New & Noteworthy

Citation

(2010), "New & Noteworthy", Library Hi Tech News, Vol. 27 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/lhtn.2010.23927cab.001

New & Noteworthy

Article Type: New & Noteworthy From: Library Hi Tech News, Volume 27, Issue 3.

IBM Announces Academic Cloud Computing Initiative

In February 2010, IBM announced it will make key parts of its software portfolio available in a cloud computing environment to more easily allow professors around the world to incorporate technology into their curricula. IBM brought together more than 200 academic and industry leaders at a conference to explore how best to integrate technology into all aspects of a college education so that the next generation of global entrepreneurs will be differentiated by an education that applies technology to areas such as information management and business analytics, digitized patient records and clean technologies.

IBM is working initially with 20 colleges and universities across the USA to help them use a new Academic Skills Cloud and will add additional schools over time. The new cloud will provide academia an opportunity to use IBM software at no charge without having to install and maintain it themselves. Cloud computing is a new consumption and delivery model inspired by consumer Internet services.

Building on the recently announced IBM Cloud Academy program for educational institutions, the new Academic Skills Cloud provides academia access to cloud computing resources for workforce skills development. IBM is partnering with educational institutions to leverage the power of cloud computing and enhance teaching and research services with more efficient IT environments.

Using the new IBM Academic Skills Cloud, professors can help students:

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  learn the latest technology skills, such as software development and practical use of information management, Web 2.0 and cloud computing and how they can be applied for decision making;

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  access IT curricula and courses from anywhere using their laptop or netbook; and

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  differentiate themselves from other graduates by gaining key IT skills to better compete for jobs.

Faculty can take advantage of cloud-delivered skills resources to:

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  quickly integrate new IT courses in their curriculum, regardless of subject taught;

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  more easily facilitate group and long-distance learning programs for students; and

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  free up existing university technology infrastructure resources.

The first wave of academics using the skills cloud will be able to teach technology skills based on IBM Rational, WebSphere and Information Management software, including Rational Application Developer, Rational Team Concert, Rational Software Architect, WebSphere Application Server, DB2 and Informix. IBM plans to add additional software over time, including Cognos, Lotus and Tivoli.

More information about the IBM Academic Initiative is available at: www.ibm.com/academicinitiative

More information on IBM's cloud computing university initiatives is available at: www.ibm.com/university/cloud

Baker & Taylor to Offer Digital Media Content from Wiley, Elsevier on Blio

In February 2010, Baker & Taylor (B & T) Inc. announced that it will partner with global publisher John Wiley & Sons Inc. to provide rich, highly formatted content on Blio. Blio is the revolutionary e-reader software application created by knfbReading Technology and powered by B & T.

"Baker & Taylor is proud to offer a wide array of Wiley's educational and consumer titles on Blio,” said Tom Morgan, Chairman and CEO of B & T. “With colorful illustrations, photos and informative graphics, Wiley's titles, including cookbooks and travel books, offer much more than straight text to educate readers.”

In March 2010, B & T announced it has entered into an agreement with Elsevier, a leading publisher of scientific, medical and technical books, to provide Elsevier's content on Blio. By the end of the year, Elsevier plans to launch between 8,000 and 9,000 titles, including titles within its life science, physical sciences and professional lists. Elsevier's Focal Press has plans to introduce enhanced titles with embedded media on Blio for its post-production list, including titles with three-dimensional (3-D) effects.

By leveraging strong relationships with the publishing community as well as its best-of-breed digital media partners, B & T is converting, managing and delivering new content for Blio every day.

Blio, featuring cutting-edge print-to-speech (for rights-enabled titles) and full-color 3-D technologies, is the brainchild of futurist and inventor Ray Kurzweil. Blio delivers the most advanced, flexible and open-reading platform in the world. Blio is also hardware neutral, meaning it works on a number of devices, including personal computers, laptops, netbooks and iPhones, not to mention up and coming tablets.

More information on Blio from B & T is available at: www.btol.com/suppliers_blio.cfm

Blackboard Brings Interactive Teaching and Learning to Mobile Devices

Blackboard Inc. has announced plans for Blackboard Mobile Learn^TM, an application that will bring two-way teaching and learning to mobile devices, creating an interactive mobile learning experience for students and teachers on the go.

Blackboard's existing Blackboard Mobile Central^TM application already delivers a mobile campus experience that includes news, events, maps and sports among a range of student life and service options. Blackboard Mobile Learn will take the next step by bringing the classroom experience and learning content to the mobile environment, arming campuses with a high-quality option to quickly meet the growing demand from students who want to do more with their smartphones and other web-enabled devices.

With Blackboard Mobile Learn, students will be able to check grades and assignments, add comments to discussion boards, email instructors and classmates and post comments on blogs – all from their mobile devices.

Blackboard Mobile Learn will recreate and enrich the course experience of Blackboard Learn^TM, the leading web-based teaching and learning platform, in native mobile applications that in June will support a selection of the world's most popular mobile platforms including iPhone(R) OS, Android and BlackBerry(R). Like Blackboard Mobile Central, Blackboard Mobile Learn is available through an annual license, will be branded under the school's name and can be downloaded by students and faculty at mobile application stores.

Schools that are interested in experimenting with mobile learning on their campus for no additional charge can enable Wi-Fi access to Blackboard Mobile Learn on devices such as the iPhone and iPod touch(R) and, through a special partnership with Sprint, on select smartphones powered by the Now Network^TM. The no-cost options are intended to help institutions get started quickly without extra investments.

Blackboard Mobile Learn will be available initially for the USA and Puerto Rico higher education and professional education clients on Blackboard Learn Releases 8, 9 and higher. Details on availability for K-12 and international markets, as well as for previous versions of Blackboard Learn and the WebCT and ANGEL platforms, will follow.

More information about Blackboard Mobile Learn is available at: http://blackboard.com/Mobile/Overview.aspx

Serials Solutions Partners with Springshare

In February 2010, Serials Solutions announced its partnership with Springshare, the maker of LibGuides. Together, Serials Solutions and Springshare will provide the first ERAMS-based LibGuides integration, enabling common subscribers to create LibGuides A-to-Z lists powered by the e-resource data of Serials Solutions^® KnowledgeWorks knowledgebase. Springshare will use the KnowledgeWorks XML API to incorporate authoritative e-resource information into LibGuides so that librarians can share their resource data through a robust, Web 2.0 user interface.

Serials Solutions and Springshare worked with beta partners at SUNY Westchester Community College, Grand Valley State University, Palm Beach Atlantic University and Mississippi State University to test the integration of KnowledgeWorks data into LibGuides.

The minimum requirement to enable this feature is a subscription to LibGuides and Serials Solutions^® 360 services or the Summon service, which include the KnowledgeWorks knowledgebase. There is no additional charge for integrating KnowledgeWorks data with LibGuides.

Serials Solutions website: www.serialssolutions.com/

Springshare website: http://springshare.com/

UKSG E-Resources Management Handbook: Eight New and Updated Chapters

UKSG, the organization that connects the information community, has today announced the latest chapters to be added to The E-Resources Management Handbook, its open-access guide to the practical aspects of working with e-resources. The Handbook comprises 27 chapters on topics such as licensing, archiving, marketing and ERM systems; recent chapters include:

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  Peer review, by Fytton Rowland of Loughborough University, which outlines the methodology of peer review of scholarly publications, with some coverage of its history and purposes.

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  A beginner's guide to working with vendors, by Joseph Thomas of East Carolina University, which considers the varieties of library-vendor relationships, issues with communication, product knowledge, licensing and negotiating, ongoing service responsibilities and ethics.

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  E-resource management and the Semantic Web, by George Macgregor of Liverpool John Moores University, which provides an introduction to some essential Semantic Web concepts and the resource description framework (RDF) in the context of e-resource discovery.

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  How to survive as a new serialist, by Glenda Griffin of Sam Houston State University, which provides information on organizations, associations, online and print resources, discussion lists and training events, and practical suggestions on getting started.

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  COUNTER: current developments and future plans, by Peter Shepherd of COUNTER, which reports on the latest Codes of Practice to govern the recording and exchange of online usage data.

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  Cancellation workflow, by Trina Holloway of Georgia State University, which posits practical procedures for reviewing library collections and selecting titles for cancellation.

The Griffin, Thomas and Holloway chapters were originally published by UKSG's North American counterpart NASIG, as “NASIGuides,” and reflect the ongoing collaboration between the two organizations.

In addition to the new chapters, and in line with the Handbook's status as a “living” e-book, two further chapters have been reviewed and updated:

1. 1.

   New resource discovery mechanisms, by consultant Jenny Walker, reviews changes since the chapter was initially published in 2006, a period in which resource discovery service development has focused on the increasingly web-literate end-user.

2. 2.

   Usage statistics and online behavior, by Angela Conyers of Birmingham City University, looks at the reasons for collecting usage statistics at both local and national level and identifies the various sources available.

Topics for further new chapters and updates in 2010 include repositories, open access, consortia and intermediaries. UKSG would like thank all its volunteer authors and interviewees for sharing their expertise.

The new and updated chapters can be accessed at: http://uksg.metapress.com/link.asp?id6tuu9n7wfl18

Variations/FRBR Project Announces Release of XML Schemas

The Variations/FRBR project at Indiana University has announced the release of an initial set of XML Schemas for the encoding of FRBRized bibliographic data. The Variations/FRBR project aims to provide a concrete test bed for the FRBR conceptual model, and these XML Schemas represent one step towards that goal by prescribing a concrete data format that instantiates the conceptual model.

From the project's home page:

Our project has been watching recent work to represent the FRBR-based resource description and access (RDA) element vocabulary in RDF; however, due to the fact that this work represents RDA data rather than FRBR data directly, and that much metadata work in libraries currently (though perhaps not permanently) operates in an XML rather than an RDF environment, we concluded an XML-based format for FRBR data directly was needed at this time. We view XML conforming to these Schemas to be one possible external representation of FRBRized data, and will be exploring other representations (including RDF) in the future. We define “implementing FRBR,” as the conceptual models described in the companion FRBR and FRAD reports; at this time we are not actively working on the model defined in the draft FRSAD report. Perhaps the most notable feature of the Variations/FRBR XML Schemas is their existence at three “levels”: frbr, which embodies faithfully only those features defined by the FRBR and FRAD reports; efrbr, which adds additional features we hope will make the data format more “useful”; and vfrbr, which both contracts and extends the FRBR and FRAD models to create a data representation optimized for the description of musical materials and we hope provides a model for other domain-specific applications of FRBR.

A User Guide with details on the structure of the Schemas and how they relate to one another may be found at: http://vfrbr.info/schemas/1.0/UserGuide.pdf

Links to all Schemas and documentation may be found at: http://vfrbr.info/schemas/1.0. Comments and questions on the Variations/FRBR Schema release may be sent to vfrbr@dlib.indiana.edu

Variations/FRBR home page: http://vfrbr.info

TemaTres Version 1.04 Release

The latest stable release of TemaTres (Version 1.04) became available in March 2010. TemaTres is a web tool to manage, publish and exploit controlled vocabularies (thesauri, taxonomies, glossaries).

This version includes the following fixes and improvements:

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  Catalan language added;

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  added ajax aid to prevent and inform duplicate terms;

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  provides an easy way to bulk upload for terms (accepted or candidates terms, alternative and narrower terms);

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  admin option to export vocabularies in SQL format (mysql backup);

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  fixed bug in fetchDirectTerm Task in web services; and

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  replaced deprecated function reg_replace().

For details of the features of TemaTres, see: www.vocabularyserver.com/

To download TemaTres: http://sourceforge.net/projects/tematres/

To access the Wiki TemaTres: http://tematres.r020.com.ar/wiki/doku.php?id:en:Inicio

Announcing 2010 Year of Cataloging Research Website

In response to On the Record (the final report created by the LC commissioned Task Force for the Future of Bibliographic Control), the Association for Library Collections and Technical Services of the American Library Association (ALA's ALCTS) is highlighting the need for research in bibliographic control by declaring 2010 the Year of Cataloging Research.

The Year of Cataloging Research website is now available at: http://faculty.washington.edu/acarlyle/yocr/. It features announcements, event information, links to relevant videos and other information highlighting cataloging research.

How can you participate?

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  Generate and share inspiring research ideas.

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  Do your own research

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  Present and publish your research.

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  Encourage and support others doing research (fill out those pesky email surveys!).

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  Read research papers and articles on bibliographic control.

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  Organize a research program or other event on bibliographic control at conferences.

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  Spread the word – make sure anyone who might be interested knows about it.

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  Attend programs on cataloging research at ALA and other conferences.

On Sunday, June 27, 2010, at the ALA Annual Conference, the ALCTS Cataloging & Classification Section and co-sponsors the Library Research Round Table (LRRT), the LITA Next Generation Catalog Interest Group and the RUSA RSS Catalog Use Committee presented a panel discussion entitled “Cataloging and Beyond: Publishing for the Year of Cataloging and Metadata Research.” Conference attendees are invited to come hear the experts share research ideas for meeting the challenges of a new decade in cataloging, cataloging standards and online catalog design. Panel members will reflect on how 2010, the Year of Cataloging and Metadata Research, can jump start new era in research for catalogs, cataloging and beyond. Speakers will include:

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  Sara Shatford Layne, Principal Cataloger, UCLA Library Cataloging and Metadata Center.

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  Lynn Connaway, Senior Research Scientist, OCLC.

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  Jane Greenberg, Professor and Director, SILS Metadata Research Center, School of Information and Library Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

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  Amy Eklund, Catalog Librarian and Instructor, Georgia Perimeter College Libraries.

2010 Year of Catalog Research: http://faculty.washington.edu/acarlyle/yocr/

PLANETS Testbed Released as Public Beta

Effective action to preserve and provide long-term access to digital content is a key priority for many organizations. Planets – Preservation and Long-term Access through NETworked Services – is a four-year 15 million project co-funded by the European Commission under the Information Society Technology priority of the Sixth Framework programme. Planets tools and services help organizations to ensure access to older digital material today and today's material far into the future.

One of the deliverables of the Planets project is a Testbed to provide a consistent and coherent evidence-base for the objective evaluation of different protocols, tools, services and complete preservation plans. The Planets Testbed is a web application that helps users to find out about the performance of tools. It offers a controlled hardware and software environment and provides structured processes for the arrangement and evaluation of experiments on preservation as well as a set of structured test data (Corpora).

The Planets Testbed enables users to conduct characterization, migration and emulation experiments in a controlled environment using sample or pre-defined content. As a Testbed user, you are guided through a six-stage Testbed Workflow that allows you to gather information scientifically and helps you to select the most appropriate tool or preservation strategy. By using pre-defined content, your holdings are not placed at risk of corruption or loss.

Users can deploy the central instance of the Testbed or download and install a configurable local version. Results are documented and reproducible. Results from tests conducted in the central instance of the Testbed are stored in the Testbed database and used to update technical information contained in the Planets Core Registry.

With the release of version 1.1 in March 2010, the Planets Testbed is now open for external users (Public Beta). Users are invited to execute experiments on the behavior of digital objects and tools in the Public Beta version of Testbed. Version 1.1 includes:

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  different experiment types that can be executed including migration and emulation;

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  a data set of almost 5,000 annotated digital objects;

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  analysis, characterization and reporting options; and

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  the possibility of integration with other preservation planning tools.

More information about the Planets Testbed: http://testbed.planets-project.eu/testbed/

Ensuring Long-term Access to Digital Information: JISC Blue Ribbon Task Force Report

Digital information is a vital resource in our knowledge economy, valuable for research and education, science and the humanities, creative and cultural activities and public policy. However, digital information is inherently fragile and often at risk of loss. Access to valuable digital materials tomorrow depends upon preservation actions taken today; and, over time, access depends on ongoing and efficient allocation of resources to preservation.

Ensuring that valuable digital assets will be available for future use is not simply a matter of finding sufficient funds. It is about mobilizing resources – human, technical and financial – across a spectrum of stakeholders diffuse over both space and time. However, questions remain about what digital information we should preserve, who is responsible for preserving and who will pay.

The Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access investigated these questions from an economic perspective. In the report, Sustainable Economics for a Digital Planet, published in March 2010, we identify problems intrinsic to all preserved digital materials, and propose actions that stakeholders can take to meet these challenges to sustainability. We developed action agendas that are targeted to major stakeholder groups and to domain-specific preservation strategies. The Task Force focused its inquiry on materials that are of long-term public interest, looking at four content domains with diverse preservation profiles:

1. 1.

   Scholarly discourse: the published output of scholarly inquiry.

2. 2.

   Research data: the primary inputs into research, as well as the first-order results of that research.

3. 3.

   Commercially owned cultural content: culturally significant digital content that is owned by a private entity and is under copyright protection.

4. 4.

   Collectively produced web content: web content that is created interactively, the result of collaboration and contributions by consumers.

Economic analysis of digital preservation of these materials reveals structural challenges that affect all digital preservation strategies:

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  long time horizons,

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  diffused stakeholders,

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  misaligned or weak incentives, and

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  lack of clarity about roles and responsibilities among stakeholders.

These risks, once identified, can be anticipated and provided for throughout the digital lifecycle. Major findings can be summarized as three imperatives for sustainable digital preservation:

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  (1) Articulate a compelling value proposition: When making the case for preservation, make the case for use. Without well-articulated demand for preserved information, there will be no future supply. Stakeholders for digital materials are often diffuse across different communities. The interests of future users are poorly represented in selecting materials to preserve. Trusted public institutions – libraries, archives, museums, professional organizations and others – can play important roles as proxy organizations to represent the demand of their stakeholders over generations.

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  (2) Provide clear incentives to preserve in the public interest: The lack of clear incentives to act will stymie timely preservation actions. Policy mechanisms can play an important role in strengthening weak motivations. Lowering barriers to efficient decentralized stewardship can be spurred by individual creators' use of non-exclusive licenses granting preservation rights to third parties.

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  (3) Define roles and responsibilities among stakeholders to ensure an ongoing and efficient flow of resources to preservation throughout the digital lifecycle: The strongest incentives to preserve will be ineffective without explicit agreement on the roles and responsibilities of all the actors – those who create the information, those who own it, those who preserve it and those who make it available for use. Every organization that creates and uses data should implement policies and procedures for preservation, including: selection of materials with long-term value; preparation of data for archiving; and protocols to ensure a smooth and secure transfer of digital assets across organizational boundaries and between institutions.

Sustainable preservation is a societal concern, however, and transcends the boundaries of any particular content domain. All parts of the society – national and international agencies, funders and sponsors of data creation, stakeholder organizations and individuals – have roles in achieving sustainability. Leadership is needed at all levels of society.

Sustainable preservation strategies are not built all at once, nor are they static. Sustainable preservation is a series of timely actions taken to anticipate the dynamic nature of digital information. Decision makers will always face uncertainties. Changes in technologies, policy environments, investment priorities and societal concerns will unfold over the course of the digital lifecycle. However, we can develop practices that resolve or anticipate uncertainties, that leverage resources among stakeholders and above all, that leave options open for decision makers in the future. Sustainable preservation strategies will find ways to turn the uncertainties of time and resources into opportunities for flexibility, adjustments in response to changing priorities and redirection of resources where they are most needed. Commitments made today are not commitments for all time. However, actions must be taken today to ensure flexibility in the future.

Download the full report: www.jisc.org.uk/media/documents/publications/reports/2010/brtffinalreport.pdf

Blue Ribbon Task Force: http://brtf.sdsc.edu/

MetaArchive Cooperative Issues Guide to Distributed Digital Preservation

Authored by members of the MetaArchive Cooperative, A Guide to Distributed Digital Preservation (Educopia Institute, Atlanta, GA, USA, 2010) is the first of a series of volumes describing successful collaborative strategies and articulating specific new models that may help cultural memory organizations work together for their mutual benefit. Readers may access A Guide to Distributed Digital Preservation as a freely downloadable pdf and/or as a print publication for purchase.

This volume is devoted to the broad topic of distributed digital preservation, a still-emerging field of practice for the cultural memory arena. Replication and distribution hold out the promise of indefinite preservation of materials without degradation, but establishing effective organizational and technical processes to enable this form of digital preservation is daunting. Institutions need practical examples of how this task can be accomplished in manageable, low-cost ways.

This guide is written with a broad audience in mind that includes librarians, archivists, scholars, curators, technologists, lawyers and administrators. Readers may use this guide to gain both a philosophical and practical understanding of the emerging field of distributed digital preservation, including how to establish or join a network.

The MetaArchive Cooperative provides low-cost, high-impact preservation services to help ensure the long-term accessibility of the digital assets of universities, libraries, museums and other cultural memory organizations. In addition to preserving members' digital content in a distributed digital preservation network, the Cooperative also offers consulting and education services to institutions that seek training in digital preservation planning, policy creation and implementation, including setting up and running Private LOCKSS Networks (www.lockss.org).

Download free pdf or order print copy at: www.metaarchive.org/GDDP

Mellon Foundation Grant to Fund Collaboration on Next-gen Archival Management Tool

The University of California (UC) San Diego, New York University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Libraries are teaming up to develop a next-generation archival management tool, thanks to a grant in the amount of $539,000 from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

The grant will support the planning and design of a new software tool for the description and management of archives, based on the combined capabilities of Archivists' Toolkit^TM (AT) and Archon^TM. The two predominant open-source archival tools are currently utilized by numerous academic libraries, special collections, archives and museums worldwide, including universities like UCLA and Harvard, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the San Diego Zoo and smaller archival repositories like the Niels Bohr Archives in Denmark and the Biblioteca Ateneu Barcelonès in Spain.

Planning activities will include the development of a next-generation architectural framework, as well as a complete review of the new archival tool's required and desirable functional specifications. Members of the archival community will be consulted during the planning and product development stages.

According to Brian E. Schottlaender, the Audrey Geisel University Librarian at UC San Diego and the principal investigator for the project, archivists across the globe have already registered their support for the development of the new archival tool. While AT and Archon have their own well-developed communities of support, most agree that Archon's access features, combined with AT's strong archival management attributes, will result in the design of a unique and even more powerful archival data management system that will greatly benefit the archival community and scholars worldwide. At a time when libraries are increasingly interested in putting primary research materials online, this new system will allow them to do so much more efficiently, while exposing previously hidden archival collections to scholars.

Schottlaender and UC San Diego Libraries will serve as the lead institution in the development of the new archival tool, sharing project oversight with Carol A. Mandel, Dean of Libraries at New York University, and Paula Kaufman, Dean of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library. UC San Diego and New York University Libraries sponsored the development of AT, released to the public in 2006; University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library supported the development of Archon, also released in 2006.

AT archivist Bradley Westbrook of UC San Diego Libraries and Archon archivists Christopher Prom and Scott Schwartz will form the archives team for the AT/Archon integration project. They are charged with the single task of determining the functional requirements and drafting specifications for the integrated application.

In 2008, the AT received the C.F. Coker award from the Society of American Archivists for its “tremendous impact on archival practice and promotion and adoption of descriptive standards.” Last year, Westbrook received the Archival Award of Excellence from the California Historical Records Advisory Board for his work on the AT. Archon has also been recognized for its impact, receiving (with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library) a Mellon Award for Technology Collaboration in 2008.

Full press release: http://libraries.ucsd.edu/about/press/next-gen-archival-management-tool.html

Archon^TM, The Simple Archival Information System: www.archon.org/

The Archivists' Toolkit^TM: www.archiviststoolkit.org/

NCSU Libraries Release Revamped History Portal

The NCSU Libraries announced in March 2010 the re-launch of Historical State (http://historicalstate.lib.ncsu.edu/), a single access point to North Carolina State University (NCSU) history. The site brings together, under a single architecture, a diverse set of historical resources, including digitized images, course catalogs and yearbooks; historic timelines, narratives and online exhibits about various aspects of university history; guides to collections held by NCSU Libraries' University Archives; and catalog records of books about NC State University. Patrons can use Historical State to explore the development of campus buildings, student life, athletics and the academic colleges and departments.

Patrons will be able to search across resources and limit results, through facets, by type, collection, subject, genre, geographic location and decade. The search mechanism within Historical State allows patrons to search for specific names, dates and events. This is particularly useful with course catalogs and student yearbooks, for which patrons desire access to information at the page level. An integrated pageturner tool further adds value to these resources, allowing users to easily browse an entire catalog or yearbook. Both are full-text searchable, to allow for pinpointing pages containing search terms. This Historical State utility relies on an open-source architecture.

Historical State will feature a “comments” function, which will allow visitors – representing NC State students, staff, alumni and community – to leave comments and share memories. There will also be an opportunity to chat in real time with reference staff from the portal.

Historical State Search is a Ruby on Rails application utilizing the Blacklight plugin for Solr-powered searching. A MySQL database is used for managing curated content. Metadata are harvested from the web API of a homegrown digital assets management system. An integrated pageturner using a separate Solr index is used for displaying multi-page documents, like course catalogs and yearbooks.

NCSU Libraries is launching Historical State in coordination with WolfWalk, a mobile application enabling users to explore NSCU campus history and spaces using a location-aware interface optimized for mobile devices. WolfWalk is available at http://m.lib.ncsu.edu/wolfwalk/

Historical State website: http://historicalstate.lib.ncsu.edu

New Version of Terrier Now Available

Terrier 3.0, the next version of the open-source Institutional Repository platform from the University of Glasgow (Scotland) was released in March 2010.

Version 3.0 is a major update to Terrier, including:

• •

  support for indexing WARC collections (such as ClueWeb09);

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  improved MapReduce mode indexing;

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  improved and more scalable index structures;

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  added field-based and proximity term dependence models, such as BM25F, PL2F and Markov random fields; and

• •

  new web-based retrieval interface.

What's new log: http://terrier.org/docs/current/whats_new.html

Society of Architectural Historians Partners with UC Press and JSTOR to Launch JSAH Online

The Society of Architectural Historians (SAH) has announced the launch of the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians Online (JSAH Online). Developed in partnership with University of California Press and JSTOR, and using software from Atypon Systems, JSAH Online offers access to JSAH from the first volume published in 1941 through the present. The current issues provide leading research articles and reviews about the built environment accompanied by extensive multimedia content, including images, videos and GIS-driven visualizations.

JSAH Online is the first online journal devoted to the arts and humanities that incorporates cutting-edge multimedia features and heralds the launch of the next generation of scholarly communication. Such features in the inaugural issue include recreated music from an ancient Roman funeral, a zoomable image of a 37-foot-long Panorama of Constantinople from 1559 and a 3-D model of the Roman Forum and environs overlaid on a Google Earth map.

JSAH Online is the culmination of several years of collaborative work among its partners. Funded by an initial planning grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and followed by an additional Mellon foundation grant, JSAH Online was conceived from the outset to take full advantage of the latest developments in online publishing. Professor Hilary Ballon of New York University, who conceived of and spearheaded the project as Editor of JSAH, collaborated with scholars at SAH and computer programmers at ARTstor, the New York-based online digital library, to develop an initial prototype for JSAH Online. “We knew that our vision had incredible potential for the wider scholarly community,” said Professor Ballon. “We also knew that to fully realize that potential, we needed to align ourselves with partners best positioned to help bring JSAH Online into being.”

JSAH Online's inaugural issue, which was released on March 1, 2010, was developed by current JSAH Editor David Brownlee, Professor of the History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania. Articles in the first issue were subjected to the rigorous peer-review process, and in addition were particularly groomed to utilize the innovative multimedia platform. “The integration of multimedia elements in these pieces dramatically increases the depth and breadth of the communication between authors and readers,” says Professor Brownlee. “Victor Hugo judged that the publication revolution of the Renaissance (moveable type printing) had annihilated the art of Gothic architecture. Happily, we can report that the digital publication revolution of our time is marvelously supportive of the study, appreciation and creation of the built environment.”

SAH selected University of California Press as its partner in publishing JSAH in early 2009. That decision was followed quickly by announcement of a new effort called the Current Scholarship Program, initiated by University of California Press and JSTOR. JSAH Online is the first journal to be launched online as part of the Current Scholarship Program.

JSAH Online will be available exclusively to SAH members during 2010. Beginning in 2011, all JSAH content, features and functionality will be incorporated into a new JSTOR platform where it will be available to SAH members as well as to non-member faculty, researchers and students working at subscribing institutions around the world.

For more information about JSAH Online and to view a freely available multimedia article, see: http://jsah.ucpress.jstor.org/

Online Guide to Open Access Journals Publishing Launched

Co-Action Publishing and Lund University Libraries Main Office announced in February 2010 the launch of the Online Guide to Open Access Journals Publishing at: www.doaj.org/bpguide

The online guide is directed to small independent teams and provides practical information on planning, setting up, launching, publishing and managing an open-access scholarly journal. Users can take advantage of additional resources in the form of links to related information, samples of applied practices and downloadable tools that can be adapted. The guide seeks to be interactive, allowing users to share their own best practices, tips and suggestions through a comment field. Although the guide contains some information that is specific to the Nordic region, most of its content can be applied internationally.

Development of the Online Guide to Open Access Journals Publishing was generously supported by the Swedish National Library and the technical solution was supported by Nordbib.

www.doaj.org/bpguide

Social Media Use Changing among Teens and Young Adults: Report from Pew Internet

Blogging among teens and young adults has declined over the past three years, even as blogging among adults over 30 has increased. The proportion of online teens and young adults who blog has plummeted since 2006. In that year, 28 percent of teens ages 12-17 and young adults ages 18-29 were bloggers. By the fall of 2009, the numbers had dropped to 14 percent of teens and 15 percent of young adults.

Much of the drop in blogging among younger Internet users may be attributable to changes in social network use by teens and young adults. Nearly three-quarters (73 percent) of online teens and an equal number (72 percent) of young adults use social network sites. By contrast, older adults have not kept pace. Some 40 percent of adults 30 and older use the social sites in the fall of 2009.

New survey results also show that among adults 18 and older, Facebook has taken over as the social network of choice; 73 percent of adult profile owners use Facebook, 48 percent have a profile on MySpace and 14 percent use LinkedIn. “Blogging appears to have lost its luster for many young users,” said Amanda Lenhart, one of the authors of a report on these findings and a senior research specialist at the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project. “The fad stage is over for teens and young adults and the move to Facebook – which lacks a specific tool for blogging within the network – may have contributed to the decline of blogging among young adults and teens.”

Lenhart also pointed out that many of the functions that blogging served for teens in the mid-2000s for communicating about their lives and updating their activities for their friends have become central activities on social networking sites like Facebook. “Microblogging and status updating on social networks have replaced old-style `macro-blogging' for many teens and adults.”

These are among the findings of a new report from the Pew Internet Project titled “Social Media and Mobile Internet Use Among Teens and Young Adults.” The report highlights data from two September 2009 telephone surveys – one focused on teens ages 12-17 and a separate survey of adults 18 and older.

Among the main findings of the report:

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  Social networking is becoming a more fragmented activity, as the average adult social network user now has a profile on more than one site – 57 percent of adults who use social networks have more than one online profile.

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  At the same time, the youngest users of social networking sites are changing their communications preferences. Teens are now less likely to send group messages, send private messages to friends and comment on a friend's blog within a social network site.

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  Teens do not use Twitter in large numbers – just 8 percent of online teens 12-17 say they ever use Twitter, a percentage similar to the number who use virtual worlds. This puts Twitter far down the list of popular online activities for teens and stands in stark contrast to their record of being early adopters of nearly every online activity.

In addition, young adults aged 18-29 have embraced mobile gadgets and connectivity:

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  More young adults own a laptop (66 percent) than a desktop computer (53 percent).

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  Eighty-one per cent of the 18-29 age group goes online wirelessly compared with 63 percent of 30-49 year olds and 34 percent of those ages 50 and older.

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  More than half of young adults have accessed the Internet wirelessly on a laptop (55 percent) or a cell phone (53 percent).

This report is part of a Pew Research Center series exploring the behaviors, values and opinions of the teens and 20 somethings that make up the Millennial Generation. Learn more at: www.pewresearch.org/millennials

Full text of the report: http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2010/Social-Media-and-Young-Adults.aspx

How the Internet will Shape Institutions in the Future: New Survey from Pew

A survey of nearly 900 Internet stakeholders reveals new perspectives on the way the Internet is affecting human interaction and the evolution of businesses and governments.

The web-based survey, conducted by the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project and the Imagining the Internet Center at Elon University, gathered opinions on ten important issues from a select group of experts and the highly engaged Internet public. Results from this survey are being released in four major 2010 reports. The first came out in February; this second report outlines expert responses to the sixth survey question, in which people were asked to share their views of the Internet's influence on the future of institutional relationships between now and 2020. Two additional reports on the survey data will be released later in 2010.

One of the long-running hopes of technology supporters is that the Internet and cell phones will bring positive change to institutions of all kinds. Pew Internet director Lee Rainie and co-author Janna Anderson, director of the Imagining the Internet Center, asked this survey question to assess those hopes.

Most people who took the survey believe the Internet will force change in institutions, no matter how resistant they are,” Anderson noted. “Many said there is too much pressure from the public in today's age of collective intelligence and transparency for institutions to be able to continue to cling to twentieth century forms. However some people shared concerns that entrenched institutions will find ways to maintain the status quo or to exercise new controls.

While 72 percent of survey respondents agreed that innovative online cooperation will result in more efficient and responsive bureaucracies, most people hedged their answers, noting, for instance, that change will be varied and in some cases the rate of change will be slow. Some of the 26 percent who expressed pessimism about the advancement of institutions said communications networks and new digital tools give entrenched institutions new abilities to control and track people.

See the survey questions and read the full report at: http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2010/Impact-of-the-Internet-on-Institutions-in-the-Future.aspx