New & noteworthy

Citation

(2009), "New & noteworthy", Library Hi Tech News, Vol. 26 No. 8. https://doi.org/10.1108/lhtn.2009.23926hab.001

New & noteworthy

Article Type: New & noteworthy From: Library Hi Tech News, Volume 26, Issue 8.

Duke University's Digital Library Collections Now Viewable on Researchers' iPhones

Scholars and students who once had to travel to museums or libraries to view collections of historic images can now do so by clicking on their mobile device instead.

With the launch of DukeMobile 1.1, the Duke University Libraries now offers the most comprehensive university digital image collection specifically formatted for an iPhone or iTouch device. It includes thousands of photos and other artifacts that range from early beer advertisements to materials on San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury scene in the 1960s. Although a growing number of scholarly institutions offer images and other material online, Duke is the first to offer collections that take advantage of the iPhone's design, navigation and other features.

Duke University Libraries offers mobile users digital materials from 20 collections – about 32,000 images overall – covering women's history, early American sheet music, Duke history and other topics. The libraries will add new collections regularly as they become available.

In addition to the library collections, DukeMobile's offerings for the iPhone and other mobile devices now include campus news feeds about business, the environment, law, research and other categories, as well as the latest stories from Duke Today and other campus sources. The news section appears under an icon that will turn red to notify users about campus emergencies or IT alerts. The DukeMobile Version 1.1 suite of apps also includes an expanded schedule of courses and improvements to the campus map.

Duke's Office of Information Technology and Office of Public Affairs and Government Relations have developed DukeMobile in partnership with TerriblyClever Design, a California-based web services company.

DukeMobile: www.medu.com/duke/

A brief video describing the new gateway to the collections: www.youtube.com/watch?viHK3E4N7w6o

WorldCat Mobile Pilot Extended to Europe

OCLC announced in early July 2009 that the WorldCat Mobile pilot, a program that makes collections from libraries visible through mobile devices, has been extended to Europe. Expanding the pilot to Europe means that now phones in the Netherlands, Germany, the UK and France will also be operational.

The WorldCat Mobile pilot allows users to search for and find books and other materials available in libraries near them through a Web application they can access from a PDA or smartphone.

Based on WorldCat.org, the world's largest online resource for finding information in libraries, the pilot has already proved a huge success in the US and Canada. Thanks to advanced global positioning capabilities found in most mobiles, WorldCat Mobile pilot users in these countries will be able to find local library materials, if the library in question has loaded records in WorldCat, no matter where they happen to be. Users can even get a Google Maps view of the library location along with detailed driving instructions if the mobile device supports the application.

Created in collaboration with Boopsie, Inc. (www.boopsie.com), a US-based provider of software for mobile devices, the WorldCat Mobile pilot is a downloadable application that supports many devices, including Nokia, Blackberry and iPhone.

As this is a pilot, OCLC are keen to receive feedback from European users as to their experiences with the service. Anyone wishing to offer such comments can do so by emailing WorldCatMobilePilot@oclc.org.

Learn more about WorldCat Mobile: www.worldcat.org/wcpa/content/mobile/

Download the application to your mobile device at: www.worldcat.org/m/

Pilot Program to Use Cloud Technologies to Test Perpetual Access

The Library of Congress National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP) and DuraSpace have announced that they will launch a one-year pilot program to test the use of cloud technologies to enable perpetual access to digital content. The pilot will focus on a new cloud-based service, DuraCloud, developed and hosted by the DuraSpace organization. Among the NDIIPP partners participating in the DuraCloud pilot program are the New York Public Library and the Biodiversity Heritage Library.

Cloud technologies use remote computers to provide local services through the Internet. DuraCloud will let an institution provide data storage and access without having to maintain its own dedicated technical infrastructure.

For NDIIPP partners, it is not enough to preserve digital materials without also having strategies in place to make that content accessible. NDIIPP is concerned with many types of digital content, including geospatial, audiovisual, images and text. The NDIIPP partners will focus on deploying access-oriented services that make it easier to share important cultural, historical and scientific materials with the world. To ensure perpetual access, valuable digital materials must be stored in a durable manner. DuraCloud will provide both storage and access services, including content replication and monitoring services that span multiple cloud-storage providers.

The New York Public Library offers a set of scholarly research collections with an intellectual and cultural range that is both global and local. The DuraCloud pilot program at the library will replicate large collections of digital images from a Fedora repository into DuraCloud. The New York Public Library plans to convert the images from the TIFF format to JPEG2000 and to serve these images using a powerful JPEG2000 image engine within DuraCloud.

The Biodiversity Heritage Library provides access to historical journal literature in biodiversity in collaboration with global partners, including the Smithsonian Institution, the Missouri Botanical Gardens and the Woods Hole Marine Biology Lab. Their DuraCloud pilot will focus on replication of digital content to provide protection for valuable biodiversity resources. The pilot will demonstrate bi-directional replication of content among partners in the USA and Europe. The library will use the cloud-computing capabilities offered by DuraCloud to analyze biodiversity texts to extract key information such as species-related words. The institution will also deploy a JPEG2000 image engine via DuraCloud to process and serve digital images.

DuraCloud is a cloud-based service developed and hosted by the nonprofit organization DuraSpace. DuraCloud was developed with support from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The DuraCloud pilot program is being launched with support from NDIIPP. DuraCloud is aimed at helping institutions and individuals take advantage of cloud technologies in providing access to their digital materials. DuraCloud is focused on providing trusted solutions for organizations such as universities, libraries, cultural heritage organizations, research centers and others who are concerned with ensuring perpetual access to their digital content.

DuraSpace provides leadership and innovation in open-source technologies for global communities who manage, preserve and provide access to digital content. DuraSpace was established by merging Fedora Commons and the DSpace Foundation, two of the largest providers of open-source repository software worldwide. DuraSpace serves more than 750 institutions that are committed to the use of open-source software solutions for the dissemination and preservation of academic, scientific and cultural digital assets.

The mission of the NDIIPP is to develop a national strategy to collect, preserve and make available digital content, especially materials that are created only in digital formats, for current and future generations.

DuraSpace website: http://duraspace.org/index.html

Library of Congress NDIIPP website: www.digitalpreservation.gov/

Living Web Archives: Developing Next Generation Web Archive Technologies

Web content plays an increasingly important role in the knowledge-based society, and the preservation and long-term accessibility of Web history has high value (e.g. for scholarly studies, market analyses, intellectual property disputes, etc.). There is strongly growing interest in its preservation by library and archival organizations as well as emerging industrial services. Web content characteristics (high dynamics, volatility, contributor and format variety) make adequate Web archiving a challenge.

LiWA – the Living Web Archives Project – will look beyond the pure “freezing” of Web content snapshots for a long time, transforming pure snapshot storage into a “Living” Web Archive. “Living” refers to (a) long-term interpretability as archives evolve, (b) improved archive fidelity by filtering out irrelevant noise and (c) considering a wide variety of content.

LiWA will extend the current state of the art and develop the next generation of Web content capture, preservation, analysis and enrichment services to improve fidelity, coherence and interpretability of web archives. By developing methods which improve archive fidelity, the project will contribute to adequate preservation of complete and high-quality content. By developing methods for improved archive coherence and interpretability, the project contributes to ensuring its long-term usability.

LiWA research and technology development will focus on innovative methods for content capturing, filtering out spam and other noise, improving temporal archive coherence and dealing with semantic and terminology evolution. Two exemplary LiWA applications – focusing on audiovisual streams and social web content, respectively – will show the benefits of advanced Web archiving to interested stakeholders.

To ensure demand-driven research and technology development and broad, sustained project impact, the LiWA consortium will closely work with the International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC) as well as important library and archiving organizations, two of which are members of LiWA.

LiWA Project partners are: L3S Research Center, Germany (coordinator); European Archive Foundation, The Netherlands; Max Planck Institut for Computer Science, Germany; Computer and Automation Research Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Hungary; Netherlands Institute for Sound & Vision, The Netherlands; Hanzo Archives Limited, England; National Library of the Czech Republic, Czech Republic; and Moravian Library, Czech Republic.

Two LiWA newsletters are available: in the first edition of LiWA NEWS (15 January 2009), the LiWA research partners present their goals and summarize their achievements for the first year. In the current issue (25 June 2009), the focus is on Streaming and Social Web applications.

LiWA NEWS: http://liwa-project.eu/index.php/newsletters/

LiWA home page: http://liwa-project.eu/

Pubget Activates 50th Research Institution, Launches New Capabilities

Pubget, the life science search engine that solves the problem of full-text content access, activated its 50th research institution in June 2009. Now more scientists and doctors than ever can accelerate the pace of research with Pubget's index of 20 million documents.

Pubget is a search platform for life science. Pubget's first product, at pubget.com, solves the problem of full-text document access in life science research. Instead of search results linking to papers, the search results ARE the papers. Once a researcher finds the desired papers, the papers can be saved, managed and shared – all online. Pubget's core service is free to scientists and doctors; it also offers a suite of premium features and marketing services to the life science community.

Pubget helps scientists get research fast because it is the only search engine in the world coupled with Pubget's proprietary path engine. The path engine knows the exact location of millions of full-text PDF files from over 20,000 science journals and delivers them as search results. This eliminates the maze of clicks typical of research today, while still respecting copyrights.

Pubget works with the subscription systems at 50 universities, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies and other research institutions. Scientists at these places can now conduct research without getting slowed down by the location of content or the logistics of subscription access. For users without subscription access, Pubget is the most comprehensive source of free life science research papers on the web.

“Each year, scientists spend at least a quarter billion minutes searching for life science literature online,” says Ramy Arnaout, MD, PhD, Pubget chairman and CEO. “This is time they could better spend curing disease and building the future. Pubget's mission is to give them that time back. We are delighted to be helping the top research institutions in the world as we activate our first 50.”

In conjunction with its expanded institution lineup, Pubget is releasing the Pubget Plugin and the Pubget Widget. The Plugin allows users to download batches of PDFs from their searches in one click, handy for offline reading. Meanwhile, the Widget allows any website to display the latest life science research associated with the context of that page.

http://pubget.com/

Index Data and Comperio Partner

Index Data and Comperio, a leader in the Italian library software and services market, have announced a marketing and technology partnership. Comperio is using Index Data's indexing and metasearching technology in its newest ILS and metasearching products and services. Comperio joins a growing number of library and information software vendors that are using Index Data's open source technology for flagship products and services.

Zebra, Index Data's MARC and XML-based index engine and database server, will power the latest version of Clavis NG, Comperio's flagship ILS product. Pazpar2 powers Comperio's new metasearch offering – Plinio – that was officially released at BiblioComm 2009 in March in Milan. Plinio adds federated searching capabilities to Discovery NG, the Social OPAC integrated into Clavis NG, one of the most advanced ILS available in the Italian library market. Plinio also integrates a Link Resolver and an Electronic Resources gateway.

Comperio website: www.comperio.it

Index Data website: www.indexdata.com

Open Source ERM Product Available

ERMes, an open source Electronic Resource Management (ERM) system, is being developed by the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse and has code contributed by Iowa State University. There are 19 registered users of ERMes listed on the website. ERMes provides basic organization and management functions critical to an ERM. The latest release also includes COUNTER functionality and additional ASP code and instructions for creating an A-Z list of databases. ERMes is freely available for download. The latest version does require use of Access 2007.

ERMes website: http://murphylibrary.uwlax.edu/erm/

ERMes blog: http://ermesblog.wordpress.com/

NISO Approves New Working Group to Look at ERMs

NISO announced in July 2009 the approval of a new work item to focus on ERM Data Standards Review. The proposal for this new work was reviewed and approved by NISO's Business Information Topic Committee, which will now create a working group to undertake a review and gap analysis of ERM-related data and standards. Following the analysis, the working group will make recommendations regarding the future of the ERMI data dictionary within the context of the broader ERM landscape, to be delivered in a report to the Business Information Topic Committee and made publicly available.

This project is an outgrowth of the Digital Library Federation's Electronic Resource Management Initiative (ERMI), first begun in 2002. A second phase of the Initiative was completed in late 2008. In follow-up discussions between Todd Carpenter, NISO's Managing Director, and Peter Brantley, Executive Director of DLF, regarding the future of ERMI, NISO agreed to perform a needs assessment with respect to ERMI and broader ERM-related data needs and standards, and to assume any appropriate maintenance responsibilities. A subgroup of NISO's Business Information Topic Committee, comprised of committee members Tim Jewell (Director, Information Resources and Scholarly Communication, University of Washington Libraries) and Ivy Anderson (Director of Collections, California Digital Library), was tasked with surveying this landscape to determine what, if any, further steps should be undertaken by NISO. This new project is an outcome of the ERMI landscape review and proposes next steps in this area. “This is the perfect time for an ERM data standards review – not only will it provide a much-needed assessment of the current state, but it will allow a formal mechanism for hearing from the different communities on where clarification, improvement or further investigation is needed,” commented Topic Committee co-chair Kathleen Folger (Senior Associate Librarian, University of Michigan Library).

The analysis will begin with a review of the ERMI data dictionary as it presently exists, and a mapping of ERMI data elements to those within relevant standards-related projects (e.g. CORE, SUSHI, ONIX-PL, etc.). Vendors, libraries using ERM systems, and other identified stakeholders will then be consulted via surveys and/or more in-depth interviews to solicit additional feedback.

The deliverable will be a report for the Business Information Topic Committee highlighting current work that provides solutions for specific areas of ERM use, identifies gaps where work has not been done, and recommends appropriate further work. The report is expected to be completed by April 2010. NISO encourages those who would like to be a part of this new working group or to join the affiliated interest group to contact the NISO office.

NISO ERM Working Group: www.niso.org/workrooms/ermreview

Streamlining Book Metadata Workflow White Paper Available

In July 2009, the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) and OCLC announced the publication of a white paper on Streamlining Book Metadata Workflow, written by consultant Judy Luther (President, Informed Strategies), that analyzes the current state of metadata creation, exchange and use throughout the book supply chain. Through interviews with over 30 industry representatives, Luther has created a book metadata exchange map illustrating the workflow and metadata exchange and has identified opportunities for eliminating redundancies and making the entire process more economical.

With the number of book formats multiplying and the amount of digital content growing rapidly, the metadata required to support the discovery, sale and use of content by a global audience is increasing exponentially. At the same time, economic pressures on all stakeholders in the supply chain – from publishers to wholesalers to booksellers to metadata suppliers and to librarians – present greater challenges for providing quality and comprehensive metadata at every point in the cycle.

The white paper was commissioned by NISO and OCLC as a follow-up to the Symposium for Publishers and Librarians held by OCLC on 18-19 March 2009 to discuss book metadata. Both organizations share the vision of an environment where data can be exchanged seamlessly between different systems and both are focused on reducing the costs of this exchange for all participants in the supply chain of data and content.

“The white paper illustrates how effectively both publishers and libraries have implemented their respective standards of ONIX for Books and MARC, but also shows how silos have grown up around the two standards,” stated Todd Carpenter, NISO Managing Director. “There are definite opportunities for breaking down these silos and both communities are eager to find better methods for interoperability and streamlining their operations.”

“Efficiently and effectively reusing metadata from publishers supports the continued relevance and success of library bibliographic control going forward,” said Karen Calhoun, Vice President, OCLC WorldCat and Metadata Services. “It is important that libraries, publishers and metadata suppliers collaborate in the ongoing development and evolution of best practices and standards in support of Web-scale services.”

NISO and OCLC plan to hold ongoing events to continue the dialog among publishers, librarians and metadata suppliers. Specific actions identified in the report will be pursued with the establishment of working groups to develop recommended practices or standards as needed.

Streamlining Book Metadata Workflow is available on the NISO website at: www.niso.org/publications/white_papers/ Information about the Symposium for Publishers and Librarians is available on the OCLC website at: www.oclc.org/publisher-symposium/

Rutgers University Libraries Release OpenMIC Metadata Management Utility

The Rutgers University Libraries are pleased to announce the availability of OpenMIC, a METS-based bibliographic utility for describing and managing resources. OpenMIC is the open source release of the Rutgers University Libraries' RUCore repository bibliographic utility and will be maintained on the RUcore annual release schedule. Releases will include fixes for known problems and recommendations for enhancements received from internal projects and the user community at large. OpenMIC can be used as a stand alone metadata creation tool or with its companion object and workflow handling utility, OpenWMS, which will be released in fall 2009 and can interact with any repository software for a complete digital object management solution.

OpenMIC includes a complete METS metadata implementation with structure map, descriptive metadata, source metadata, technical metadata and rights metadata documents. OpenMIC incorporates MODS, Dublin Core, MIX (NISO technical metadata for images), AES (technical metadata for sound recordings) and PREMIS.

OpenMIC can be fully customized and managed for use at a single or at multiple institutions in a consortial environment. OpenMIC is currently in use for RUcore, the Rutgers Community Repository, the New Jersey Digital Highway, the statewide cultural heritage portal and NJVid, the statewide digital video portal.

Features of OpenMIC include:

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  An event-based data model that enables libraries and archives to document significant events in the lifecycle of the resource, including full event description, agents and their roles and associated documentation, in any METS metadata category. For example, a library may create a rights event for a non-exclusive license, with the heir of the resource creator documented as donor and a PDF of the signed license linked as a related object. Events have been used to document exhibits and their curators, preservation activities and condition inventories.

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  The ability to create multiple METS documents and to link METS documents together (e.g. the source document for the analog source used to create a digital preservation copy documented in a technical metadata document).

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  An authentication and authorization module that enables administrators to set permissions at the organization, collection or project level.

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  The ability to determine required data elements and establish templates, based on organization, collection or project.

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  The ability to add taxonomies to any vocabulary-based data element.

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  Management options based on single or multiple-organization use.

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  Rich metadata for describing analog source objects, digital masters and associated rights.

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  An intuitive user interface that can be customized for simple or complex levels of description depending on the needs of the resource or collection or the expertise of the cataloger.

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  Complete documentation, including a metadata data dictionary.

OpenMIC was developed by a team of designers and programmers, led by Dr Yang Yu, database architect at the Rutgers University Libraries and Kalaivani Ananthan, RUL open source applications manager. Metadata designers are Grace Agnew, Associate University Librarian for Digital Library Systems, Mary Beth Weber, Head of Technical Services, Jane Otto, Multimedia metadata and catalog librarian, Isaiah Beard, Digital Data Curator, and Kalaivani Ananthan. The development and release of OpenMIC is managed by the RUL open source software team, Kalaivani Ananthan and Chad Mills, RUL Programming Coordinator. OpenMIC is released through GNU GPL License 3.0. Basic support for the digital library community includes complete installation and user documentation, as well as communication tools for reporting bug fixes and suggesting enhancements. A higher level of support, including training and customization, is offered to the Rutgers University community, in active support of the many digital projects undertaken by the faculty and staff of the university.

OpenMIC can be downloaded from the RUcore Open Source Projects page: http://rucore.libraries.rutgers.edu/open/projects/openmic/

Serial Solutions Joins the eXtensible Catalog Project

The University of Rochester River Campus Libraries announced in July 2009 that Serials Solutions, a leader in providing technology solutions for libraries, had joined the eXtensible Catalog (XC) Project – an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation funded project currently underway at the University's River Campus Libraries. Serials Solutions' involvement is both technical and financial. The additional funding for the XC Project by Serials Solutions reflects the company's commitment to supporting the development of a common open-source framework for enhancing and enriching metadata for libraries and other cultural institutions. Serials Solutions believes that the XC software holds much potential for providing a standard platform for metadata enrichment across a variety of products and applications, both open-source and commercial.

eXtensible Catalog (XC) Project: www.extensiblecatalog.org/

Summon Discovery Service Moves Out of Beta

Serials Solutions announced the first commercial adoption of the revolutionary Summon web-scale discovery service at the American Library Association's (ALA) annual conference in Chicago in July 2009. Michigan's Grand Valley State University (GVSU) Library will launch the Summon service for students and faculty, enabling single search box access to the breadth of its collection – from books and videos to e-resources at the article level.

The Summon service aims to bring the researcher back to the library and provide a channel for greater return on the library's content investment. Summon users enter their search term in a simple, library branded search box and the service returns a list of the physical and digital materials that are appropriate for them. From this relevancy-ranked list, they can click through to full-text articles, but also find the books, specialty research and bibliographic tools and services that will propel their research.

The Summon service was announced in January with Dartmouth College Library and Oklahoma State University Libraries as beta sites, along with content heavyweights ProQuest and Gale as key partners. In its six months of beta testing, the Summon service has added five global sites – University of Sydney, Claremont Colleges Library, University of Calgary, Western Michigan University and University of Liverpool – partners in refining the service in its final stages of development. Initially tested with just librarians, both Dartmouth College Library and University of Liverpool have opened the service to faculty and students.

Concurrent with beta testing, publishers and other contributors have rapidly signed on to the Summon service. ProQuest and Gale – aggregators contributing indexing of titles from 4,700 of their participating publishers – have been joined by hundreds of other contributors, including Springer, Taylor & Francis, SAGE, IEEE, Emerald, Scitation publishers, the Royal Society, as well as scores of scholarly publishers and university presses. Earlier this month, the momentum behind the Summon service grew as LexisNexis, Publishing Technology – provider of the scholarly research platform IngentaConnect – and ISI Web of Science joined the growing ranks of those whose content will be discovered through the service. The Summon service now includes more than 6,000 contributors with nearly half a billion records indexed in a single content store, enabling one search and true relevancy-ranked results.

The Summon service is designed with library needs in mind. It is hosted, making it easy to implement and easy to support with low impact on library staff. It is also built with an open API so that it can be integrated with existing library websites or campus systems.

Serials Solutions Summon: www.serialssolutions.com/summon

Ex Libris and EBSCO Partner on Primo Central

Ex Libris and EBSCO Publishing (EBSCO) have signed an agreement that enables EBSCOhost subscribers that run the Primo discovery and delivery solution to offer their users seamless access to the authoritative EBSCOhost electronic content via a new Primo component, Primo Central. This flexible Primo technology will be used by Ex Libris to index the EBSCO content centrally and make it available for users' searches along with all other library and institutional collections. Primo will display the search results in a single relevance-ranked list. Primo Central indexes scholarly materials such as articles and e-books provided by publishers and aggregators, and is seamlessly integrated into local Primo systems. Primo Central will be managed by Ex Libris as a service available to all Primo customers.

EBSCO's content will be more visible to library patrons through Primo. Ex Libris and EBSCO will ensure that libraries that use both Primo and EBSCOhost services are able to provide their users with seamless online access to the full-text information that they want, whether it is discovered through Primo, EBSCOhost Integrated Search or EBSCO Discovery Service.

EBSCO joins a large, rapidly growing list of publishers participating in Primo Central that includes Alexander Street Press; IOP Publishing; the Johns Hopkins University Press/Project MUSE; the National Academy of Sciences/PNAS; the United States National Library of Medicine/PubMed; the American Institute of Physics, together with a number of their Scitation hosting platform partners, including SPIE, SIAM and the Acoustical Society of America; the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and more. These organizations are collaborating with Ex Libris on a global scale to enable library users to find and access valuable, authoritative content in their local library and through the growing network of Primo libraries. Primo is implemented in more than 180 leading academic and research institutions in 23 countries.

EBSCO website: www.ebsco.com

Ex Libris Primo Central information: www.exlibrisgroup.com/category/PrimoCentral/

Ebrary Announces Enhancements, New Services

In June 2009, ebrary announced a series of enhancements and new services. It has considerably improved its QuickView Reader, which does not require any software downloads or installations. New QuickView features include InfoTools, which networks every word with other online resources; copying; highlighting; annotating and the ability to turn text into hyperlinks. Earlier ebrary added printing to QuickView as well as integration with RefWorks and EndNote for easy citation management. Additionally, ebrary has enhanced its bookshelf feature. End-users can now email folders containing notes, highlights, hyperlinks and bookmarks to peers.

Ebrary also announced the availability of Content Hosting Plus, a new product that combines pre-packaged, full-text e-books in academic subject areas with ebrary's hosting services. In most cases the inclusive e-books from leading publishers, which contain hundreds of titles each, are valued at more than the cost of ebrary's hosting services. With Content Hosting Plus, customers simply send ebrary their PDF files and ebrary does the rest. In most cases, customers' sites can be up and running in days.

Ebrary has also developed new COUNTER-compliant usage statistics that make it easier for customers to view and analyze how e-books and other electronic materials are being used.

Ebrary's new reports include the same functionality as the company's existing reports, such as the ability to track usage based on page views, copies and prints.

Additional capabilities include the following:

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  Ability to select report formats including HTML, PDF, Excel and Active Reports. Active Reports provide Excel-like features in the browser, with sorts, graphs, pivot and visualization.

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  Reporting of percent utilization by title, based on the unique pages accessed.

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  Drill-down to category and subcategory.

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  Drill-down from month to day.

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  Report of turnaways and wait queue for single access purchased titles.

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  Ability to select metadata columns for reports including title, author, publisher, content owner, category, subcategory, pages and type.

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  Report of title license type, separating titles purchased through ebrary and those included in subscriptions.

Ebrary website: www.ebrary.com

VTLS Announces New Social OPAC Chamo

In July 2009, VTLS announced the development of its new social OPAC, Chamo [kámmō], a groundbreaking addition to VTLS' software offerings. Chamo boasts numerous features that make it attractive to novice and expert OPAC users alike. The software lets users discover materials quickly, using familiar search methods such as Quick Search and faceted result links. Users can know immediately whether materials are available and at which location and can place requests from the very first result screen. Relevancy ranking and various sorts are supported. Refining a search is as easy as picking a facet from a list or typing additional terms in the search box and letting Chamo add them to the original search string. Advanced searches give users the advantage of applying multiple filters simultaneously.

“In developing Chamo, one goal was to create a scalable OPAC that would support thousands of simultaneous users and still provide the capabilities and ease of use that people expect,” said Vinod Chachra, President and CEO of VTLS Inc. “Chamo represents a departure from traditional client-server architecture in that it connects directly to the Oracle database. It also acts as a Drupal module, allowing sites to take advantage of Drupal's themes and its content management capabilities.”

Personalized searches and search results are also hallmarks of Chamo. Users can add personal comments using reviews, ratings and social tagging. RSS feeds inform patrons of newly added materials. Users can create multiple lists and then use these lists to print, e-mail, place holds or request materials from the stacks. In addition, users can save their favorite search, which Chamo will remember and will execute automatically when users sign back on.

VTLS website: www.vtls.com/

Agent Iluminar Scheduled for Customer Implementation

Auto-Graphics, Inc., a technology innovator providing library automation solutions for over 36 years, announced in July 2009 the successful completion and full production launch of AGent the next generation patron user interface for the company's library automation platform. The beta testing program occurred over several months this past spring and incorporated a representative cross section of library customers, varying in both size and library type. The program encompassed a range of AGent™ library automation products including: AGent VERSO, a complete integrated library system; AGent Resource Sharing, a robust interlibrary loan and consortial borrowing solution; and AGent Search, a powerful federated search application. Amongst the first of its beta testing program customers to implement AGent Iluminar is Auto-Graphics' longtime partner, the State Library of Kansas.

AGent Iluminar is a Web Services application that was built using the free open source Adobe Flex^® framework, which enables graphic transitions and design features in a more visually pleasing interface, while retaining and enhancing the underlying functionality of the AGent platform. AGent Iluminar provides intuitive navigation, using web cues already familiar to many web-savvy patrons, as well as a “wizard-like” advanced search screen that utilizes prompts modeled from popular search engines. In addition, AGent Iluminar employs innovative, attention-grabbing display technologies such as 3D Flip and Cover Flow book jacket display, made popular by Apple iPod, as well as enhanced drag & drop functionality and the ability for patrons to modify their own user experience through “My Lists” and “My Account” customization options.

Auto-Graphics website: www.auto-graphics.com/

OITP Seeks Nominations for Cutting-Edge Technology Practices

The ALA's Office for Information Technology Policy (OITP) is soliciting nominations for best library practices using cutting-edge technology.

“We want to showcase libraries that are serving their communities with novel and innovative methods and provide the library community with some successful models for delivering quality library service in new ways,” said Vivian Pisano, Chair of OITP's America's Libraries for the 21st Century Subcommittee.

“Cutting edge” refers to tested and successful implementations of technological advancements used in services such as:

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  improvements in traditional services and processes by inventing/re-inventing/twisting technology;

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  introduction of new, innovative services that are flexible and responsive to community needs;

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  methods for connecting libraries to their communities; and

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  funding initiatives or organizational models that ensure library information technology will remain current.

Nominations should be sent to the ALA, Office for Information Technology Policy, 1615 New Hampshire Avenue NW, 1st Floor, Washington, DC 20009 by 1 September 2009. Details about the nomination process and an online submission form are available on the OITP website.

The America's Libraries for the 21st Century Subcommittee will review all nominations and conduct selected interviews or site visits to identify those libraries that are truly offering a best practice or most innovative service. Libraries or library service areas selected will be publicized via the OITP website, highlighted through ALA publications, and featured in a program at the ALA Annual Conference in 2010.

For additional details and an online submission form: www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/oitp/Cutting%20Edge/cuttingedge.cfm

Innovative Strategies for Financing Digital Resources in the Non-Profit Sector

Tens of millions of dollars, pounds and euros are invested each year by government agencies and private foundations to develop and support digital resources in the not-for-profit sector. As institutional budgets tighten, will these digital resources be able to survive and thrive?

A new study, released today by Ithaka S + R and the JISC-led Strategic Content Alliance, illustrates the varied and creative ways in which leaders of digital initiatives, particularly those developed in the higher education and cultural heritage sectors, are managing to identify sources of support and generate revenue.

Ithaka Case Studies in Sustainability consists of 12 examples of digital resource projects and a final report, Sustaining Digital Resources: An On-the-Ground View of Projects Today, written by Ithaka S + R analysts Nancy L. Maron, K. Kirby Smith and Matthew Loy. The projects that served as subjects for the case studies include:

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  (1)  BOPCRIS Digitisation Centre, Hartley Library, University of Southampton (UK);

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  (2)  Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London (UK);

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  (3)  DigiZeitschriften, Göttingen State and University Library (Germany);.

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  (4)  eBird, Information Science Department, Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Cornell University (US);

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  (5)  Electronic Enlightenment, Bodleian Library, University of Oxford (UK);

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  (6)  Hindawi Publishing Corporation (Egypt);

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  (7)  Inamédiapro and ina.fr, L'Institut national de l'audiovisuel (France);

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  (8)  Licensed Internet Associates Program, The National Archives (UK);

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  (9)  Middle School Portal 2: Math and Science Pathways, National Science Digital Library (US);

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  (10)  Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Stanford University (US);

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  (11)  Thesaurus Linguae Graecae, University of California, Irvine (US); and

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  (12)  V&A Images, Victoria and Albert Museum (UK).

The case studies provide a rare glimpse into the strategies of 12 digital initiatives across Europe, the Middle East and North America – ranging from an online scholarly encyclopedia of philosophy to an image licensing operation at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Each case is extensively researched, drawing from interviews with key stakeholders of the organization, and details the costs and revenues that each project generates, while illustrating the decision-making process that underlies these strategies.

The final report serves as a guide to the cases, and argues that sustainability entails much more than simply covering the costs of putting a resource online. Equally important is ensuring the ongoing development of the resource to suit the continually evolving needs of its users. The paper presents a framework for thinking about sustainability, outlining the five stages that successful projects must undertake in developing sustainability models: from acquiring a deep understanding of users and their needs, to thinking broadly about the range of revenue models that might be possible.

The studies also demonstrate that, while many projects are attempting to generate some revenue through subscription, pay-per-view, and a range of licensing arrangements, their overall financial picture still depends heavily on receiving direct as well as in-kind support from the institutions that host them.

The work is part of a long-term examination into the sustainability of digital content, supported by the JISC-led Strategic Content Alliance in the UK, and builds upon the 2008 Ithaka Report, Sustainability and Online Revenue Models for Online Academic Resources.

The work was jointly funded by JISC's Strategic Content Alliance in the UK and the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Science Foundation in the USA.

The full report and case studies are available online and open for comment:

www.ithaka.org/ithaka-s-r/strategy/ithaka-case-studies-in-sustainability

Lyrasis Mass Digitization Collaborative Expands

Lyrasis announced in July 2009 that North Georgia College & State University Library Technology Center (North Georgia), Dahlonega, GA, was the first Southeastern member to join the Lyrasis Mass Digitization Collaborative. The Collaborative, founded by PALINET in October 2008 has expanded member participation from its original Mid-Atlantic region to include the Southeastern region as a result of the recent merger with SOLINET.

The Collaborative offers members the capability to contribute materials for digitization as part of a regional digital collection. Funded by the Lyrasis membership and supported in part through a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Collaborative's first goal is the conversion of approximately 60,000 books into digital format. Through Lyrasis' partnership with the Internet Archive, the new digital resources are shared on the web, ensuring open access to rare and special library collections from the Mid-Atlantic and Southeastern regions.

Participation in the Lyrasis Mass Digitization Collaborative benefits all libraries and cultural heritage institutions. Institutions with less digitization experience can jump start a project, while larger programs can get high-volume, high-quality digitization done quickly at a low cost. Currently, 31 libraries and cultural heritage institutions are members of the Collaborative, including the newest participants: Bloomsburg University (PA), Bucknell University (PA), Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh (PA), Curtis Institute of Music (PA), Duquesne University (PA), Free Library of Philadelphia (PA), Gettysburg College (PA), Lehigh University (PA), Penn State University (PA), Rutgers University (NJ) and Villanova University (PA).

Mass Digitization Collaborative website: www.lyrasis.org/Products-and-Services/Digital-Services/Mass-Digitization-Collaborative.aspx

Alliance Library System and LearningTimes Announce ATLAS

Alliance Library System (ALS) and LearningTimes are pleased to announce the debut of ATLAS (Alliance Trail to Learning and Syndicated Sites). ATLAS is a new set of social media tools ALS is using to promote information and historical photos about Illinois history. ALS and LearningTimes partnered to create this innovative and exciting new model of collaborative digital imaging collections using multimedia and social networking tools to bring historical times to life, and involving a community at large in its creation. The project debuted 29th June with an online conference. A recording of the event is available at: www.atlaspodcasts.org/webcast-2009-06/ The Cullom-Davis Library at Bradley University will serve as the first partner library to produce additional podcasts on Illinois history to be added to the site. They were involved in the first set of ten podcasts, providing the material for the five from Peoria.

At the heart of the ATLAS project are digital images of historic people, places, documents and objects. The images are combined with audio descriptions and placed on a map of Illinois to produce an engaging new interactive learning model for libraries and their customers.

The project began with ten short high-quality podcasts about nineteenth century Illinois and famous women from the first 100 years of statehood. Produced in association with LearningTimes, each podcast spotlights a specific person or topic area. ATLAS visitors are able to mouse over a city in Illinois and select a story of interest, featuring engaging commentary and information. A searchable database allows users to search sound files, narratives and photographs. The programs may be enjoyed right from the ATLAS site, or downloaded to a portable audio player.

The ATLAS site will support dozens of additional podcasts. To encourage continued growth and wide participation, LearningTimes trained over 50 librarians from all over the state to produce their own podcasts. Based on the popular LearningTimes program “Producing Great Audio and Video Podcasts,” these online workshops offered concrete approaches for bringing each of the elements of a great podcast together. Participants learned the practical skills and techniques they need to produce high-quality, highly engaging audio and video podcasts. Participants are expected to share two images relating to Illinois history and additional podcast modules which will become part of the project website.

To participate in upcoming ATLAS events, join the ATLAS google group at: http://groups.google.com/group/AllianceATLAS?lnk=gcimv

ATLAS website: www.atlaspodcasts.org

Rare Africa Photos Go Online, Open New Options for Research

In June 2009, for the first time ever, a searchable collection of thousands of rare photographs chronicling Europe's colonization of East Africa became available to anyone with an Internet connection anywhere in the world, thanks to the efforts of staff at Northwestern University Library.

The Humphrey Winterton Collection of East African Photographs: 1860-1960 began attracting the interest of Africa scholars and others in 2002 when it was acquired by Northwestern's Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies. The library officially launched the online collection on 25th June.

“The 7,000-plus photographs in this extraordinary collection document the changing relationships among Africans and between Africans and Europeans during 100 years of dramatic historic change,” says Herskovits Library curator David Easterbrook. The photographs include formal and informal portraits of Africans and their colonizers, photos of slaves and slave traders, and images depicting the building of railroads and urban areas and of traditional African life. They represent the work of explorers, colonial officials, settlers, missionaries, military officers, travelers and early commercial photographers.

Visitors to the site can search for photographs by subject or browse them in a way that replicates how British collector Winterton organized the collection into 65 albums, scrapbooks and boxes. A “browsing feature” developed by Northwestern University Library technology specialists, for example, reproduces the experience of flipping through a photo album's pages.

Because the images are tagged with extensive metadata, they can be searched by date or keywords. A school group viewing the site in its pilot stage, for example, asked Easterbrook to see if the collection included any photos relating to President Obama's ancestry. The result: 31 photos of people and places were found.

According to Easterbrook, photos going back as far as the 1860s are extremely rare in the history of photography in Africa, and opportunities to see and study them are rarer still. The creation of the digital Winterton site changes that.

Generous funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services made it possible for Northwestern University Library not only to digitize the Winterton Collection images but also to design innovative tools to preserve and display them in electronic form.

The Winterton Collection is the third Herskovits Library collection available online. The others are a collection of 113 antique African maps dating from the 16th to the early 20th century (www.library.northwestern.edu/govinfo/collections/mapsofafrica/) and a collection of 590 posters reflecting the culture and politics of contemporary African nations (www.library.northwestern.edu/africana/collections/posters/). These and other digital collections are part of an innovative digital repository being designed by Northwestern University Library to most effectively preserve and display electronic text, visual, audio and video materials for online access.

Winterton Collection: http://repository.library.northwestern.edu/winterton/

Qidenus Robotic Book Scanner Features Fast, Gentle Bionic-Finger Page-Turning

The Austrian-manufactured Qidenus Robotic Book Scanner made its debut on American soil at the ALA National Conference in July 2009.

The RBS Pro book scanner is housed in a chic black and glass cabinet and features impressive bionic-finger technology suited for large-volume scanning applications. The scanner is distributed in the US by The Crowley Company and in the UK by TownsWeb Archiving Ltd.

Designed as a stand-alone product (the RBS Pro, featured at the ALA exhibits) or as an accessory to a Zeutschel scanner (the RBS Module), the QiScan fully automatic book scanners permanently store any bound material, making them both accessible and searchable. The QiScan is able to scan books according to their physical condition at varied aperture angles and at up to 2,500 pages an hour, with an average throughput of 1,500 pages per hour. The associated software package supports all standards and formats (XML, PDF/a, OCR (also fracture), JPEG2000, GIF, TIFF, RAW). Working with and without a glass plate as desired, special attention was paid during development to realizing a gentle page-turning technology while creating a workflow with the greatest possible efficiency and the lowest labor input.

Qidenus Technologies: www.roboticbookscan.com/

To see video of the RBS Pro in action, visit: www.thecrowleycompany.com/products/qidenus.html

ELPUB 2009: Rethinking Electronic Publishing – Presentations, Papers Available

Presentations and full papers are now available from ELPUB 2009, the 13th International Conference on Electronic Publishing, entitled “Rethinking Electronic Publishing: Innovation in Communication Paradigms and Technologies”, held in Milan in June 2009.

Electronic publishing via the Internet is continuously changing its shapes and models, challenging traditional players to adapt to new contexts. Innovative technologies enable individuals, scholars, communities and networks to establish contacts, exchange data, produce information, share knowledge. Open access sources and commercial players make contents available for a heterogeneous audience in diversity of environments, from business to private life, from educational and cultural activities to leisure time, and in a large variety of devices, from personal computers to mobile media.

New opportunities and new needs challenge us to rethink electronic publishing, to innovate communication paradigms and technologies, to make information not just a flat equivalent of a paper but a truly digital format, to allow machine processing and new services, to face the future of mobile life. The ELPUB 2009 conference focused on key issues in e-communications, exploring dissemination channels, business models, technologies, methods and concepts.

ELPUB 2009: http://conferences.aepic.it/index.php/elpub/elpub2009/schedConf/presentations