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Current and historical content from at least ten University of Illinois Press-published journals will be available on a re-designed JSTOR in 2011.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

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

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

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)

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

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

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

Here’s some of what you’ll find on the web site as of today:

+ Read contextual guides on the Games, and what we might expect to happen in East London

+ Dr Iain MacRury and his team researched with and filmed focus groups with local people on the subject of legacy and community participation. Excerpts of those films are available here (or search the main catalogue for focus groups)

+ Findings from research carried out by the Institute of Health and Human Development for the Well London Alliance in the London boroughs of Greenwich, Hackney, Tower Hamlets, Newham and Waltham Forest on issues such as health, wellbeing and regeneration can be found in the archive (search the archive for Well London, health, wellbeing and borough names).

+ To provide context on recent developments, the archive also contains nearly 600 Greater London Authority published documents (search the archive for GLA and subject areas) and some transcripts of oral history interviews with Dr Mary Smith and local participants remembering the 1948 London Olympic Games or reflecting on sports history in the local area to provide a comparative historical perspective for the contemporary material (search the archive for oral history).

Access East London Lives 2012 – a Living Archive

Source: JISC

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)

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.

“I can think of no better candidate to lead this new initiative,” commented Michael Spinella, ITHAKA’s Executive Vice President of Global Content Alliances and JSTOR Managing Director. “We are absolutely thrilled that Mary Rose is joining us. She has a deep understanding of digital publishing and the diverse needs of publishing organizations, a track record of delivering value and results, and an infectious dedication demonstrated throughout her career to serving the scholarly community.”

The Current Scholarship Program will build on what JSTOR is today and aims to provide a new and sustainable approach to online publishing. It will make current and historical scholarly content available on a single, integrated platform, provide a single point of purchase and access for librarians and end users around the world, and ensure its long-term preservation. “I am excited by the vision for this initiative,” said Muccie. “It recognizes the benefits that can be realized through scale and collaboration, but also values in meaningful ways the independence that press and society publishers need in setting prices and other areas to be successful.” The first current content will be available to libraries beginning in 2011.

Muccie will start work later this month and relocate back to the Philadelphia area, her home for many years before joining MUSE. She will work in ITHAKA’s Princeton office.

Source: JSTOR

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

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

…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

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

+ 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

+ 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

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)

…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