Repository Software Comparison: Building…

Repository Software Comparison: Building Digital Library Infrastructure at LSE :
“Digital collections at LSE (London School of Economics and Political Science)are significant and growing, as are the requirements of their users. LSE Library collects materials relevant to research and teaching in the social sciences, crossing the boundaries between personal and organisational archives, rare and unique printed collections and institutional research outputs. Digital preservation is an increasing concern alongside our commitment to continue to develop innovative digital services for researchers and students. The Digital Library Management and Infrastructure Development Programme is a cross-library initiative to build our capacity to collect, manage, preserve and provide access to our digital collections. The initial phase of the programme has investigated our collections, their users and best practice in the wider community and produced functional specifications for testing against the current best-of-breed open source repository software. Following this comparison we made a recommendation for the implementation of a repository system to operate at the core of our digital library. This article gives a summary of that comparison.”
URL : http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue64/fay/

The Current State and Likely Future of t…

The Current State and Likely Future of the Commercial Legal Publishing Industry: The Effect of Open Access Innovation on the Industry’s Core Market :
“Outsell’s David Curle, a publishing industry analyst, gave the following presentation on the legal publishing industry at the May 21, 2010 Chicago LAW.GOV workshop. After reviewing the market structure of the industry, estimating revenue generated by selling primary legal resources, and the impact the current recession has had on the major companies’ core market, namely law firm and corporate instititutional buyers, Curle forecasts that open access innovation will create new markets outside of this core market and that the products and services created there will push the major legal publishers to provide similar products and services because their core institutional buyers will be demanding them.”
URL : http://lawprofessors.typepad.com/law_librarian_blog/2010/08/the-current-state-of-commercial-legal-publishing.html

Law.Gov : A Proposed Distributed Reposit…

Law.Gov : A Proposed Distributed Repository of All Primary Legal Materials of the United States :
“Law.Gov is an idea, an idea that the primary legal materials of the United States should be readily available to all, and that governmental institutions should make these materials available in bulk as distributed, authenticated, well-formatted data. To make this idea a reality, a series of workshops were held throughout the country, resulting in a consensus on 10 core principles”
URL : http://resource.org/law.gov/index.html

E-Science and Data Support Services

The Association of Research Libraries E-Science Working Group developed a survey to “build an understanding of how libraries can contribute to e-science activities in their institution” and “identify organizations and institutions that have similar interests in e-science to leverage research library interests.”

The August 2009 survey gathered 57 responses to the survey from the 123 ARL member libraries in the United States and Canada. Twenty-one respondents report their institution provides infrastructure or support services for e-science, 23 institutions are in the planning stages, and 13 do not provide support for e-science.

After analyzing the survey results, the authors identified a small set of respondents (Purdue University, the University of California, San Diego, Cornell University, Johns Hopkins University, the University of Illinois at Chicago, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology) for interviews to further elaborate their activities.

The resulting six case studies synthesize the interviews with the corresponding institutions’ responses to the survey. The cases further illuminate programs and services mentioned only briefly in the survey and allow some interesting patterns to emerge from interviewees’ reflections on faculty connections, staffing levels, and organizational structure and culture.

This report presents a summary of the survey results and the six cases studies. It also includes a bibliography of related articles, reports, and Web sites, along with the survey instrument and a selection of recent research library position descriptions with significant e-science support components.

URL : http://www.arl.org/storage/documents/publications/escience-report-2010.pdf