DigitalKoans postings will resume on 11/29/09.

1. DigitalKoans Break
2. DigitalKoans Break
3. DigitalKoans Break
4. DigitalKoans Break
5. DigitalKoans Break

The University of Arkansas at Fort Smith Library is recruiting a Web Services Librarian.

Here's an excerpt from the ad:

Primary responsibilities of the Web Services Librarian will be to provide vision and direction for all aspects of the library's website; to work collaboratively with library staff in order to provide and maintain quality online services and resources; to create new and/or update the existing web pages; and to provide leadership in developing new web-based applications. Other duties will include exploring how new technologies can be implemented and used to the best advantage on the website; delivering instruction to students and faculty on the use of website and database content; serving as a liaison to a selected discipline; and performing other related duties as required and/or assigned. Candidate chosen must be available to work some evening and weekend hours.

1. Web Services Librarian at University of Miami
2. Library IT Jobs: Web Services Librarian at Golden Gate University
3. Library IT Jobs: Web Services Librarian at Tulane University
4. Library IT Jobs: Web Management Librarian at University of Houston-Downtown
5. Library IT Jobs: Systems Librarian/Technologist at Union Institute & University

The UCLA Library has made The Google Books Settlement: Issues and Options, a digital video featuring copyright expert Jonathan Band, available on YouTube.

1. Google Books Settlement Status Conference Reports
2. The Google Books Settlement: Who Is Filing And What Are They Saying?
3. Digital Video: Google's Chief Legal Officer Testifies at Hearing on "Competition and Commerce in Digital Books"
4. The Google Books Settlement and the Future of Information Access Conference
5. Google Books Adds Creative Commons Licence Options

The Institute of Museum and Library Services has awarded $249,623 to the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill School of Information and Library Science for the Closing the Digital Curation Gap project.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

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. Because digital curation, or the management and preservation of digital data over the full life cycle, is of strategic importance to the library and archives fields, IMLS is funding the project through a cooperative agreement with UNC-CH. U.K. partners include the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), which supports innovation in digital technologies in U.K. colleges and universities, and its funded entities, the Strategic Content Alliance (SCA) and the Digital Curation Centre (DCC).

Well-curated data can be made accessible for a variety of audiences. For example, the data gathered by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (www.sdss.org) at the Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico is available to professional astronomers worldwide as well as to schoolchildren, teachers, and citizen scientists through its Galaxy Zoo project. Galaxy Zoo, now in its second version, invites citizen scientists to assist in classifying over a million galaxies (www.galaxyzoo.org). With good preservation techniques, this data will be available into the future to provide documentation of the sky as it currently appears.

Data and information science researchers have already developed many viable applications, models, strategies, and standards for the long term care of digital objects. This project will help bridge a significant gap between the progress of digital curation research and development and the professional practices of archivists, librarians, and museum curators. Project partners will develop guidelines for digital curation practices, especially for staff in small to medium-sized cultural heritage institutions where digital assets are most at risk. Larger institutions will also benefit. To develop baseline practices, a working group will establish and support a network of digital curation practitioners, researchers, and educators through face-to-face meetings, web-based communication, and other communication tools. Project staff will also use surveys, interviews, and case studies to develop a plan for ongoing development of digital curation frameworks, guidance, and best practices. The team will also promote roles that various organizations can play and identify future opportunities for collaboration.

As part of this project, the Digital Curation Manual, which is maintained by the DCC, will be updated and expanded www.dcc.ac.uk/resource/curation-manual/chapters and the Digital Curation Exchange web portal will receive support (http://digitalcurationexchange.org). Through these efforts, the CDCG project will lay the foundation that will inform future training, education, and practice. The project's research, publications, practical tool integration, and outreach and training efforts will be of value to organizations charged with maintaining digital assets over the long term.

1. Johns Hopkins University Sheridan Libraries' Data Conservancy Project Funded by $20 Million NSF Grant
2. Proceedings of DigCCurr2009: Digital Curation: Practice, Promise, and Prospects
3. Keeping Research Data Safe 2: The Identification of Long-lived Digital Datasets for the Purposes of Cost Analysis: Project Plan
4. Infrastructure Planning and Data Curation: A Comparative Study of International Approaches to Enabling the Sharing of Research Data
5. Digital Curation Centre Releases "Archiving Web Resources"

Oberlin College has adopted an open access policy.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

The Oberlin College General Faculty unanimously endorsed on November 18 a resolution to make their scholarly articles openly accessible on the Internet. As a result of the measure, the rich scholarly output of the Oberlin faculty will become available to a much broader national and international audience. The Oberlin resolution is similar to policies passed at Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Kansas, and Trinity University.

"Through this resolution the Oberlin College faculty has expressed a principled commitment to disseminating their scholarship as widely as possible,” said Sebastiaan Faber, Professor of Hispanic Studies and Chair of the General Faculty Library Committee. “The current system of journal publishing, which largely relies on subscriptions and licenses, limits access to research information in significant ways, particularly for students and faculty at smaller and less wealthy institutions, as well as for the general public. Access is also seriously limited around the world in countries with fewer resources."

Under the new policy, Oberlin faculty and professional staff will make their peer-reviewed, scholarly articles openly accessible in a digital archive managed by the Oberlin College Library as part of the OhioLINK Digital Resource Commons. Oberlin authors may opt out of the policy for a specific article if they are not in a position to sign journal publishing agreements that are compatible with the policy, or for other reasons. The resolution also creates an institutional license that gives Oberlin College the legal right to make the articles accessible on the Internet through the digital archive. The resolution further encourages, but does not require, authors to submit publications other than peer-reviewed articles in the same manner. . . .

"I'm delighted that Oberlin's faculty and staff have made this important commitment to open access," said Ray English, Azariah Smith Root Director of Libraries. "The movement for open access to scholarly research information is international in scope and growing rapidly as academic institutions, research-funding agencies, and policy makers see the benefits of unfettered access to scholarly research. The library looks forward to putting in place the support structures that are needed to carry out this important initiative."

Adopted at the recommendation of the General Faculty Library Committee, the policy calls for the committee, in consultation with a faculty council, to establish procedures for carrying out the policy and to monitor its implementation. Policy implementation will be coordinated by a scholarly communications officer, a member of the library staff designated by the director of libraries. The text of the faculty resolution is available online at: http://tinyurl.com/ykyfz2j

1. Trinity University in San Antonio Adopts Open Access Policy
2. Copenhagen Business School Adopts Open Access Policy
3. Harvard Graduate School of Education Faculty Adopt Open Access Policy
4. MIT Open Access Policy Approved
5. Harvard Kennedy School of Government Adopts Open Access Policy

• The revised Google Book Settlement gained preliminary court approval. The deadline for comments is January 28, 2010, with the final fairness hearing scheduled for February 18.
• A grant from the National Science Foundation will help enhance arXiv.
• The Saarland University and State Library is conducting a questionnaire on "the desirability of various features which can be implemented in repository systems".
• HathiTrust launched its search tool for Google-digitized books.
• The British Library added the 500,000th item to its digital library -- but don't expect to see it for free.
• Cameron Neylon takes a closer look at Nature Communications, the announced Nature-branded hybrid OA journal.
• LinuxInsider looks at open source science.
• T. Scott Plutchak says that everybody likes the idea of OA, but not everybody is sure that mandates for publicly-funded research are "the best way to get there".
• Wikimedia picks up plaudits: the Webby Awards named Wikipedia one of the ten most influential projects of the decade, and the Huffington Post named Wikimedia's executive director Sue Gardner the year's top "game changer" in media.

The Oberlin College General Faculty unanimously endorsed on November 18 a resolution to make their scholarly articles openly accessible on the Internet. As a result of the measure, the rich scholarly output of the Oberlin faculty will become available to a much broader national and international audience. The Oberlin resolution is similar to policies passed at Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Kansas, and Trinity University. ...

Under the new policy, Oberlin faculty and professional staff will make their peer-reviewed, scholarly articles openly accessible in a digital archive managed by the Oberlin College Library as part of the OhioLINK Digital Resource Commons. Oberlin authors may opt out of the policy for a specific article if they are not in a position to sign journal publishing agreements that are compatible with the policy, or for other reasons. The resolution also creates an institutional license that gives Oberlin College the legal right to make the articles accessible on the Internet through the digital archive. The resolution further encourages, but does not require, authors to submit publications other than peer-reviewed articles in the same manner. ...

Adopted at the recommendation of the General Faculty Library Committee, the policy calls for the committee, in consultation with a faculty council, to establish procedures for carrying out the policy and to monitor its implementation. Policy implementation will be coordinated by a scholarly communications officer, a member of the library staff designated by the director of libraries. ...

The Oberlin College Student Senate recently endorsed the national “Student Statement on the Right to Research,” which expresses a similar commitment to making scholarly research information openly accessible.

• Sharing data, editorial, Nature Cell Biology, November 2009 (not OA, at least so far).
• Johan Weigelt, The case for open-access chemical biology, EMBO Reports, November 2009 (not OA, at least so far).
• Christina Chandras, et al., Models for financial sustainability of biological databases and resources, Database, October 23, 2009.
• Thinh Nguyen, Remembering Babel: Open Data Sharing & Integration, Science Commons, November 19, 2009.
• Shadi S. Saleh, et al., The case for developing publicly-accessible datasets for health services research in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, BMC Health Services Research, October 29, 2009.
• Group on Earth Observations Meets in Washington to Strengthen Access to Data and Information on Biodiversity, Forest Carbon and Other Global Issues, press release, November 17, 2009.
• University of California, DataONE to deal with data deluge, press release, November 18, 2009.
• Vishwas S. Chavan and Peter Ingwersen, Towards a data publishing framework for primary biodiversity data: challenges and potentials for the biodiversity informatics community, BMC Bioinformatics, November 10, 2009.
  • Also see: Dorothea Salo, The basic carrot: usage statistics, The Book of Trogool, November 16, 2009 .
• Vincent S. Smith, et al., Scratchpads: a data-publishing framework to build, share and manage information on the diversity of life, BMC Bioinformatics, November 10, 2009.

The Survey of Higher Education Faculty: Use of Digital Repositories and Views on Open Access (ISBN 1-57440-137-8) presents data on how higher education faculty in the United States and Canada view the growing digital repository/open access movement. The report helps to answer questions such as: Who cooperates with requests from librarians and who does not? Who gives their articles to repositories? Who among faculty sympathizes with the aims of open access? How many scholars have had a publication fee paid for them by their library or academic department?

The report presents the results of a survey of more than 550 higher education faculty in the United States and Canada. Data is presented in the aggregate and for 12 criteria including academic field, size of college, type of college, academic title and other factors.

Just a few of the report's many findings are that:

• 13% of the faculty in the sample had ever used a college's institutional digital repository for scholarly research purposes.
• Use was greatest by faculty at specialized colleges, of whom 40% had used a digital repository at some time for research purposes
• About 28% said that they sympathize and try to help out by providing open access to their research materials as much as they possibly can.
• Although the tenured are less likely than the untenured to have heard of digital repositories, they are roughly twice as likely to have actually contributed an article to one of them.
• 74.62% of the faculty of the sample understood the meaning of the term 'open access'. Individuals on the left wing of the political spectrum were more likely than those on the right wing to understand this term.
• Older faculty were more likely than younger faculty to be mystified by open access and digital repositories. Almost 43% of faculty between the ages of 50 and 59 did not know what digital repositories or open access really were. ...

US District Court Judge Denny Chin has granted preliminary approval of the amended Google Book Search Settlement.

Here's the order.

Read more about it at "Judge Gives Preliminary Approval to Google Deal, Sets Feb. 18 for Final Hearing" and "Judge Sets February Hearing for New Google Books Deal."

1. Google Book Search Settlement Amended
2. Google Books Settlement Status Conference Reports
3. Google Book Settlement Fairness Hearing Postponed
4. Publishers Weekly Surveys on the Google Book Search Settlement
5. “The Google Book Search Settlement: A New Orphan-Works Monopoly?”

Benjamin J. Keele has self-archived "Examining Law Journal Publication Agreements for Copyright Transfers and Self-Archiving Rights" in SSRN.

Here's an excerpt:

This study examines 78 law journal publication agreements and finds that a minority of journals ask authors to transfer copyright. Most journals also permit author to self-archive articles with some conditions. The study recommends journals make their agreements publicly available and use licenses instead of copyright transfers.

1. "Shrinking the Commons: Termination of Copyright Licenses and Transfers for the Benefit of the Public"
2. University of Washington Faculty Senate Passes Resolution Concerning Scholarly Publishing Alternatives and Authors’ Rights
3. “Self-Archiving Journal Articles: A Case Study of Faculty Practice and Missed Opportunity”
4. New Report Says Less Than 50% of Publishers Permit Self-Archiving in Disciplinary Archives
5. SHERPA's RoMEO Service Tops 500 Publisher Self-Archiving Policies

The Research and Enterprise Office of the University of Essex is recruiting an Institutional Repository Manager.

Here's an excerpt from the ad (Ref# SS948):

The postholder will be accountable for delivering an institutional repository (IR) for the University’s research outputs, to schedule and on budget, and for managing the IR once implemented. This will involve working closely with other members of the University, both in academic departments/schools and in professional services, to identify a suitable system, to implement it, and to maintain it in the future so as to provide a quality service for those within and outside the University.

1. Manager, GALILEO Knowledge Repository at Georgia Tech
2. Institutional Repository Manager and Institutional Repository Administrator at University of the Arts London
3. Office of Scholarly Communication Program Manager at Harvard
4. Digital Library Jobs: Project Manager for the Integrated Workflow for Institutional Repository Enhancement Project
5. Digital Library Jobs: Institutional Repository and Digital Collections Librarian at Missouri University of Science and Technology

The Yale University Library is recruiting a Systems Programmer 2.

Here's an excerpt from the ad (STARS# 8624BR):

Purpose In a dynamic 24×7x365 production data center environment, working independently and collaboratively as a senior member of an interdepartmental team, provides Unix and Windows system administration, storage and backup administration, and application administration for Yale University Library, consortia, and development partner’s servers and web services. Plays a leadership role in the acquisition and deployment of new hardware.

1. Head of Library Systems at Johns Hopkins
2. Library Systems Department Head at West Virginia University Libraries
3. Programmer Analyst 2 at Yale
4. ILS and Discovery Systems Specialist at New York University
5. Library IT Jobs: Director of Information Technology at Rutgers

OCLC has released CONTENTdm version 5.2.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

With the new release, the CONTENTdm Project Client now supports auto updates, enabling users to get updates as quickly as they are available. It automatically checks for software updates in the background, so work is not interrupted. If updates are available, they are downloaded but not installed until the organization is ready.

To better support text-based collections, PDF print quality can now be specified in the Project Client, enabling users to select a quality level when generating optional print versions of their compound objects. For users with large, full-text collections, several enhancements improve performance and reduce indexing times. Other enhancements include the addition of a new thesaurus, Canadian Subject Headings (CSH), and configuration options to filter hits in Usage Reports.

1. CONTENTdm Image Viewer: dmMonocle 1.0 Released
2. OCLC Releases WorldCat Digital Collection Gateway
3. Open Source Biological Specimen Database System for Museums: Specify 6 Released
4. Conference Notes on “Using CONTENTdm in a Consortium”
5. Digital Collection/Repository Software: OCLC Releases CONTENTdm 5

Herbert Van de Sompel, Michael L. Nelson, Robert Sanderson, Lyudmila L. Balakireva, Scott Ainsworth, and Harihar Shankar have self-archived "Memento: Time Travel for the Web" in arXiv.org.

Here's an excerpt:

The Web is ephemeral. Many resources have representations that change over time, and many of those representations are lost forever. A lucky few manage to reappear as archived resources that carry their own URIs. For example, some content management systems maintain version pages that reflect a frozen prior state of their changing resources. Archives recurrently crawl the web to obtain the actual representation of resources, and subsequently make those available via special-purpose archived resources. In both cases, the archival copies have URIs that are protocol-wise disconnected from the URI of the resource of which they represent a prior state. Indeed, the lack of temporal capabilities in the most common Web protocol, HTTP, prevents getting to an archived resource on the basis of the URI of its original. This turns accessing archived resources into a significant discovery challenge for both human and software agents, which typically involves following a multitude of links from the original to the archival resource, or of searching archives for the original URI. This paper proposes the protocol-based Memento solution to address this problem, and describes a proof-of-concept experiment that includes major servers of archival content, including Wikipedia and the Internet Archive. The Memento solution 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.

Read more about it at "Time-Travelling Browsers Navigate the Web's Past" and the Memento project website.

1. SHERPA DP2: Developing Services for Archiving and Preservation in a Distributed Environment—Final Report
2. California Digital Library's Web Archiving Service
3. Digital Preservation: Two-Year Pilot Project Evaluation
4. Reference Model for an Open Archival Information System (OAIS) Draft for Review
5. Digital Curation Centre Releases "Archiving Web Resources"

• New OA backfiles:
  • Jamaica Journal (1967-2007), via the the Digital Library of the Caribbean (announcement)
  • Bulletin of the Evangelical Theological Society (1958-1968), via BiblicalStudies.org.uk (announcement)
  • Vox Evangelica (1962-1997), via BiblicalStudies.org.uk (announcement)
  • Reformation & Revival (1992-2005), via BiblicalStudies.org.uk (announcement)
  • Theological Students Fellowship Bulletin (1951-1975), via BiblicalStudies.org.uk (announcement)
• Converted to delayed OA:
  • L’Orientation scolaire et professionnelle (3 year delay), via Revues.org (announcement)
• New on PubMedCentral:
  • Clinics in Orthopedic Surgery (immediate OA)
  • Korean Journal of Physiology & Pharmacology (immediate OA)
  • Advances in Bioinformatics (immediate OA) (announcement)
  • Current Cardiology Reviews (12 month embargo) (announcement)

... A few weeks ago, science blogger Lars Fischer started an e-petition on the website of the Bundestag (German parliament) calling for Open Access to publications based on research that is publicly funded. To date, the petition has been signed by over 11,000 people, making it the most-endorsed open petition currently in the system (the vote ends on November 22nd has apparently been extended to December 22nd). ...

The striking thing about the petition is not that it gives precise policy recommendations (it doesn’t) or contains meticulous explanations of what Open Access is (it doesn’t), but that is has attracted popular support extending well beyond the “usual suspects” from the OA scene.

How did that happen?

While I can’t provide absolute proof, I think the short answer is the Social Web. Fisher’s petition was scooped up by people who ordinarily have little to do with the Open Access community, which consists mostly of librarians and academics, but who are very much invested into the idea of Openness in other contexts: open (government) data, no censorship of the Internet, digital privacy rights etc. There is a budding political movement in Germany and elsewhere and the petition was interpreted as congruent with the goals of this movement and therefore spread with according speed. It was featured on Netzpolitik.org, which is frequently ranked as Germany’s most popular blog, and one prolific supporter is social media personality Sascha Lobo, who placed a banner on his website calling for support of the petition. ...

Lars makes this point in the interview with Richard Poynder:

As far as I see it, Open Access has always been treated — even by its supporters — as a niche topic for experts. But that is wrong. It is an issue that in the long run concerns everyone, and many people understand that.

My opinion (and not just mine) is that Open Access should be treated as the broad societal issue it really is, not just as a nifty way for libraries to save money or researchers to communicate more effectively. ...

If you get the Internet, Open Access is a no-brainer – in a sense the success of the petition has already proven that point. Social media appeals to people who use the Net as their primary source of information and who accordingly believe that information should be free. In other words, they believe in Open Access, even without knowing Peter Suber or having read the Berlin Declaration.

Maybe we should start talking to these people.

Every weekday, thousands of researchers around the world access the Arabidopsis Information Resource (TAIR), which contains the most reliable and up-to-date genomic information available on the most widely used model organism in the plant kingdom. But now, to those users' horror, TAIR faces collapse: the US National Science Foundation (NSF) is phasing out funding after 10 years as the data resource's sole supporter.

TAIR's plight is emblematic of a broader crisis facing many of the world's biological databases and repositories. Research funding agencies recognize that such infrastructures are crucial to the ongoing conduct of science, yet few are willing to finance them indefinitely. ...

Advertising and sponsorship are unlikely to bring in enough money to pay the experts needed to maintain such resources. And the superficially plausible idea of charging subscription fees is effectively unworkable for facilities such as TAIR, because the producers and consumers of data are essentially the same community. Scientists provide data and resources for free, because sharing benefits everyone. However, they would be considerably less likely to deposit the fruits of their labour if this synergy was removed from the equation. ...

The problem is acute even for modest resources. Two examples are the kidney database EuReGene and the mouse-embryo database EURExpress, both of which were launched with funds from the European Commission that have run out in recent months. The databases are currently being maintained on a hand-to-mouth basis, and the scientists who built them don't know where to turn for maintenance money. Yet the European Commission's investment will have been wasted if the databases disappear.

It is time for a whole new approach. Front-line biology cannot function without these resources, so solutions must be found at both national and international levels.

Governments must ensure that at least one of their national funding agencies has money specifically set aside for the long-term support of bioresource infrastructures. ...

But action is also needed on the international front. ... What is required is an international cost-sharing organization that could fund competitively selected infrastructures, large and small. ...

• The OA Shakespeare Quartos Archive, funded by the UK's JISC and the U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities, launched.
• The German SHERPA/RoMEO database of journal policies got an upgrade.
• The BioMed Central journals Journal of Hematology & Oncology and Scandinavian Journal of Trauma, Resuscitation and Emergency Medicine have been accepted for inclusion in MEDLINE.
• The no-fee OA journal Herpetological Conservation and Biology published its 100th article, and will expand from two issues per year to three.
• D-Lib Magazine profiles the Pennsylvania Literary Journal, an OA journal hosted on Google Sites.
• And a letter in D-Lib imagines a dialogue with an author, explaining self-archiving.
• David Wiley tries to define "open" and concludes the most important freedoms for content are reuse, revision, remix, and redistribution.
• The arts and humanities faculty of the University of Buenos Aires passed a resolution condemning the criminal prosecution of an Argentine philosophy professor for allegedly violating copyright by posting the works of Derrida and Heidegger on his Web site.
• American publishers praised a plan by the Chinese government "to begin inspections of libraries, to determine whether unauthorized duplication, communication or electronic dissemination of copyrighted [academic and medical] works is occurring".

Lisa A. Gregory's Master's theses, "The Practice and Perception of Web Archiving in Academic Libraries and Archives," is available from the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Here's an excerpt:

In order to dig deeper into possible reasons behind archivists’ and librarians’ reluctance to archive Web sites, the study described here asks professionals to reveal their Web archiving experiences as well as the information sources they consult regarding archiving Web sites. Specifically, the following two research questions are addressed: Are librarians and archivists at institutions of higher education currently engaged in or considering archiving Web sites? What sources do these professionals consult for information about Web archiving?

1. California Digital Library's Web Archiving Service
2. Foundation Grants for Preservation in Libraries, Archives, and Museums, 2009 Edition
3. Controlling Access to and Use of Online Cultural Collections: A Survey of U.S. Archives, Libraries and Museums for IMLS
4. Copyright and Related Issues Relevant to Digital Preservation and Dissemination of Unpublished Pre-1972 Sound Recordings by Libraries and Archives
5. DCC Releases "Database Archiving"