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Learn About the Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR), It Was Just Upgraded

Saturday, January 16th, 2010

Very impressive and useful!

The ROAR Registry of Open Access Repositories has just been upgraded to the full power of the EPrints software’s remarkable functionality.

Please come and explore the power of ROAR to display and track repository size, contents and growth across time, by country, repository type, and many performance parameters.

This will make it possible to monitor and analyze repository growth worldwide, and to encourage institutions to create their own repositories and adopt deposit mandates for filling them.

Access the Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR)

The aim of ROAR is to promote the development of open access by providing timely information about the growth and status of repositories throughout the world. Open access to research maximises research access and thereby also research impact, making research more productive and effective.

Source: Open Access Archivangelism (via OATP)
Hat Tip: P.S.

Posted in Digital Repositories, Info Management and Retrieval, Scholarly Publishing | No Comments »

Hathi Trust Passes Five Million Volumes in Digital Holdings & Other December, 2009 News

Friday, January 15th, 2010

The December, 2009 Hathi Trust update is now available (3 pages; PDF)

Articles Include:

1) Columbia Partnership– HathiTrust is very pleased to welcome Columbia University as its newest partner. A representative of HathiTrust will be traveling to Columbia in late January to give a full introduction to repository operations, current activities, and future plans.

2) 5 Million Volumes – A significant milestone was passed in December as HathiTrust exceeded 5 million volumes in digital holdings.
More than 3/4 of a million of these are in the public domain.

3) TRAC Audit – In early December, HathiTrust began a process with the Center for Research Libraries (CRL) to assess the digital repository in relation to the Trustworthy Repositories Audit and Certification (TRAC) criteria

4) Bib API – HathiTrust has released a new bibliographic API that enables retrieval of descriptive and rights information for objects in the repository based on standard identification numbers (e.g., ISBN, ISSN, LCCN, OCLC).

You’ll also find reports about the following working groups:

+ Discovery Interface
+ Collaborative Development Environment
+ Research Center

Also news about the Internet Archive ingest and a job opening for a new programmer for the non-Google ingest.

Finally, look for Development Updates, Partner News, New Growth, and the January Forecast.

Posted in Digital Preservation, Digital Repositories, Information Industry | No Comments »

Radio Interview: David Ferriero, Archivist of the United States (and Librarian)

Friday, January 15th, 2010

Mr. Ferriero spoke to Federal News Radio this morning. You can download the interview as an mp3 file here or listen via the Federal News Radio web site.

The interview runs 7:18.

Source: Federal News Radio

Posted in Archives and Special Collections, Digital Preservation, Digital Repositories, Info Management and Retrieval, Information Policy, Preservation/Conservation | No Comments »

Indiana University Press Joins Current Scholarship Program

Thursday, January 7th, 2010

From the Announcement:

Indiana University Press, founded in 1950 and one of the leading university presses in the country, 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 Current Scholarship Program, a new collaborative initiative announced on August 13, 2009.

By joining the Program, current and historical content from 28 Indiana University Press-published journals will be made available on a re-designed JSTOR in 2011. This will offer faculty and students around the world access to current issues alongside back issues easily and seamlessly. JSTOR’s nearly 6,000 library participants worldwide will be able to license the Press’s journals, either individually or as part of current issue collections, together with JSTOR back issue collections in a single transaction.

IU Press serials in the Program will include Africa Today, Jewish Social Studies, the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, the Journal of Folklore Research, and the Journal of Modern Literature, among others. The journals will be preserved in Portico, the digital preservation service that is also part of ITHAKA.

[Snip]

Indiana University Press joins University of California Press and the University of Illinois Press in the Program. The current issues of at least 70 journals from these publishers will be available from JSTOR for the 2011 subscription year. Other organizations are being encouraged to join.

Learn More about the Current Scholarship Program

Posted in Digital Preservation, Digital Repositories, Scholarly Publishing | No Comments »

Results of Digital Curation Survey from the Digital Curation Centre in the United Kingdom

Tuesday, January 5th, 2010

From the Results:

In 2009 DCC users were surveyed, repeating a similar survey carried out in 2006. In the highlights below we draw conclusions both from the more recent results and also changes over the 3 year period. Both surveys were publicised on the DCC website and via several mailing lists, principally the DCC-Associates and (in 2009) the JISC sponsored Research-Dataman list.

[Snip]

In both surveys around 90% of respondents are familiar with the term ‘digital curation’ and regard it as a critical issue within their project or unit. The DCC is consistently given as the main source of information on curation issues by around 70% of respondents, with “on the job challenges/ research” second at around 60%.

[Snip]

More than two thirds indicate that their main reasons for curating and preserving digital information are its educational/research or historical value; in both years a minority cites other reasons. Similarly, the main obstacles are indicated as financial or staff resources, with around half also indicating lack of awareness or appropriate policies.

Between the two surveys there is a large jump (from 13% to 32%) in the number of respondents indicating that DCC has been “very effective” in raising awareness about digital curation, and those believing it to be “slightly effective” has correspondingly fallen from 53% to 31%.

Of a list of DCC resources, five are identified as “most helpful” by at least 1 in 5 of the 2009 survey respondents, these being (in descending order) the DCC website, Briefing Papers (of various sorts), the DCC Curation Lifecycle Model, Case Studies, and the Digital Curation Manual.

Source: Digital Curation Blog

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

Digital Preservation: American Geophysical Union to Preserve E-Journals in Portico

Tuesday, January 5th, 2010

From the Announcement:

Portico (www.portico.org) is pleased to announce that it has entered into an agreement with the American Geophysical Union (AGU) to preserve 10 online journals. Through this agreement with Portico, AGU ensures that these journals will be preserved and available for future scholars, researchers, and students.

The American Geophysical Union, which was established in 1919 by the National Research Council, is a nonprofit organization that promotes the study of the geophysical sciences. AGU’s publications, which are available in more than 135 countries and nearly 2,000 libraries, include peer-reviewed scientific journals, a member newspaper, and award-winning books.

As part of the agreement, AGU will make an annual financial contribution to Portico to support its preservation activities. AGU has also named Portico as a mechanism to fill post-cancellation access claims.

With the inclusion of AGU’s 10 online journals, over 10,700 e-journals and 34,000 e-books from 92 publishers on behalf of over 2,000 societies and associations have now been entrusted to the Portico archive. The complete list of titles and participating publishers is available at www.portico.org.

Source: Portico

Posted in Digital Preservation, Digital Repositories, Information Industry | No Comments »

PubMed Central Cananda Officially Launches

Tuesday, January 5th, 2010

From the Announcement:

The newest addition to the PubMed Central (PMC) International effort, PubMed Central Canada, is now publicly available. PMC Canada is the result of a three-way collaborative effort by the National Library of Medicine, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), and the National Research Council’s Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (NRC-CISTI). Similar to United Kingdom PubMed Central, PMC Canada will include most of the health and life sciences literature available through the United States PMC. PMC Canada will also include research resulting from funding through the CIHR.

Access PubMed Central Canada

Source: NLM Technical Bulletin
Hat Tip: LS

Posted in Databases, Directories, and Guides, Digital Repositories, Science, Technology and Internet | No Comments »

American Public University System Becomes One of the First For-Profit Online Universities to Join JSTOR

Wednesday, December 16th, 2009

From the Announcement:

American Public University System (APUS) now has access to the complete backfiles of 278 leading scholarly journals in the arts, humanities, and general sciences by becoming a member of JSTOR. JSTOR was founded in 1995 to build trusted digital archives for scholarship. APUS, an online university system that educates more than 50,000 adult learners worldwide, now participates in Arts & Sciences II and Arts & Sciences III collections. Combined, the collections provide access to more than 7 million digitized journal pages.

Access the Complete Announcement

Source: Business Wire

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

Now Available from OCLC Research: Webcast of Herbert Van de Sompel’s Presentation, “Memento: Time Travel for the Web,”

Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009

From the Web Page:

Herbert Van de Sompel, Research Library Prototyping Team Lead at Los Alamos National Laboratory, spoke at OCLC on 19 November 2009.

A recording of his presentation and the discussion that followed, including video and slides, is now available as a streaming webcast. Individual files of the audio and slides from his presentation are also available.

From the Presentation Abstract:

Have you ever felt frustrated by your inability to get to old versions of Web pages? Did you bookmark a page last year, and revisited it recently only to find that the current content isn’t even remotely related to what caught your interest back then?

Remnants of the past Web are available, and there are many efforts ongoing to archive even more Web content. It’s just that the past Web is not as readily accessible as today’s. For example, if you want to see an archived version of http://cnn.com, you can go to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine and search for it there. Or if you want to see an old version of the Wikipedia page about—say—clocks, you can go to the current page and from there follow a link to one of the many prior versions. And, if you are interested in stories that featured on the BBC news site on your last year’s birthday, you can explore the archive that Matthew Somerville set up in his spare time.

But doesn’t doing so feel more like walking to a library, than using the Web the way you usually do? Wouldn’t it be much easier if you could just connect to cnn.com, Wikipedia, or news.bbc.co.uk indicating that you are interested in the pages of March 20 2008, not the current ones? If you could activate a time machine in your browser or bot? The Memento solution that we propose to achieve this is based on existing HTTP capabilities applied in a novel way to add the temporal dimension. The result is a framework in which archived resources can seamlessly be reached via the URI of their original: protocol-based time travel for the Web.

+ Webcast of Herbert Van de Sompel’s Memento presentation (video and slides: 64 min.)

+ Herbert Van de Sompel’s Memento demonstration video (streaming video and audio: 6 min.)

+ Herbert Van de Sompel’s Memento discussion (streaming video and audio: 16 min.)

+ Slides of Herbert Van de Sompel’s Memento presentation (.pdf: 15.4MB/90 pp.)

+ Audio of Herbert Van de Sompel’s Memento presentation (.mp3: 79MB/ 86 min.)

+ OCLC Research Distinguished Seminar Series

Source: OCLC Research

Posted in Archives and Special Collections, Digital Preservation, Digital Repositories, Info Management and Retrieval, Technology and Internet | No Comments »

The Growing Importance of Curating, Sharing, and Re-Using Research Data

Thursday, November 26th, 2009

From the Summary:

Researchers in almost all disciplines now create data in digital form. These data can come in many guises: for example, the measurements recorded by environmental monitoring satellites, the products of collisions between fundamental particles, the sequences of entire genomes, the results of social science surveys and interviews, the annotated images of ancient Greek inscriptions or the annotated videos of innovative dance routines.

Like the books in a well-run library, some of these data are curated and kept for future access and re-use in well-managed data centres that are usually subject-based. These lucky data, which typically are generated by large-scale facilities or major goal-oriented research programmes, can be re-analysed or interpreted by tomorrow’s researchers who may use them to answer questions we cannot predict today. The majority of research data, however, goes uncatalogued and is therefore not reusable. In all probability, this is not only a loss to posterity, but also a failure to reap the full potential from present day investment in research.

As the volume of research data increases relentlessly, the need to find ways to manage and curate data for sharing and re-use also grows. Many organisations have a stake in finding solutions, which will vary almost as much as the data themselves. Policies are needed at international, national and institutional levels that are rooted in the actions researchers themselves will need to take.

Access the Complete Document: (2 pages; PDF)

Source: JISC

Posted in Digital Preservation, Digital Repositories, Info Management and Retrieval, Information Policy | No Comments »

International Collaboration to Close the Digital Curation Gap

Monday, November 23rd, 2009

From the Announcement:

Scientists, researchers, and scholars across the world generate vast amounts of digital data, but the scientific record and the documentary heritage created in digital form are at risk — from technology obsolescence, from the fragility of digital media, and from the lack of baseline practices for managing and preserving digital data. The University of North Carolina Chapel Hill (UNC-CH) School of Information and Library Science, working with the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) and partners in the United Kingdom (U.K.), are collaborating on the Closing the Digital Curation Gap (CDCG) project to establish baseline practices for the storage, maintenance, and preservation of digital data to help ensure their enhancement and continuing long-term use.

Source: Institute of Museum and Library Services

Posted in Digital Preservation, Digital Repositories | No Comments »

Hathi Trust Digital Library Publishes Update on October Activities (November, 2009)

Friday, November 13th, 2009

The update consists of a four page PDF.

Here’s a list of some of the topics covered. Access the full text to get all of the details.

Ingest

HathiTrust ingested a record 553,963 volumes in October. These included nearly 5,000 volumes from Penn State and initial loads of volumes from the University of California’s Santa Cruz and San Diego campuses. Ingest of volumes from Penn State will continue in November. Subsequent shipments of metadata for up to 600,000 additional volumes from UC campuses are expected in November. Ingest of these volumes will begin shortly thereafter.

HathiTrust participates in grant from Mellon Foundation

Google Summit and Internet Archive Ingest

Large-scale Search

Staff at the University of Michigan successfully indexed all volumes in HathiTrust using the newly acquired hardware. However, the official launch of the large-scale search application was postponed in order to acquire additional hardware to accommodate new index growth.

HathiTrust/OCLC Catalog

After finalizing metadata requirements for the version 1 catalog in September, the HathiTrust/OCLC Catalog team turned its attention in October to interface requirements. The team is currently finalizing interface requirements for version 1 of the catalog and has agreed to engage in collaborative usability testing during the first quarter of 2010. Meanwhile, OCLC’s e-content synchronization work for HathiTrust remains on schedule, and is expected to be completed by the end of the calendar year.

New Growth: Number of Volumes Added
Indiana University
64,614 volumes added in October, 84,132 Total
Penn State University
4,675 volumes added in October, 4,675 Total
University of California
264,710 volumes added in October, 786,414 Total
University of Michigan
206,283 volumes added in October, 3,417,264 Total
University of Wisconsin
20,430 volumes added in October, 242,705 Total
Totals
553,963 volumes added in October, 4,535,190 Total

Source: Hathi Trust

Posted in Archives and Special Collections, Digital Repositories, Info Management and Retrieval, Information Industry, Libraries and Librarianship | 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.

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 »

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 »

Podcast: Professor Robert Darnton on Harvard’s Success With Open Access
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 »

Nirvanix Provides Permanent Digital Archive for National September 11 Memorial & Museum
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 »

Brown Univesity Gets Ready to Launch Digital Repository Using Fedora Software
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 »

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Archive for the ‘Digital Repositories’ Category

Learn About the Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR), It Was Just Upgraded

Hathi Trust Passes Five Million Volumes in Digital Holdings & Other December, 2009 News

Radio Interview: David Ferriero, Archivist of the United States (and Librarian)

Indiana University Press Joins Current Scholarship Program

Results of Digital Curation Survey from the Digital Curation Centre in the United Kingdom

Digital Preservation: American Geophysical Union to Preserve E-Journals in Portico

PubMed Central Cananda Officially Launches

American Public University System Becomes One of the First For-Profit Online Universities to Join JSTOR

Now Available from OCLC Research: Webcast of Herbert Van de Sompel’s Presentation, “Memento: Time Travel for the Web,”

More on OAIster Content Being Added to WorldCat.org + Useful Tip for Searching Images

The Growing Importance of Curating, Sharing, and Re-Using Research Data

International Collaboration to Close the Digital Curation Gap

Hathi Trust Digital Library Publishes Update on October Activities (November, 2009)

Internet Archive Founder Brewster Kahle Profiled in Forbes

Bibliotheca Alexandrina: A Digital Revival

Univerisity of Illinois Press Signs Agreement With JSTOR

Podcast: Professor Robert Darnton on Harvard’s Success With Open Access

Nirvanix Provides Permanent Digital Archive for National September 11 Memorial & Museum

Brown Univesity Gets Ready to Launch Digital Repository Using Fedora Software

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