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

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

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

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

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)

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

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

Direct to Archive

Included in the web archive are U.S. government sites, foreign government sites, public policy and political advocacy groups, educational organizations, religious organizations, support groups for military personnel, anti-war groups, sites that target children, and news sources.

This collection is part of a continuing effort by the Library of Congress to evaluate, select, collect, catalog, provide access to, and preserve digital materials for future generations of researchers.

This archive can be both searched and/or browsed.

Source: LC Web Archives

From the Article:

Academic and research institutions are digitizing, preserving and distributing vast amounts of electronic content at an enormous rate today — from video, photos and animation, to research papers and visualization of scientific models. Like many universities, Penn State is striving to ensure that these immense electronic collections and storage repositories are easily accessible to users and will continue to be available to future generations.

“Digital library platforms will change, but our first priority will always be to provide students and faculty with access to the information they need,” said Saussure. “Needs such as these, in addition to the needs of faculty, staff, and our research partners at other institutions all need to be taken into account. With all these interrelated roles, being able to find information now, and long into the future, is just as important as how we store it.”

Saussure and his team have recently been collaborating with HP to test digital tools that can be used across all of Penn State’s many repository platforms. Primary among these tools is eXtensible Access Method (XAM), a new interface standard created by the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) that is expected to help the University cohesively manage and provide access to its diverse digital library collections, electronic record archives, e-science and e-research data repositories.

“We’re talking about hundreds of terabytes to petabytes of information from many sources,” said Saussure. XAM is the digital glue that brings all these data repositories together.

Source: Penn State Live
Hat Tip: P.W.

Direct to Complete Issue (PDF)

Articles Include:

+ Universities Should Have an Institutional Repository
Affirmative: Soo Young Rieh | Negative: Kevin Smith

+ Libraries Should Lead the Institutional Repository Initiative and
Development at Their Institutions
Affirmative: Jim Ottaviani | Negative: Carolyn Hank

+ Institutional Repositories Should Be Built on Open Source Software
Affirmative: Paul Jones | Negative: Michael Day and Alexander Ball

+ Institutional Repository Success is Dependent Upon Mandates
Affirmative: Steve Harnad | Negative: Nancy McGovern

+ Apple, IKEA and Their Integrated Architecture
David Potente and Erika Salvini

+ Web 2.0 Applications of Geographic and Geospatial Information

Source: American Society for Information Science and Technology

From a Post by Brewster Kahle:

Today the Internet Archive and Sun Microsystems are launching a new datacenter that stores the whole web archive and serves the Wayback Machine.

See Also: Learn More Here

Source: The Internet Archive

From the Post:

MIT faculty have agreed on a mandate for all their research articles to be made available with a non-exclusive license. The content will be placed in a DSpace repository as a part of the university-wide mandate.

Much more in this article from the MIT paper The Tech

Source: dSpace/The Tech

From the News Release:

Experts and advocates examine the state of the art in digital repositories in a new series of videos now freely available online from SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition). Also, by popular demand, SPARC has announced it will host the third SPARC Digital Repositories Meeting on November 8 & 9, 2010, in Baltimore, Maryland.

The video series was taped at the November 2008 SPARC repositories meeting, and underscores the central role of repositories across library services. Particular emphasis is placed on the added value they contribute to the institution and on the importance of funding repository development even in lean economic times. The clips feature three full-length plenary addresses plus seven short interviews with leading-edge repository implementers, including:

• Ernie Ingles, Vice Provost and Chief Librarian at University of Alberta
• Michelle Kimpton, Executive Director of the DSpace Foundation
• Bonnie Klein, Information Collection/Copyright Specialist at the US Defense Technical Information Center
• Catherine Mitchell, Director of the eScholarship Publishing Group at California Digital Library (CDL)
• Sarah Shreeves, IDEALS Coordinator at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
• David Shulenburger, Vice President for Academic Affairs of the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges (NASULGC)
• John Wilbanks, Vice President for Science at Creative Commons
• Bob Witeck, CEO of Witeck-Combs Communications Inc.

Direct to Videos

Source: SPARC

From the Article:

Neil Grindley of JISC describes the importance of preserving digital information and some of the major projects that are helping with this.

Source: ResearchInformation (February/March 2009)

This issue focuses on news preservation.

Articles Include:

+ In This Issue

A foreword on CRL’s news preservation efforts.

+ “On the Record” – A Forum on Electronic Media and the Preservation of News

Summaries of presentations and discussions held at the forum, the challenges confronting libraries engaged in news preservation, and an agenda for concerted action for libraries, aggregators, and publishers.

+ World Newspaper Archive Update

Update on World News Archive, CRL’s collaborative initiative to preserve and digitize historical newspapers from around the globe.

Learn more about the World Newspaper Archive

Source: Center for Research Libraries