Archive for the ‘Digital Repositories’ Category
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 »
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 »
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 »
Tuesday, October 27th, 2009
From the Summary:
In October 2008 Harvard University in the US adopted an open access policy for all its research papers to be made available in their university repository, in an opt out basis. 12 months on, since the policy was adopted, JISC’s Rebecca O’Brien speaks with Professor Robert Darnton, Director of Harvard University Library and trustee of New York Public Library and the Oxford University Press (USA), about the cultural change that is taking place at Harvard and the background to why professors at the university decided to share their knowledge in this way.
The podcast runs 23 minutes. You’ll find it near the bottom of this page.
Source: JISC
See Also: DASH (Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard): Harvard University Scholarly Repository
See Also: Harvard University Library: Open Collection Program
Posted in Digital Repositories, Scholarly Publishing | No Comments »
Wednesday, October 21st, 2009
From the Announcement:
Nirvanix today announced that the Nirvanix Storage Delivery Network (SDN) is being used as the main digital archive platform for the National September 11 Memorial & Museum’s permanent collection of audio, video and photographs that chronicle the events of the day and their aftermath through the eyes of those who experienced it – both at the attack sites and around the world.
The Museum is actively acquiring materials for its permanent collection from the general public and those directly impacted by the attacks. The collection includes audio recordings of personal experiences of the attacks of September 11, 2001 left by visitors at the 9/11 Memorial Preview Site located next to the World Trade Center. The Museum is actively collecting photographs, audio, video and other 9/11 related material through a number of outreach initiatives, including a “Call to Remember.” This program is designed for 9/11 victims’ family and friends to leave voice mail messages with remembrances about their loved ones. In addition, the Museum has collected thousands of photos submitted by the public through an online initiative, “Make History,” as well as hundreds of hours of video. All of this material will be kept as a permanent digital archive of content that will be an evolving historical record of the day’s events.
Source: Nirvanix
Hat Tip: AMIA Newsbriefs
Posted in Archives and Special Collections, Digital Repositories, Info Management and Retrieval | No Comments »
Tuesday, October 20th, 2009
Yesterday, we posted about a massive digitization project recently announced at NYU and an editorial from the Princeton University newspaper focusing on Google digitization and the HathiTrust.
Today, we move to Providence, RI and Brown University.
From the Article:
The Center for Digital Initiatives is preparing to launch the Brown Digital Repository, an online database to allow faculty members to easily and safely store thousands of documents — and share them with their students and colleagues.
The service, which aims to make faculty research and teaching materials more accessible in the present as well as preserve them for posterity, could be operational as soon as next semester, according to Patrick Yott, head of the library’s digital services department and the Center for Digital Initiatives.
[Snip]
Many digital repositories, such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s, use a program called DSpace, which Yott said is less flexible. The new program, Fedora, improves on older repository software.
“We were waiting for some of the technologies to mature,” Yott said. “We just waited to do it the way we wanted to do it.”
[Snip]
The repository will allow users to upload faculty papers, research data, electronic dissertations, teaching materials and other files. One feature of the Fedora platform allows files to be updated into newer formats should old ones become obsolete, preserving the documents for generations to come.
Source: The Brown Daily Herald
See Also: Learn More About Fedora (via Wikipedia)
Posted in Digital Repositories, Libraries and Librarianship, Scholarly Publishing | No Comments »
Friday, October 16th, 2009
Carl Malamud is an information hero to many people. He created EDGAR, FedFlix (digitizing U.S. government film and video), and many other services that can be found on his Public.resource.org page. The Los Angeles Times recently named him a government transparency crusader.
Now, Mr. Malamud is involved a new project, Law.gov.
He explains what it’s all about in a new O’Reilly Radar blog post. He even mentions a role for librarians in the post.
Public.Resource.Org is very pleased to announce that we’re going to be working with a distinguished group of colleagues from across the country to create a solid business plan, technical specs, and enabling legislation for the federal government to create Law.Gov. We envision Law.Gov as a distributed, open source, authenticated registry and repository of all primary legal materials in the United States. More details on the effort are available on our Law.Gov page.
[Snip]
The idea for Law.Gov seems to be getting a good reception in Washington, D.C. Senator Lieberman, writing on behalf of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, the committee responsible for the E-Government Act, has already accepted our request to submit our report to the Committee. Additional formal requests to submit the completed report are outstanding.
[Snip]
Law.Gov is a big challenge for the legal world, and some of the best thinkers in that world have joined us as co-conveners…[Our emphasis] There are challenges for librarians as well, such as compiling a full listing of all materials that should be in the repository.
[Snip]
The factor that made this coalesce was the recent Government 2.0 Summit put on by Tim O’Reilly. I gave a talk at that summit about the need to put primary legal materials on-line, and it was gratifying to hear the Deputy CTO of the United States, in his closing keynote, highlight that as one of the issues which he thought the White House should help make real through their “moral authority and convening power.”
Much More in the Complete Article
Source: O’Reilly Radar
Posted in Digital Repositories, Government Documents and Political Information, Information Industry, Information Policy, Legal, Technology and Internet | No Comments »
Monday, October 12th, 2009
As you’ll read this is not a new project but rather one where the pilot phase is about to end and they’re preparing for the next phase. The content that’s been digitized will be accessible via Google Book Search with copies to the HathiTrust Digital Repository.
The project began in 2007 with CIC (Committee on Institutional Cooperation) and Google partnering to digitize up to 10 million volumes. You can learn more here, read the agreement, and checkout the detailed FAQ.
From the Most Recent Update Announcement:
The libraries of the CIC universities are partnering with Google to digitize a comprehensive collection of U.S. Federal Documents. It is believed this collection will comprise between 1 and 1.5 million volumes. The workflow and scanning process for the initiative was tested by the University of Minnesota, which has sent Google approximately 85,000 duplicate holdings from its St. Paul campus. As the pilot phase of this initiative draws to completion, Pennsylvania State University is preparing to move the project forward by readying a portion of its collection for scanning. Digital facsimiles of successfully scanned Federal Documents from Minnesota and other CIC institutions — will be accessible through Google Book Search, with copies also being returned to the HathiTrust Digital Repository, where public domain material can be universally accessed.
This project is part of an overarching CIC Library Director-led initiative to assess the opportunities HathiTrust might provide for more cost-effective management of less frequently used print resources.
Access the Complete October, 2009 Announcement
Source: Committee on Institutional Cooperation
Hat Tips: @miss_eli and @caminick
Posted in Digital Repositories, Digitization Projects, Government Documents and Political Information | No Comments »
Friday, October 9th, 2009
From the JISC Blog Post:
East London Lives 2012, a digital archive project which aims to document some aspects of change in the lives of East Londoners towards the hosting of the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games.
The archive hosts content from research projects based at the University of East London and other contextualising material about London and specifically the five East London boroughs and the bid promises that were made about the impact of the Olympics.
Importantly the archive also contains a wealth of community generated content, including oral histories, image, video and interviews.
The blog post also contains a brief introductory video.
Access East London Lives 2012 – a Living Archive
(more…)
Posted in Archives and Special Collections, Digital Repositories | No Comments »
Monday, October 5th, 2009
From the Web Site Home Page:
Over 12,000 images from various collections of rare books, manuscripts, papyri, photographs and sheet music are available for your viewing. Each collection has its own web site that is unrestricted in the interests of knowledge and learning.
You can learn more about each collection by beginning with this page.
Each “about” page also contains a direct link to that specific collection. 17 collections are listed.
Direct links to to the search interfaces for some of the collections are also available (via a drop down menu on the home page).
Source: SCETI (from the University of Pennsylvania Libraries)
Posted in Archives and Special Collections, Arts and Humanities, Databases, Directories, and Guides, Digital Repositories, Digitization Projects, History, Info Management and Retrieval, Resources, Resources for Educators | No Comments »
Friday, October 2nd, 2009
Follow JSTOR on Twitter
JSTOR’s Facebook Page
From the Announcement:
Mary Rose Muccie will join JSTOR, a service of the not-for-profit organization ITHAKA, on October 26, 2009 as Current Journals Director where she will lead efforts to cultivate and deepen relationships with university presses and scholarly associations, building their participation in the new Current Scholarship Program announced last month by JSTOR and University of California Press. She will also manage the Program’s operations and lead its business strategy going forward.
”The Current Scholarship Program continues JSTOR’s long history of sustainable collaborative programs that benefit libraries, publishers, and scholars,” says Muccie. “I look forward to being a part of this important solution and to working with colleagues at all levels to make it a success.”
A highly regarded leader in digital publishing, Muccie has led Project MUSE, an online aggregation of humanities and social science journals that is part of Johns Hopkins University Press for the last three years. During that time she initiated a substantial upgrade of features and functionality of the MUSE website and reworked MUSE policies to provide a better return for publishers and enable growth for the organization. Prior to joining MUSE, Mary Rose served for 13 years at the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), most recently as Publisher, overseeing both their journals and book publications. At both MUSE and SIAM, Muccie collaborated with JSTOR, first to digitize and make available SIAM’s archival journal content and later to establish connections between the JSTOR and MUSE platforms to ease faculty and student use of the content across the sites.
(more…)
Posted in Digital Repositories, Digitization Projects, Information Industry | No Comments »
Wednesday, August 19th, 2009
The following paper by Penny Carnaby (National Library of New Zealand) and presented by Sue Sutherland (National Library of New Zealand) will be delivered at the upcoming World Library and Information Congress: 75th IFLA General Conference and Assembly in Milan, Italy.
From the Abstract:
While the complex issues concerning the protection and preservation of digital assets are better understood by the information professions, there is still much thinking required about the preservation and protection of the new wave of citizen-created content.
Traditionally information professionals in all types of memory institutions have clearly met the need for, and nature of, the preservation activities around formal and authoritative knowledge services and systems. However, informal, citizen-created knowledge activities are far less straightforward in terms of preservation. These activities arise and evolve as individual citizens develop as authors, content creators, thought leaders, filmmakers, blog diarists, etc. There is at present an extraordinary
unleashing of content creation by individual citizens.
This development challenges established organisational systems and professional practice in an unprecedented way. This paper outlines some of the issues involved in the preservation of digital assets in this new environment. It explores how all memory institutions including archives, galleries, museums and libraries in particular, can value and protect a country’s digital assets in both the formal and informal arena.
Access the Full Text (10 pages; PDF)
Source: International Federation of Library Associations
Posted in Digital Preservation, Digital Repositories | No Comments »
Thursday, August 13th, 2009
The other day we posted some updated statistics about the many collections from the Internet Archive.
We didn’t mention that a great way to learn about new features, cool collections, etc. is the “What’s New at the Internet Archive” blog posted here.
From the looks of it the blog has about two or three posts a month. The latest posting (posted earlier today) is a lot of fun. It looks at (and provides links to) drive-in movie advertising accessible via the IA.
Almost forgot, if you prefer RSS, no problem. The “What’s New at the Internet Library” blog has an RSS feed accessible here.
Want Internet Archive news? Take a look at their Twitter feed: http://twitter.com/internetarchive
Posted in Digital Preservation, Digital Repositories | No Comments »
Tuesday, June 9th, 2009
From the Open Content Alliance Blog:
…Cornell University Library [has] removed all restrictions on its digital public domain holdings. It did so in conjunction with a donation of more than 70,000 digitized public domain books to the Internet Archive. As these books are processed, they will appear on archive.org.
Cornell has removed restrictions not only on non-commercial use but commercial use as well. University Librarian Anne Kenney explains: “We decided it was more important to encourage the use of the public domain materials in our holdings than to impose roadblocks.”
You can read the complete news release from the Cornell University Library here.
Direct to the 70,000 images via The Internet Archive
Source: Open Content Alliance
Posted in Archives and Special Collections, Digital Preservation, Digital Repositories, Intellectual Property | No Comments »
Monday, June 8th, 2009
From the Announcement:
Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) grants showcased innovative repository-based projects at the Fourth International Open Repositories Conference (OR2009) in Atlanta May 18-21. The meeting focuses on open-source repository platforms to manage and archive digital data from a variety of environments (education, research, science, cultural heritage) and contexts (national, regional, institutional, project, lab, personal). Ultimately, the goal of these repositories is to support the creation and management of digital content, to enable its use and re-use, to interconnect information, and to ensure its long-term preservation and archiving.
The announcement also contains direct links to numerous projects.
Source: Institute of Museum and Library Services
Posted in Digital Preservation, Digital Repositories, Info Management and Retrieval | No Comments »
Friday, May 22nd, 2009
Articles Include:
+ Editorial: Social Networking Gets Serious
+ Commentary: Time Challenges – Challenging Times for Future Information Search
+ EScience in Practice: Lessons from the Cornell Web Lab
+ Towards a Repository-enabled Scholar’s Workbench: RepoMMan, REMAP and Hydra
+ Evaluation of Digital Repository Software at the National Library of Medicine
+ NeoNote: Suggestions for a Global Shared Scholarly Annotation System
+ The Fierce Urgency of Now: A Proactive, Pervasive Content Awareness Tool
+ Unlocking Audio: Towards an Online Repository of Spoken Word Collections in Flanders
Source: D-Lib
Posted in Digital Repositories, Info Management and Retrieval, Information Science, Libraries and Librarianship, Technology and Internet | No Comments »
Thursday, May 21st, 2009
Articles include:
+ Diversity in Research Universities
+ Digital Scholarly Communication: A Snapshot of Current Trends
+ Strategies for Supporting New Genres of Scholarship
+ Achieving the Full Potential of Repository Deposit Policies
+ Author-Rights Language in Library Content Licenses
Direct to Complete Issue
Source: Association of Research Libraries
Posted in Digital Repositories, Libraries and Librarianship, Scholarly Publishing | No Comments »
Tuesday, May 5th, 2009
Direct to Full Text Paper (12 pages; PDF)
by Anne Morrow and Allyson Mower
From the Abstract:
The University Scholarly Knowledge Inventory System (U-SKIS) provides workspace for institutional repository staff. U-SKIS tracks files, communications, and publishers’ archiving policies to determine what may be added to a repository. A team at the University of Utah developed the system as part of a strategy to gather previously published peer-reviewed articles. As campus outreach programs developed, coordinators quickly amassed thousands of journal articles requiring copyright research and permission. This article describes the creation of U-SKIS, addresses the educational role U-SKIS plays in the scholarly communication arena, and explores the implications of implementing scalable workflow systems for other digital collections.
Source: Cataloging and Classification Quarterly (via E-LIS)
Posted in Digital Repositories, Info Management and Retrieval | No Comments »
Friday, May 1st, 2009
From a Blog Post by Roy Tennant:
…I’ve followed the doings of the Hathi Trust when they were still known as the University of Michigan and Friends. Why? Because I think it makes a great deal of sense to not rely on Google as our only means to access digitized books. For those of you keeping score at home, the Hathi Trust is a collaborative project of a group of universities to archive and share their digitized collections.
Information on what is available there has been gradually getting better. For a while all that was available were metadata downloads, which I had used last year to create a prototype bare-bones search interface. Then the Hathi Trust put up an experimental full-text search. Now they have just released a new catalog of the digital content in the Hathi Trust. Built using VUFind, the catalog sports a spiffy look and all the features expected of the latest search systems — faceted narrowing of search results, various sorting options, suggestions of similar items, cover art (or title page images of older works), etc.
Direct to Hathi Trust Database
See Also: Learn More About the Hathi Trust
Source: Library Journal
Posted in Digital Repositories, E-books, Info Management and Retrieval | No Comments »
Thursday, April 30th, 2009
From the Article:
Government data prepared for public reuse should be offered in multiple-formats, be machine-readable and adhere as closely as possible to lightweight standards, advised federal Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra, speaking at the 2009 Government Web Managers conference held this week in Washington.
In March, when Kundra assumed the role of federal CIO, he promised that the federal government would set up a new repository, called Data.Gov, that would be populated with links and sources of data from federal agencies, which could be reused by citizens and organizations for their own Web applications.
See Also: Remixing government data
Source: GCN
Posted in Digital Repositories, Government Documents and Political Information, Info Management and Retrieval | No Comments »
