New & Noteworthy

Citation

(2012), "New & Noteworthy", Library Hi Tech News, Vol. 29 No. 9. https://doi.org/10.1108/lhtn.2012.23929iaa.002

New & Noteworthy

Article Type: New & Noteworthy From: Library Hi Tech News, Volume 29, Issue 9

Undergraduate Students and Information Technology, 2012: Report from EDUCAUSE

The EDUCAUSE Center for Applied Research (ECAR) has surveyed undergraduate students annually since 2004 about technology in higher education. In 2012, ECAR collaborated with 195 institutions to collect responses from more than 100,000 students about their technology experiences. The findings are distilled into the broad thematic message for institutions and educators to balance strategic innovation with solid delivery of basic institutional services and pedagogical practices and to know students well enough to understand which innovations they value the most.

Key findings of the 2012 report reflect four general themes:

1. 1.

   Blended-learning environments are the norm; students say that these environments best support how they learn.

2. 2.

   Students want to access academic progress information and course material via their mobile devices, and institutions deliver.

3. 3.

   Technology training and skill development for students is more important than new, more, or “better” technology.

4. 4.

   Students use social networks for interacting with friends more than for academic communication.

Among the recommendations offered in the report:

• •

  Look to emerging or established leaders (other institutions, other countries, other industries) for strategies to deliver instruction and curricular content to tablets and smartphones. Learn from their exemplary strategies for IT support and security with student devices as well as planning, funding, deploying, and managing instructional technologies, services, and support.

• •

  Prioritize the development of mobile-friendly resources and activities that students say are important: access to course web sites and syllabi, course and learning management systems, and academic progress reports (i.e. grades).

• •

  Bridge the gap between the technologies that have seen the greatest growth (e-portfolios, e-books/e-textbooks, and web-based citation/bibliographic tools) and students’ attitudes about their importance. Focus training/skill-building opportunities for students, professional development opportunities for faculty, and support service opportunities on these emerging technologies.

• •

  Use e-mail and the course and learning management system for formal communication with students. Experiment with text messaging and instant messaging/online chatting, and do not focus efforts on using social networks and telephone conversations to interact with students.

See the 2012 report for a full list of key messages, findings, supporting data, and recommendations: http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ERS1208/ERS1208.pdf

Stanford launches Class2Go open-source platform for online classes

Class2Go is Stanford’s internal open-source platform for online education. A team of eight built the first version over the summer 2012, and it is still under active development. Class2Go launched this Fall for six on-campus classes and two “massive open online courses” (MOOC’s): computer networking; and solar cells, fuel cells, and batteries.

Class2Go was built to be an open platform for learning and research. Professors have access to the classes’ data to learn how their students learn. The Class2GO team will facilitate experiments. For example, the team intends this to be the best platform for running tests to measure the impact of different teaching methods on student outcomes, or to build interesting features to try out new ways of presenting material or grading exercises.

Philosophical principles that have guided the project:

• •

  Open. The platform is open source to make it easier for users (faculty members) to give feedback on what the team is doing. The team would love to have others use the platform, and is working with others who are interested in using Class2Go for online education: universities, private schools, even NGO’s.

• •

  Portable. Valuable course content should not be tied to any one platform. Documents are already portable; the videos are outside our system (on YouTube) and the assets themselves can be repurposed as faculty see fit. And exercises and problem sets, instead of being trapped in a proprietary database, are in the Khan Academy format, so they can be used elsewhere.

• •

  Interoperable. The team does not want to build or maintain more than they have to. Among the systems and projects supporting Class2Go are: YouTube for video; Khan Academy for their HTML-based exercise framework; Amazon AWS suite for hosting; Github for source code management and issues; and others, some commercial, some open source.

Anyone with an interest is welcomed to contribute to Class2Go. If you are interested in reaching the team, e-mail them at: c2g-contact@class.stanford.edu

Class2Go on Github: https://github.com/Stanford-Online/class2go/

Common Access Point for Spanish libraries launches; based on eXtensible Catalog

Domingo Arroyo-Fernández of the Office of Library Co-ordination, Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport, has announced that the pilot of Common Access Point (the “PCU”) for the Spanish General State Authority Libraries has gone “live”. The platform for the Common Access Point is the eXtensible Catalog (XC), a suite of open-source tools which cover most functionalities required for a Union Catalogue.

The pilot project involved a total of 92 libraries, with about two million records.

Arroyo-Fernández writes: “The pilot shows that XC meets the requirements of the Common Access Point; however, logically it will require additional developments to customize and adapt to the specific requirements of our libraries. More specifically in the pilot we have developed a separate MST service for de-duplication we call ‘simple aggregation’, and advance search utility in Drupal Toolkit. This pilot is just the first steps of the project, but we believe they are steps in the right direction.”

For more information about Common Access Point:

Public Interface Pilot Common Access Point for the General State Authority libraries: http://pcu.bage.es

Common Access Point for the General State Authority libraries: project report (in English): http://hdl.handle.net/10421/5601

Punto de Consulta Único de las Bibliotecas de la Administración General del Estado. Proyecto Piloto 2011-2012: Informe final (in Spanish): http://hdl.handle.net/10421/6521

Information resources on open source integrated library systems

The School of Information Sciences at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, has announced a new web site, open source ILS (http://opensourceils.com), now available as a resource for librarians and anyone interested in open source software integrated library systems (OSS ILS). The web site is the product of a multi-year IMLS grant-funded study of technical support options for proprietary and open source ILS. It offers best practices gleaned from interviews with open source ILS adopters on subjects such as evaluating, migrating to, and customizing and maintaining these systems.

While conducting their study, researchers found that although there are a number of resources available about OSS ILS, finding them is not easy and requires visits to several different web sites to compile information. Open Source ILS is an effort to create a portal that will contain useful information about different systems and the steps necessary to migrate to these systems. This web site is the first to consolidate resources on systems such as Evergreen and Koha in a single place.

Links to additional information are included for each subject. These sources include vendor web sites, community documentation, and technical support resources. Other features of the web site include an internal blog, forum, and screencast tutorials.

For more information, visit the web site at: http://opensourceils.com

The open source ILS site has been added to SCONUL’s Higher Education Library Technology (HELibTech) wiki. HELibTech also has a lot of information about open source library systems on its Open Source page. The entry contains information on systems (resource management and resource discovery) vendors and issues. There is also a link to an OSS in libraries discussion list.

The HELibTech Open Source “Capacity” page is a start on “mapping” the nature and extent of capacity to enable open source solutions to flourish in HE libraries. HELibTech is supported by The Society of College, National and University Librarians (SCONUL) so has a UK perspective – but many of the issues and the content are of relevance internationally.

HELibTech is an open community, creative commons licensed resource so anyone may re-use any information and can edit the content and should feel free to contribute.

HELibTech home: http://helibtech.com/

HELibTech Open Source page: http://helibtech.com/Open+Source

OSS in libraries discussion list: www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A0=LIS-OSS

SCOAP³ Open Access initiative launched at CERN

Representatives from the science funding agencies and library communities of 29 countries met on October 1, 2012 in Geneva at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, to launch the SCOAP³ Open Access initiative. Open Access revolutionizes the traditional scientific publishing model with scientific papers being made freely available to all, and publishers paid directly for their indispensable peer-review services to the community.

“It is gratifying to see how the model of international collaboration in particle physics has been applied to addressing the important societal issue of open access to scientific information,” said CERN Director General Rolf Heuer. “I am proud that CERN has contributed to exploring win-win solutions to this issue, which is important to both scientists and science policy makers the world over.”

“It has been very much like working on a CERN experiment,” added Salvatore Mele, head of Open Access at CERN, who has coordinated the initiative so far, “amazing collaboration from experts from all over the world, both volunteers from libraries and partners in the publishing industry, bringing together their different expertise and working together to build something never tried before.”

The objective of SCOAP³ (the Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics) is to grant unrestricted access to scientific articles appearing in scientific journals in the field of particle physics, which so far have only been available to scientists through certain university libraries, and generally unavailable to a wider public. Open dissemination of preliminary information, in the form of pre-peer review articles known as preprints, has been the norm in particle physics for two decades. SCOAP³ now brings the vital peer-review service provided by journals into the Open Access world.

In the SCOAP³ model, libraries and funding agencies pool resources currently used to subscribe to journal content and use them to support the peer-review system directly instead. Journal publishers then make their articles Open Access, which means that anyone can read them. Authors retain the copyright, and generous licenses for re-use are used.

Publishers of 12 journals, accounting for the vast majority of articles in the field, have been identified for participation in SCOAP³ through an open and competitive process, and the SCOAP³ initiative looks forward to establishing more partnerships with key institutions in Europe, America and Asia as it moves through the technical steps of organizing the re-direction of funds from the current subscription model to a common internationally coordinated fund. SCOAP³ expects to be operational for articles published as of 2014.

SCOAP³ is an international consortium of research institutions, funding agencies, libraries and library consortia with the mission of converting to Open Access the peer-reviewed literature in particle physics, in partnership with leading publishers. It counts an increasing list of hundreds of interested parties in 29 countries.

SCOAP³: http://scoap3.org

Current membership of SCOAP³: http://scoap3.org/whoisscoap3.html

Oral Literature in Africa: first free ebook release from Unglue.it

Unglue.it has announced the first free ebook release supported by a successful campaign on the Unglue.it crowdfunding platform, which launched in May 2012. “Oral Literature in Africa” may be downloaded from Unglue.it at https://unglue.it/work/81834/. Soon you will also be able to download it from your favorite ebook store, and library ebook collections.

Open Book Publishers (Cambridge, UK) has released a revised, digital edition of Ruth Finnegan’s classic work of scholarship, Oral Literature in Africa, free for all to read and share under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license.

With this license, there no limit on the kind of tablet, ereader or computer on which the book can be read, and – perhaps most importantly – no limit on the number of readers and libraries which can download their own copies at the same time.

For the first time, young Africans who may never have known this collection exists will be able to read this priceless record of the cultures and languages of their grandparents and great-grandparents. An African student in Senegal can hear songs in dialects of languages spoken in Kenya 50 years ago; African-American children in South Carolina can read stories told by the descendants of their Gulah speaking ancestors; and a literary scholar in Cambridge, UK can write a dissertation the oral traditions behind Wole Soyinka’s Nobel-prize-winning plays and novels.

Based on research done in the 1960s and first published in 1970, Oral Literature in Africa has been out of print and very hard to find for over a decade. Now, through the contributions of ungluers from around the world, who raised the goal of $7,500, not only the text but also newly released audio recordings and photographs by Professor Finnegan will be easily accessible to students and scholars around the world.

Print copies of Oral Literature in Africa will be sold by Open Book Publishers through book retailers everywhere, including Kobo, Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk – where the free ebook will also be downloadable. The free ebook will be available at libraries and bookstores around the world through Internet Archive’s Open Library and on the Open Book Publisher web site.

Unglue.it is a crowdfunding platform which rewards rights holders for making their ebooks available to the world under a Creative Commons license. Unglue.it runs campaigns for previously published books, allowing book lovers to pledge toward giving them to the world. When rights holders’ target prices are reached, they receive funds in exchange for issuing an unglued ebook edition which can be freely read, copied, and shared, non-commercially, worldwide.

Open Book Publishers has changed the nature of the traditional academic book. They offer free online editions of their books to benefit scholars and readers worldwide, while also selling traditional print and electronic copies. Their authors range from early-career academics to eminent scholars, chosen on the basis of academic merit and public value through a rigorous peer-review process.

Unglue.it: http://unglue.it

Open Book Publishers: http://www.openbookpublishers.com

Internet Archive Open Library: http://openlibrary.org/

Creators and Curators: Photos and Videos as Social Currency Online – Report from Pew

A recent phone survey by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project finds that:

• •

  About 46 percent of adult internet users post-original photos or videos online that they themselves have created. The study authors call them creators.

• •

  About 41 percent of adult internet users take photos or videos that they have found online and repost them on sites designed for sharing images with many people. The study authors call them curators.

Overall, 56 percent of internet users do at least one of the creating or curating activities we studied and 32 percent of internet users do both creating and curating activities.

In addition, this is the first time that the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project has asked questions about Pinterest, Instagram, and Tumblr. The survey found that women are more likely than men to use Pinterest, while Instagram and Tumblr attract equal shares of men and women.

A nationally representative phone survey of 1,005 adults (ages 18+) was taken August 2-5, 2012. It was conducted in English on landline and cell phones. The sample contained 799 internet users, who were asked questions about their online activities. The margin of error for the full sample is ±3.7 percentage points. The margin of error for the internet sample is ±3.8 percentage points.

Read the report at: http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2012/Online-Pictures.aspx

Association of American Publishers and Google reach agreement

The Association of American Publishers (AAP) and Google announced in early October a settlement agreement that will provide access to publishers’ in-copyright books and journals digitized by Google for its Google Library Project. The dismissal of the lawsuit will end seven years of litigation.

The agreement settles a copyright infringement lawsuit filed against Google on October 19, 2005 by five AAP member publishers. As the settlement is between the parties to the litigation, the court is not required to approve its terms. The settlement acknowledges the rights and interests of copyright-holders. US publishers can choose to make available or choose to remove their books and journals digitized by Google for its Library Project. Those deciding not to remove their works will have the option to receive a digital copy for their use.

Apart from the settlement, US publishers can continue to make individual agreements with Google for use of their other digitally-scanned works.

“We are pleased that this settlement addresses the issues that led to the litigation,” said Tom Allen, President and CEO, AAP. “It shows that digital services can provide innovative means to discover content while still respecting the rights of copyright-holders.”

“Google is a company that puts innovation front and center with all that it does,” said David Drummond, Senior Vice President, Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer, Google. “By putting this litigation with the publishers behind us, we can stay focused on our core mission and work to increase the number of books available to educate, excite and entertain our users via Google Play.”

Google Books allows users to browse up to 20 percent of books and then purchase digital versions through Google Play. Under the agreement, books scanned by Google in the Library Project can now be included by publishers. Further terms of the agreement are confidential.

This settlement does not affect Google’s current litigation with the Authors Guild or otherwise address the underlying questions in that suit.

The publisher plaintiffs are The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.; Pearson Education, Inc. and Penguin Group (USA) Inc., both part of Pearson; John Wiley & Sons, Inc.; and Simon & Schuster, Inc. part of CBS Corporation.

More at the Google news blog: http://googlepress.blogspot.com/2012/10/publishers-and-google-reach-agreement.html

Classical Works Knowledge Base creates direct connections to original texts

As more translations and classical resources appear online, faculty and librarians see an opportunity to smooth the paths of scholars through the maze of digital texts and complex citations.

That opportunity became the Classical Works Knowledge Base (CWKB), a relational database and specialized link resolver software that seamlessly links abstracts to the works they cite. Cornell University Library and Cornell’s Classics Department developed this tool, which allows scholars to access online, full-text versions of the primary sources that their institutions own or license.

CWKB works with ancient Greek and Latin texts, and will be used first in the online database “L’Année philologique.” Other online resources could make use of it as well; for example, if a database on American history used CWKB, a researcher could look at citations in a pamphlet by Thomas Jefferson and arrive in one click at passages he cites from Plato’s dialogues, Cicero’s letters and other sources in multiple languages and translations.

“The Library is committed to open-access tools, and we deliberately developed a service that could be extended easily,” said Anne R. Kenney, Carl A. Kroch University Librarian. “We are committed to creating tools where none exist and there is a clear case that scholarship would benefit greatly. We also focus on development that can be broadly applicable for other researchers, facilitating work in a range of disciplines.”

CWKB relies on OpenURL links, which are parsed when a user clicks on them. A link resolver then uses the metadata to pull up multiple links to several versions of the texts. The CWKB web site features a demonstration of OpenURL, using the Canonical Metadata Citation Format, and the software will be available under an Educational Community License. That software has far-reaching implications for scholarship in other disciplines, because any field that relies heavily on primary-source texts could adapt it.

The project was supported by a grant made to the American Philological Association (APA) in 2010 by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Eric Rebillard, Professor of Classics and History and Editor of “L’Année philologique on the Internet,” conceived of this service and worked with the Library’s Director of Scholarly Communications Services, David Ruddy, and Electronic Resources User Experience Librarian, Adam Chandler.

The APA is pleased that this project has produced a resource that the wider academic community will find useful. “Users of ‘L’Année philologique,’ the premier bibliographical database in classical studies, will applaud this eagerly awaited enhancement,” said Jeffrey Henderson, APA President. “It is exciting to know that the CWKB may similarly benefit the many other fields informed by classical texts.”

To learn more, check out a 2010 Cornell Chronicle story for details about the origins of the project: www.news.cornell.edu/stories/June10/ClassicsBase.html

CWKB: http://cwkb.org

OCLC member libraries to contribute metadata to the Europeana.eu portal

OCLC and Europeana, the provider of Europe’s digital library, have worked together on an approach that will enable OCLC member institutions to contribute metadata derived from OCLC’s WorldCat database to the Europeana.eu portal in a manner that is consistent with OCLC’s WorldCat Rights and Responsibilities for the OCLC Cooperative.

This agreement aims to dispel concerns that OCLC’s policies around metadata in its WorldCat database are an obstacle to complying with the terms of the Europeana Data Exchange Agreement (DEA), which places all metadata contributed to Europeana.eu in the public domain, using the Creative Commons Zero Public Domain Dedication license. While OCLC makes no intellectual property claims to individual metadata records in WorldCat, it asserts a copyright claim over the WorldCat database as a whole – which created uncertainty over contributions to Europeana.eu by members of the cooperative. Nevertheless, OCLC wishes to support participation in Europeana by its member libraries given the significance of Europeana.

In response to these concerns, OCLC requested and Europeana agreed to ask subsequent users of the metadata to give attribution to both OCLC and to the contributing institution as the source, and to make them aware of the OCLC cooperative’s community norms around data. This attribution and awareness are consistent with the expectations that OCLC member institutions have of one another with respect to data use. It is also consistent with Europeana’s Usage Guidelines for Metadata, particularly the principle of “giving credit where credit is due.”

“Many libraries and cultural heritage institutions have benefited from having their collections exposed through OCLC’s services and specifically, through WorldCat. We are very pleased that with this understanding we can encourage libraries to participate in the Europeana.eu effort with confidence that the cooperative’s values are being recognised,” said Eric van Lubeek, Managing Director, OCLC Europe, Middle East and Africa.

“Coming to this understanding is significant because it facilitates library contribution and ensures that the important heritage objects that have been digitised, and which The European Library aggregates for Europeana can be discovered and accessed,” said Jill Cousins, Executive Director. “We have always thought it was important to encourage attribution to heritage institutions and we are glad to extend that same encouragement to metadata derived from WorldCat.”

OCLC will continue to publicize its cooperative norms and provide advice and support to members of the cooperative who contribute metadata, while Europeana will actively encourage re-users of the metadata to uphold the aforementioned Usage Guidelines for Metadata.

“This understanding is timely,” said Elisabeth Niggemann, the Director General of the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek, former chair of the Europeana Foundation and a current member of the OCLC Board of Trustees. “It gives clear encouragement to European libraries to participate and is evidence that OCLC is a supportive partner in the global library community.”

Metadata from national and research libraries is aggregated for Europeana by The European Library, and currently the metadata for 3.5 million digitised texts has been contributed. The Europeana DEA was signed on behalf of all national libraries by the Conference of European National Librarians (CENL), the provider of The European Library. At its last board meeting, CENL authorized The European Library to create its own set of linked open data, and therefore the negotiations with OCLC represent a positive step forward to facilitate this process.

More about the technical projects, partners and background to Europeana: www.pro.europeana.eu

To explore Europe’s cultural collections, visit: www.europeana.eu/portal/

TERMS: Techniques for Electronic Resource Management now released as a Wiki

In September 2011, Jill Emery, collection development librarian at Portland State University, and Graham Stone, Information Resources Manager at the University of Huddersfield, launched a blog titled “TERMS: Techniques for ER management”, and invited librarians to join them in developing recommendations for best practices in e-resource management. Their goal was to explore and create recommended practices for each of the stages in the e-resources cycle:

1. 1.

   Investigating new content for purchase/addition.

2. 2.

   Acquiring new content.

3. 3.

   Implementation.

4. 4.

   Ongoing evaluation and access.

5. 5.

   Annual review.

6. 6.

   Cancellation and replacement review.

Jill Emery writes: “Graham Stone & I have been working on turning TERMS into a wiki!

We began this project a year ago by posting each TERM segment to a tumblr blog and a Facebook group page and soliciting feedback on our ideas from the library social community. At the same time we also solicited for workflow documents that could be shared via a publicly open dropbox. To date, we have 20 direct followers of the blog, 138 Twitter followers, and 152 Facebook members. This wiki is the latest publicly available version of TERMS and is intended to be updated and edited by contributors. We invite feedback & edits to: TERMSWIKI12@gmail.com.”

If you had like to be an editor, contact: Jill Emery (jemery@pdx.edu) or Graham Stone (G.Stone@hud.ac.uk).

Access the TERMS wiki at: http://library.hud.ac.uk/wikiterms/

NISO publishes COUNTER-SUSHI Implementation Profile as a recommended practice

The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) has announced the publication of the COUNTER-SUSHI Implementation Profile (NISO RP-14-2012). The new recommended practice provides a practical implementation structure to be used in the creation of reports and services related to harvesting of COUNTER Release 4 reports using the NISO SUSHI Protocol. The Standardized Usage Statistics Harvesting (SUSHI) Protocol was issued as a standard (ANSI/NISO Z39.93) in 2007 to simplify and automate the harvesting of COUNTER usage reports by libraries from the growing number of information providers they work with. Counting Online Usage of Networked Electronic Resources (COUNTER) is an international initiative that published their first Code of Practice in 2003 and issued Release 4 of the COUNTER Code of Practice for e-Resources in April 2012. XML schemas supporting the Implementation Profile and Release 4 of the Counter Code of Practice have also been published by NISO, which has an agreement with COUNTER to maintain the schemas and keep the SUSHI and COUNTER schemas in synch.

“The creators of the SUSHI standard and the COUNTER XML schema were forward looking and created products that could handle future needs,” explains Oliver Pesch, Chief Strategist for E-Resource Access and Management Services at EBSCO Information Services and Co-chair of the NISO SUSHI Standing Committee that developed the Implementation Profile. “Accommodation of such future growth requires a level of abstraction and flexibility to be built in, but that can result in decisions by implementers that could cause interoperability issues or require client implementers to customize the service for every different provider. The COUNTER-SUSHI Implementation Profile was developed to provide guidance with Release 4 of COUNTER by setting out detailed expectations for both the server and the client of how the SUSHI protocol and COUNTER XML reports are to be implemented to ensure interoperability.”

“SUSHI implementation became a COUNTER compliance requirement with Release 3 of the COUNTER Code of Practice,” states Bob McQuillan, Senior Product Manager at Innovative Interfaces, Inc. and Co-chair of the NISO SUSHI Standing Committee. “The new Release 4 of the COUNTER Code of Practice is a single, integrated Code of Practice covering journals, databases, and books, as well as multimedia content. This COUNTER-SUSHI Implementation Profile supports the changes in Release 4 and was developed with the intention that it could be used by COUNTER auditors to verify compliance of a content provider’s SUSHI server.”

“Adoption of the SUSHI protocol continues to grow,” states Todd Carpenter, NISO Executive Director. “Supporting recommendations such as this Implementation Profile will simplify and expedite the implementation of SUSHI while further ensuring interoperability.”

The COUNTER-SUSHI Implementation Profile (NISO RP-14-2012), the referenced schemas, and additional implementation guidance for SUSHI can be found on the SUSHI webpages at: www.niso.org/workrooms/sushi/

Release 4 of the COUNTER Code of Practice is available on the COUNTER web site at: www.projectcounter.org/code_practice.html

Project MUSE to preserve entire e-book catalog with Portico

Portico and Project MUSE have announced that they are partnering to secure the long-term preservation of e-books published online in MUSE through the University Press Content Consortium (UPCC). Working together, Project MUSE and Portico will ensure that the e-book offerings of the UPCC – 73 presses and more than 15,000 books at the time of signing – will remain available for future scholars, researchers, and students.

“Partnering with Portico will make it possible for Project MUSE to future-proof the book content entrusted to us by the members of the UPCC community,” said Terry Ehling, Associate Director of Project MUSE. “The archiving and preservation of our book content is a priority for us, and we look forward to working closely with Portico to ensure that the UPCC title collections are available to scholars in perpetuity.”

The UPCC book collections allow thousands of peer-reviewed new and backlist e-books to be discovered and searched in an integrated environment with content from nearly 500 journals currently on the Project MUSE platform. The book collections’ inclusion in the Portico archive strengthens a growing e-book preservation service currently responsible for the long-term preservation of more than 150,000 e-books from a spectrum of publishers, including university presses, societies, and commercial publishers.

“This is an important partnership for both the university press and library communities,” stated Kate Wittenberg, Portico managing director. “Project MUSE’s investment in the long-term preservation of the UPCC books reflects their deep commitment to their library customers.”

Project MUSE is a provider of digital humanities and social science content for the scholarly community. Since 1995 the MUSE journal collections have supported a wide array of research needs at academic, public, special, and school libraries worldwide. MUSE is the trusted source of complete, full-text versions of scholarly journals from many of the world’s leading university presses and scholarly societies, with over 120 publishers currently participating. UPCC Book Collections on Project MUSE, launched in January 2012, offer book-length scholarship, fully integrated with MUSE’s scholarly journal content.

Portico is a digital preservation service for e-journals, e-books, and other scholarly e-content. The Portico archive is certified as a “trustworthy digital repository” by the Center for Research Libraries; more than 14,000 e-journals, more than 150,000 e-books, and 48 d-collections have been entrusted to it.

UPCC Book Collections on Project MUSE: http://muse.jhu.edu/about/order/book_collections.html

Portico: www.portico.org

SCAPE Project Newsletter Issue 2 now available

SCAlable Preservation Environments (SCAPE) is an EU-funded project which directs towards long-term digital preservation of large-scale and heterogeneous collections of digital-objects. It aims to develop scalable services for preservation planning and preservation actions on an open source platform. These services will be based on a framework for automated, quality assured work-flows, which will be elaborated and tested during the project runtime. A policy-based preservation planning tool and an automated watch system will ensure a secure and targeted implementation of the preservation strategy.

The second SCAPE newsletter is now available. This issue features include an interview with Barbara Sierman, Digital Preservation Manager at the National Library of the Netherlands, an overview of the xcorrSound tool and information about the upcoming training events.

Read SCAPE Newsletter Issue 2: www.scape-project.eu/news/scape-newsletter-2

Information in E-motion: BOBCATSSS 2012 Proceedings available

Proceedings of BOBCATSSS 2012, the 20th International Conference on Information Science, are now available for free download. The success of the 20th BOBCATSSS symposium, as documented by the proceedings, also shows the power and relevance of the European spirit, which has encouraged all BOBCATSSS organisers up to now. The contributions from 27 countries demonstrate: Europe is more than a financial market approaching the crisis. BOBCATSSS is a strong European network proving that people profit from cooperation in the area of library science and information management, sharing their knowledge and experiences. Furthermore: the European Symposium BOBCATSSS is attracting more and more participants from all over the world.

The main theme for BOBCATSSS 2012 is “Information in E-motion”. Four sub-themes were focused on e-developments and their impact on us from the point of views of organization, private person and the world:

• •

  E-media in motion. There is hardly any information left that is only available in analogue formats. An increasing amount of data is only accessible through digital media. The devices being used to get access to information are developing rapidly. The world of mobile devices, cross media, augmented reality, learning through games instead of books, semantic web and new search techniques is a challenging and dynamic one.

• •

  Organizations 2.0. Organizations are adapting to the world around us; they have to! The globalised world demands us to find new ways of collaborating, learning and working. And as a result of that, we will have to find alternative ways and tools to record and archive our information. How can organizations develop effective strategies to benefit from these challenges?

• •

  My Information. Can you remember the time when you had a diary with a lock, hidden in a place where no-one could find it. Many people now use social networks where they keep track of what they are doing. Hardly hiding their private information; sharing the stories of their lives. Who is able to access and (mis) use this information, or could privacy be guaranteed to a certain extend. Who are responsible? Governments? Non-government bodies, profit organizations or every individual? It is all about the content and the use of content.

• •

  Access to public information. It is important for citizens to have access to the data they need. It is crucial in democratic processes. In order to achieve that, boundaries have to be eliminated. We have to be critical users of information and become “media literate”. Do governments have the responsibility to stimulate this critical process by funding public services like libraries and broadcasting organizations? Or will other stakeholders take over. What are the strategies, concepts and events that will have impact on access on public information?

80 paper presentations, 15 workshops and 40 poster presentations of high quality are documented in the proceedings.

Download “Information in e-Motion” from the conference web site at: www.bobcatsss2012.org/programme/proceedings/