of Energy.

Here’s the Blurb:

The American public has invested billions of dollars in the atomic energy and subsequent related programs. This investment has mostly been in the form of the printed page. OSTIs historical preservation is described.

Direct to “Printed Archive” Video (via YouTube)

Direct to OSTI YouTube Channel

Direct to OSTI Home Page

While print preservation is essential, OSTI is home to many free online databases including:

+ Science Accelerator
+ Science.gov (Content from Many Government Databases, Search Tecnology from OSTI)
+ WorldWideScience (Global in Scope)
+ Information Bridge: DOE Scientific and Technical Information (Includes over 210K Full Text Documents)
+ DOE Data Explorer
+ Energy Citations Database
+ E-print Network
+ Several Others Linked on the OSTI Home Page

Source: OSTI

Posted in Databases, Directories, and Guides, Government Documents and Political Information, Preservation/Conservation, Print Publications, Resources, Science | No Comments »

Internet Archive Founder Brewster Kahle Profiled in Forbes

Wednesday, November 4th, 2009

Brewster Kahle has many titles. These days he’s best known as founder of the Internet Archive (home of The Wayback Machine) and founding member of the Open Content Alliance.

From the Article:

“We have to have universal access to everything, just like a library,” he says. “Do we want that under a single corporation’s control? It is openness, not corporate control, that propels capitalism.”

[Snip]

Digital libraries will shape education, creativity and our shared intellectual heritage, Kahle declares. As founder and director of the Internet Archive, Kahle has posted online digital copies of 1.7 million books, 100,000 hours of television, 200,000 video clips, 70,000 concerts and 415,000 audio recordings. All that material can be downloaded for free from the Archive’s Web site.

[Snip]

Bookserver* uses a range of open source and proprietary electronic book standards, search algorithms, editing tools and libraries. The architecture, as Kahle calls it, potentially separates manufacturers of devices from control over much of the content inside them. It also preserves the idea of the lending library–if you “check out” a volume, others cannot access it in the time allowed to you. Publishers sell their books in the system using credit cards.

The article continues with more about Google Book Search and Kahle’s background.

We were surprised not to see The Wayback Machine mentioned in the stats about the Internet Archive listed above. At the moment (and we know of nothing coming), “Wayback” is probably the best chance a researcher has to access a page no longer on the Internet. Material in “Wayback” dates back to 1996 and as of today, contains more than 150 BILLION archived pages. The Internet Archive also offers a fee-based service that helps organizations organize and archive their web content. It’s called, Archive-It.

* See Also: We Have an In-Depth Post About Bookserver on ResourceShelf
It Includes an comprehensive press review the day after the Bookserver announcement.

Source: Forbes

Posted in Archives and Special Collections, Digital Repositories, Digitization Projects, E-books, Information Industry | No Comments »

Bibliotheca Alexandrina: A Digital Revival

Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009

The Bibliotheca Alexandrina is one busy place. If you want to learn more read on through our highlights but make sure to read the complete article. Our highlights is just a sample of what’s going on.

From the Article:

The International School of Information Science (ISIS) a research institute affiliated with the BA [Bibliotheca Alexandrina], aims at furthering the BA’s goals of being a leading institution in knowledge dissemination and, specifically, promoting research and development related to the digital libraries. Toward that goal, ISIS has embarked on an array of ambitious projects, in partnership with world-class institutions. These include hosting a mirror site for the Internet Archive, participating in the Million Book Project, organizing the digital archive of the Gamal Abdel Nasser collection, digitizing 113 years of Al-Hilal magazine, presenting the first-ever complete digital version of Description de l’Egypte, conducting advanced research such as the Arabic component of the UN-sponsored Universal Networking Language computerized multi-language translation program, and offering the most advanced 3D virtual imaging techniques in a virtual immersive environment for science and technology applications. Thus, despite being barely seven years in existence, the BA already has a substantial record of achievements.

Among the other projects you’ll read about are:

+ The Digital Assets Repository (DAR)

+ Memory of Modern Egypt Digital Repository

+ Archive documenting the history of the Suez Canal

+ SuperCourse

To empower science educators worldwide, the BA is working with a team of specialists, in partnership with the University of Pittsburgh, to launch the first science SuperCourse, comprising thousands of PowerPoint lectures made available for free to teachers and lecturers, who can use the lectures as they see fit in their teaching of science. The SuperCourse has been effectively implemented in the area of Public Health and Epidemiology, with a network of 65,000 scientists in 174 countries, providing more than 3,500 lectures in 31 languages. The BA maintains a mirror site of SuperCourse, which receives an average of one million hits per month, and is working on setting up a similar course in all fields of science.

Much More in the Complete Article

Source: EDUCAUSE Review
Hat Tip: OAN

Posted in Digital Preservation, Digital Repositories, Digitization Projects, Info Management and Retrieval, Libraries and Librarianship | No Comments »

More Digitization Underway: This Time Footnote.com is Digitizing the U.S. Census from 1790-1930

Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009

Footnote.com is once again partnering the National Records and Administration Agency (NARA) to digitize massive amounts of content and then make that material available, often for a fee, available online. Footnote is becoming–and for some has already become–and important resource for historians, genealogists, students, and others.

This time around, Footnote.com, is digitizing all publicly available Census materials from 1790-1930. These dates represent the period when all materials (including names) from a given census have been made publicly available. Through its partnership with NARA, Footnote.com will add more than 9.5 million pages of content when the census database project is complete. We’ve learned that Footnote.com is digitizing all of this material on their own.

From a Footnote.com Blog Post:

With over 60 million historical records already online, Footnote.com will use the U.S. Census records to tie content together, creating a pathway to discover additional records that previously have been difficult to find.

The Interactive Census Project Home Page offers much more detail and examples. You can also create email alerts when new states are added to the census database. On the lower-left side of the page you can track the progress of each census has been digitized. As you’ll see, the 1860 census is complete and the 1930 census is just about done.

Searching is free, Footnote provides numerous options to refine your search (here’s an example). Accessing the complete record is fee-based either subscribing to the database for a annually or monthly. You can also by individual documents for $2.95. Btw, Footnote.com also sells institutional access to libraries through EBSCO.

Footnote looks at the census project as a “highway” to assist the researcher in finding more information in other databases.

If you’ve been reading ResourceShelf for a while you’ve seen an increasing number of mention their services. Here’s a list of a few of them,

+ In August of 2009. we posted on the release of a joint project with the National Archives (NARA) to digitize holocaust material.

+ In December of 2008, in a partnership with NARA, Footnote released the largest interactive World War II collection online.

+ In March, 2008 we posted about Footnote.com offering an interactive version of the Vietnam Wall.

Our first post about Footnote dates back to January, 2007.

If you run this search using the ResourceShelf database, you’ll be able to see and read all of our Footnote.com posts.

But wait, there’s more. A quick review of the Footnote “press room” offers up even more projects. You can learn about them here.

Posted in Digitization Projects, Genealogy, Geographic, History, Information Industry, Resources, Search News | No Comments »

Survey of Higher Education Faculty: Use of Print & Electronic Library Collections of Scholarly Journals

Monday, November 2nd, 2009

This new report was released today by Primary Research. The full text is fee-based but a few highlights from the report are available online.

The report is based on a representative survey of more than 550 higher education faculty in the United States and Canada. Faculty present their opinions on preferences for print or paper journal formats, degree of problems with archival access, use of url-catalog links to journals, extent to which their college library journal collection satisfies their scholarly needs, and frequency of database access and library visits. Data is broken out by 12 criteria including age, academic field or specialty, type of college, size of college, frequency of library use, and many other factors.

Here are Just a Few Findings From the Report:

+ Canadian faculty were more likely than American faculty to think of the paper copies as a waste of time – nearly 45% thought so.

+ In general, age was highly inversely correlated with the tendency to think of paper copies as wasteful and redundant when online versions were available.

+ Only 13.86% of faculty at research universities prefer paper to online journal formats.

+ Only a third of community college faculty express support for increased spending on academic journals while about 64.3% of faculty in MA/Ph.D. granting colleges expressed such support.

See Also: The Survey of Academic & Research Library Journal Purchasing Practices

Here’s another related fee-based report from a related Primary Research report.

Some Findings:

+ The libraries in the sample acquired a mean of more than 46% of their journal subscriptions in bundles of more then 50 titles.

+ The libraries in sample canceled a mean of 53 journal titles in the past year.

+ Mean spending on print edition only subscriptions was $130,721, less than a sixth of total spending.

+ About a quarter of the libraries in the sample believe that open access has already slowed the increase in journal prices.

+ 15.56% of the libraries in the sample have paid a publication fee on behalf of an author from their institution.

+ For 42.22% of the libraries in the sample, all new subscriptions to journals include electronic access.

+ More than 64% of the libraries in the sample keep track of their various journal subscriptions through use of a commercial software product.

+ In general, subscription agents seem to enjoy a relatively high level of customer satisfaction. On the issue of timeliness of service, none of the libraries in the sample said that they were highly dissatisfied with their subscription agent and only 2.22% said that they were dissatisfied.

+ Non-academic research libraries have done more than their academic counterparts to make sure that contracts renew at the same time. Smaller institutions, those with journal budgets of less than $100,000 per year, were less likely to make such efforts than libraries with higher budgets.

Source: Primary Research

Posted in Info Management and Retrieval, Information Industry, Scholarly Publishing | No Comments »

Semantic Search: The European Research Project Named MESH (Part 1)

Monday, November 2nd, 2009

From the Report:

But while there is a phenomenal amount of content, most of it is not that easy to find. Sure, text content can be skimmed or glanced, but audiovisual content has to be viewed in linear time. We cannot easily search inside a film or audio recording for relevant information.

That is changing, and one European project has created the first integrated platform for semantic search that can return results based on the content and context of film and audio files, as well as text.

But European researchers in the MESH project have developed an integrated platform which they say, for the first time, can combine semantic search – or search by the meaning of the words – and a host of associated tools to deliver more relevant information, from a wide variety of sources that can be accessed from an individual user.

[Snip]

These technologies are becoming common in particular knowledge domains, and more are emerging every day, but most relate to the concepts behind text-based documents. The MESH platform sought to use semantic search for every type of media.

On the way, it created some cutting-edge technology. “Our automatic annotation for video, for example, is state of the art,” explains Pedro Concejero, coordinator of the MESH project.

“The annotation system is capable of identifying the general scene setting, such as whether a video is a studio shot or a shot recorded on location. With adequate training, it can also detect (within some error margins) the general topic of the video, such as a scene about an earthquake or a flood. It can also find a number of salient objects within the scene, such as persons or fire, but cannot yet identify consistently objects with great variations in shape or aspect.”

One of the major challenges of the project was a product of its own success: It annotated too much information!

Much More fiin the Complete Report.

We will post Part II as soon as it become available.

See Also: MESH Project Home Page
Several videos are available.

Source: ICT Results

Posted in Info Management and Retrieval, Multimedia Search, Search News, Semantic Search, Technology and Internet | No Comments »

The Complete Archive of National Geographic Magazine on Six DVD’s

Sunday, November 1st, 2009

Every now and then a fee-based product comes around that we believe deserves your attention. The following is one of them.

Chris Pendleton on the Bing Blog reminds us that a major digitization project, every issue ever published of National Geographic from 1887-2008, is now available (it was officially released yesterday according to this media announcement) on 6 DVD’s or an external hard drive. That’s right, all of the writing, the legendary imagery, the supplement , even the advertisements are included. For many topics, Nat Geo magazine is a resource that documents people, places, and events, on a global scale. In other words, for all of the reasons just mentioned and many others, makes the magazine an important part of the historical record.

By the way, the reason it was mentioned on the Bing Blog is because Bing is providing some the technology that powers the digitized version this recently released collection.

From the Blog Post

Nat Geo uses Bing Maps in their Geobrowse functionality which allows you to browse a map anywhere in the world to find locations where relevant articles are referenced using geographic metadata.

Yes, we still love paper and those massive collections of past issues of the print version of National Geographic Magazine many people own (where are yours)? They’re also important.

That said, we also hear and read that for today’s student, it’s all about digital access. Yes, of course, that’s rather sad. However, a digitized archive of this size and scope can truly demonstrate the power of digital info technology for people of all ages and turn 120 years of content into important research and learning resources.

Another digitized archive of the magazine was released seven years abut this 120 year collection is the most complete version ever published with more content, more search options, saving/sharing tools, interactive maps, and more. One thing we noticed right of the bat is the that the new version is available for both PC and Mac. The “112 year version” was PC only.

Here are a few fast facts about the new collection. They were gleaned from Nat Geo site (including the video overview) and news release.

+ All Issues from October, 1888-December, 2008 are included

+ Six DVD’s include more than 200,000 pages; 300 wall map supplements, more than 8,400 articles; more than 250,000 photographs

+ All images scanned in high-resolution

+ Flip one page at a time, zoom, print

+ Geobrowse

A new Geobrowse function powered by Bing Maps that allows users with Internet access to search nearly 5,000 locations on a globe that are featured in the magazine’s archive of articles and maps.

+ Search by keyword, date, contributor, and topic; refine by date or content type

+ Browse by month or year

+ Create personalized reading lists; share these lists with other users in the Nat Geo community

+ Pre-loaded “favorite article lists” compiled by experts

National Geographic is selling the DVD’s for $69.95/US and the hard drive version for $199.95/US.

The lowest price we found as of Sunday November 1st was $42.78 from an Amazon.com Merchant. The DVD’s directly from Amazon.com are $44.99/US.

We’ve ordered a copy of the DVD’s and after spending some time with them we will report back.

Posted in Digitization Projects, Geographic, Information Industry, Print Publications | No Comments »

Cornell University Library Publishes New Digitization Manual

Friday, October 30th, 2009

Our friends at TeleRead.org let us know about a new digitization manual from Cornell University Library.

From the Announcement:

“Copyright and Cultural Institutions: Guidelines for Digitization for U.S. Libraries, Archives, and Museums,” a new book published today by Cornell University Library, can help professionals at these institutions answer that question.

Based on a well-received Australian manual written by Emily Hudson and Andrew T. Kenyon of the University of Melbourne, the book has been developed by Cornell University Library’s senior policy advisor Peter B. Hirtle, along with Hudson and Kenyon, to conform to American law and practice.

The development of new digital technologies has led to fundamental changes in the ways that cultural institutions fulfill their public missions of access, preservation, research, and education. Many institutions are developing publicly accessible Web sites that allow users to visit online exhibitions, search collection databases, access images of collection items, and in some cases create their own digital content. Digitization, however, also raises the possibility of copyright infringement. It is imperative that staff in libraries, archives, and museums understand fundamental copyright principles and how institutional procedures can be affected by the law.

“Copyright and Cultural Institutions” was written to assist understanding and compliance with copyright law. It addresses the basics of copyright law and the exclusive rights of the copyright owner, the major exemptions used by cultural heritage institutions, and stresses the importance of “risk assessment” when conducting any digitization project. Case studies on digitizing oral histories and student work are also included.

The rest of the news release provides background about each of the Peter Hirtle and Anne R. Kenney, the authors of the manual.

Access
The manual is available for purchase $39.95 from CreateSpace.

You can also download the entire book for free by visiting the Social Science Research Network and the eCommons@Cornell.

Source: Cornell University Libraries
Hat Tip: TeleRead

Posted in Digitization Projects | No Comments »

The Library of Congress Unveils API for Chronicling America Digitized Newspaper Database and Directory

Friday, October 30th, 2009

What follows is a post that might be of special interest to web developers, webmasters, site owners, or anyone who can work with an API (Application Programming Interface), It comes from a digitized collection of more than 1 million historic newspapers and a searchable directory of newspaper info. Even if you are don’t have the technical skills required, it’s possible you know someone who does and with their help you can partner to develop new resources, create mashups, etc. Btw, if you know of people who are able to work with an API, feel free to share this post with them.

First, some background.

We’ve posted about the CA program since the day it launched in March, 2007. The project is a joint effort between the Library of Congress and the National Endowment for the Humanities to digitize historic American newspapers. In addition to the digitized newspaper database CA also provides Chronicling America directory. It’s both searchable with a powerful interface (a great example of what good metadata can do) and browsable. The directory contains information about most American newspapers published from 1690 to today.

On June 16, 2009, we ran a story about CA reaching a milestone. CA had just hit the one million digitized pages mark. It has grown a lot since then. About five weeks ago we posted an item about CA adding more than 192,000 pages to CA. The media release said the size of the database at that time contained 1,442,000 digitized pages from 171 titles, that were published between 1880 and 1922.

Thanks for the info but what about the API (Application Programming Interface) ?

The following from the “About the Chronicling America API” web page:

Chronicling America provides access to information about historic newspapers and select digitized newspaper pages. To encourage a wide range of potential uses, we designed several different views of the data we provide, all of which are publicly visible. Each uses common Web protocols, and access is not restricted in any way. You do not need to apply for a special key to use them. Together they make up an extensive application programming interface (API) which you can use to explore all of our data in many ways.

The rest of the web page offers technical details about the API.

Programmable Web has also posted about the new API.

Here are a couple of highlights:

Search results are available on the web site appear with terms highlighted. The API does not have access to highlight information, but it does contain thumbnails. Each page has a permalink back to the Library of Congress site, which displays the page in a zoomable, draggable viewer similar to Google Map.

The Library of Congress is focused on making these public domain works widely available. As such, this is an API without any registration or key necessary. That’s pretty wide open.

Among the interesting technical details is that the API can return linked data via RDF. It’s good to see reference sites, especially government ones, support semantic web formats (there are now 20 APIs in our directory with RDF support.)

Sources: Library of Congress, Programmable Web
Hat Tip: Dan C.

Posted in Databases, Directories, and Guides, Digitization Projects, History, Info Management and Retrieval, Media | No Comments »

New Report: Digitisation of special collections: Mapping, assessment, prioritisation

Friday, October 30th, 2009

From the Executive Summary:

Traditionally, digitisation has been led by supply rather than demand. While end users are seen as a priority they are not directly consulted about which collections they would like to have made available digitally or why. This can be seen in a wide range of policy documents throughout the cultural heritage sector, where users are positioned as central but where their preferences are assumed rather than solicited. Post-digitisation consultation with end users is equally rare. How are we to know that digitisation is serving the needs of the Higher Education community and is sustainable in the long-term?

[Snip]

Key Findings

+ The communities of both intermediary and end users are willing to express their view on prioritising digitisation of special collections; the participation in the project was a matter of good will and the good response (see p. 25) makes evident that there is definitely interest of the professional communities to express their opinion on the matter of digitisation needs. It should be noted here that the community of intermediaries sees collections on a finer level of granularity; end users often refer to super-collections such as the holdings of an institution

+ The top user-driven priority criteria that emerged from consultation with both intermediaries and end users are: Improve access; Enhance impact on research and/on studies; Enhance impact on teaching; Allow for collaboration; Improve access outside

+ The geographic and institutional boundaries of collections nominated for digitisation are wider – this study was aimed at the higher education institutions in the UK, but 14% of the nominated collections were from institutions outside of the higher education sector, and 6% were from overseas (see p. 27)

+ The complementarity of collections is strongly favoured by both users’ communities (see section 5)

+ The criteria for digitisation nominated by intermediary and end users include general criteria but also a number of criteria where metrics can be applied; thus allowing to establish a ranking mechanism (see p. 45

Access the Complete Report (62 pages; PDF)

Access the Final Report Appendices (94 pages; PDF)

Source: JISC, Research Information Network

Posted in Archives and Special Collections, Digitization Projects | No Comments »

Open Book Alliance Co-Founder Peter Brantley Visits Spain to Talk About the Alliance and Google Book Search

Friday, October 30th, 2009

Brantley is attending meetings in Spain and discussing the OBA and Google Book Search. He’s been interviewed by two newsapers, El Pais and Publico.es.

Here are links to both interviews in Spanish along with mechanically generated translations from two services.

1) “Google no ve libros, se limita a ver datos” (via El Pais)

+ Translation by Google: “Google does not see books, is limited to viewing data” (via El Pais)

+ Translation by Systran: “Google does not see books, is limited to see data” (via El Pais)

2) El bibliotecario que se enfrentó a Google (via Público.es)

+ Translation by Systran: “The Librarian Who Faced Google” (via Público.es)

+ Translation by Google: “The librarian who challenged Google” (via Público.es)

Posted in Digitization Projects, Information Industry, Intellectual Property | No Comments »

Univerisity of Illinois Press Signs Agreement With JSTOR

Tuesday, October 27th, 2009

From the Announcement:

The University of Illinois Press, the not-for-profit publishing division of the University of Illinois, and JSTOR, the preservation archive and research platform that is part of the not-for-profit ITHAKA, announced an agreement today to make leading journals from the Press available worldwide as part of the Current Scholarship Program.

The Current Scholarship Program is a new collaboration initiated by University of California Press and JSTOR and first announced on August 13, 2009.

[Snip]

Current and historical content from at least ten University of Illinois Press-published journals will be available on a re-designed JSTOR in 2011. This will offer faculty and students around the world access to current issues alongside back issues and a growing set of primary source materials from libraries easily and seamlessly. JSTOR’s nearly 6,000 library participants worldwide will be able to license the Press’s current journals, either individually or as part of current issue collections, together with JSTOR back issue collections in a single transaction. University of Illinois Press-published journals available as part of the Program will include American Journal of Psychology, American Music, Journal of Aesthetic Education, and Journal of American Ethnic History among others. The journals will also be preserved in Portico, the digital preservation service that is also part of ITHAKA.

Source: ITHAKA

Posted in Digital Repositories, Information Industry, Scholarly Publishing | No Comments »

New Project Report: Newspaper Digitisation: British Newspapers 1620-1900

Tuesday, October 27th, 2009

From the Summary:

This report describes all of the stages and issues that occurred during a second complex mass newspaper digitisation project. The project was an innovative and challenging example of a public/private partnership between Gale Cengage Learning, CCS and the British Library.

Access the Executive Summary

Access the Complete Report (57 pages; PDF)

Source: JISC

See Also: Newspaper Digitisation News from the British Library: £33m Saves the World’s Greatest Newspaper Collection for the Nation

See Also: Video and Slides Available from OCR for the Mass Digitisation of Textual Materials Workshop

Posted in Digitization Projects | No Comments »

The World Media Has Responsibility to Save Audio-Visual Archives + Library of Congress Research Project

Tuesday, October 27th, 2009

October 27 is UNESCO Audio-visual Heritage Day.

From the Article:

Federation president Herbert Hayduck says that the world media community has a common responsibility to save audio-visual archives, many of which are on the verge of being lost.

Source: CCTV

See Also: UNESCO World Day for Audiovisual Heritage: Library of Congress Engaged in Cutting Edge Grooved Recording Imaging Research

In celebration of UNESCO’s World Day for Audiovisual Heritage, the Library of Congress Preservation Directorate is featuring information about an innovative project using imaging technology to recover ‘lost’ sound from grooved analog recordings.

+ Learn More about the IRENE Project

+ Webcast: Capturing Recorded Sound through Imaging: The I.R.E.N.E. Project and Future Prospects

See Also: UNESCO World Day for Audiovisual Heritage Day Web Page

See Also: Message from Director-General of UNESCO

Posted in Preservation/Conservation | No Comments »

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