Digital Treasures: The Evolution of a Digital Repository in Massachusetts :
« Digital Treasures is a digital library collection of the history of central and western Massachusetts. It is a collaborative project among Central/Western MA Automated Resource Sharing System (C/W MARS), Central MA Regional Library System (CMRLS) and Western MA Regional Library System (WMRLS). Initiated by C/W MARS in 2006, Digital Treasures began as a pilot program when C/W MARS purchased equipment and software and set up a scanning lab at its headquarters in Worcester. Currently Digital Treasures has 36 collections from libraries, with over 1,300 accessible images. C/W MARS, CMRLS and WMRLS continue to collaborate on ways to bring funding, selection guidance and metadata expertise to their member libraries and bring access to the wealth of cultural history of the Commonwealth. »
URL : http://metroblogs.typepad.com/files/ditrw_26.pdf
Learned society members and open access …
Learned society members and open access :
« The individual members of 35 UK learned societies were surveyed on their attitudes to open access (OA); 1,368 responses were received. Most respondents said they knew what OA was, and supported the idea of OA journals. However, although 60% said that they read OA journals and 25% that they published in them, in both cases around one-third of the journals named were not OA. While many were in favour of increased access through OA journals, concerns were expressed about the cost to authors, possible reduction in quality, and negative impact on existing journals, publishers, and societies. By contrast, less than half knew what self-archiving was; 36% thought it was a good idea and 50% were unsure. Just under half said they used repositories of self-archived articles, but 13% of references were not in fact to self-archiving repositories. 29% said they self-archived their own articles, but 10% of references were not to publicly accessible sites of any kind. The access and convenience of self-archiving repositories were seen as positive, but there were concerns about quality control, workload for authors and institutions, chaotic proliferation of versions, and potential damage to existing journals, publishers, and societies. »
URL : http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/alpsp/lp/2009/00000022/00000003/art00008?token=004f1b40f52ecd31e937e2a46762c6b675d7e706a70442a6e6d78673f7b2f267738703375686f49
Requirements for Emulation as a Long-term Preservation Strategy
Emulation is a strategy receiving increasing attention in the long-term digital archiving community. It can act as a complement to the otherwise dominant digital preservation strategies of migration and has convincing advantages, especially for dynamic digital objects. Nevertheless, a range of conditions must be met for successful reproduction of such digital objects in the future.
The incorporation of view paths to identify the necessary metadata as well as additional software components may propose extensions of the OAIS reference model. This paper combines this view path concept, which captures the contextual information of software, with additional insights, thereby improving the flexibility of the approach.
The concept provides insights into workflow instructions allowing for the archive management to preserve access to its artifacts. The view path model requires extensions of the metadata sets of the primary object as well as additionally stored secondary objects resulting in a reproduction of the object’s environment, e.g. applications or operating systems.
This paper addresses strategies regarding reference environments and gives an outlook for how to apply emulation strategies in the long-term while improving user convenience and maximizing emulation capabilities.
Publishing Practices of NIH-Funded Facul…
Publishing Practices of NIH-Funded Faculty at MIT :
« Faculty and researchers who receive substantial funding from NIH were interviewed about their publication practices. Qualitative data was collected from interviews of eleven faculty members and one researcher representing six academic departments who received NIH funding. Interview responses were analyzed to identify a representative publication workflow and common themes related to the publication process. The goals of this study were to inform librarians about faculty publication practices; to learn how faculty are affected by and responding to NIH publication policy changes; and to inform planning and discussion about new services to support NIH compliance in addition to general faculty publishing.
Major themes from the interviews included consistency in publishing workflows, but variety in authorship patterns and in data management practices. Significant points of pain for authors included difficulty finding quality reviewers, frustrating submission processes, and discomfort about the implications of publication agreements. Some authors found the NIH submission requirement to be burdensome, but most assumed their publishers were taking care of this process for them. Implications for library services are considered. »
URL : http://www.istl.org/10-summer/refereed2.html
First Results of the SOAP ProjectView mo…
First Results of the SOAP Project
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Global Adoption of Electronic Theses and…
Global Adoption of Electronic Theses and Dissertations :
« Electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) are a relatively new mode of research and scholarly
communication. Lippincott states that an ETD program provides a process, standards, and software to
automate functions, as well as a digital infrastructure for access and preservation (Lippincott, 2006). As a primary source of information, theses and dissertations are particularly useful to researchers, but many languish in obscurity in university libraries and archives. Digital library technologies have helped ETDs gain momentum (Jin, 2004). Theses submitted in support of a PhD are difficult to access, as they are only collected by the library of the university that granted the degree. ETDs can be easily located, readily accessible, and delivered over the Web (Vijaykumar and Murthy, 2001). Most university libraries are very enthusiastic about electronic theses, but thesis supervisors and university administrators have sometimes been less keen on the idea. In most cases, it is necessary to change university regulations in order to require students to deposit an electronic copy of their thesis, which can be a time-consuming and frustrating process (Greig, 2005). This paper attempts to view the status of use and adoption of ETDs in various different parts of the world, and gives a brief history of ETDs, key issues governing ETD projects, potential merits of ETDs, with a glimpse on ETD initiatives in India. »
URL : http://unllib.unl.edu/LPP/dillip-swain.pdf
Estimating the Economic Impact of Mass D…
Estimating the Economic Impact of Mass Digitization Projects on Copyright Holders: Evidence from the Google Book Search Litigation :
« Google Book Search (GBS) has captured the attention of many commentators and government officials, but even as they vigorously debate its legality, few of them have marshaled new facts to estimate its likely effects on publishing and other information markets. This Article challenges the conventional wisdom propounded by the U.S. and German governments, as well as Microsoft and other competitors of Google, concerning the likely economic impact of mass book-digitization projects. Originally advanced by publishing industry lobbying groups, the prevailing account of mass book-digitization projects is that they will devastate authors and publishers, just as Napster and its heirs have supposedly devastated musicians and music labels. Using the impact of GBS on the revenues and operating incomes of U.S. publishers believing themselves to be the most-affected by it, this Article finds no evidence of a negative impact upon them. To the contrary, it provides some evidence of a positive impact, and proposes further empirical research to identify the mechanisms of digitization’s economic impact.
The debate surrounding the GBS settlement is important to students, writers, researchers, and the general public, as it may decide whether a federal appellate court or even the U.S. Supreme Court allows the best research tool ever designed to survive. If the theory of Microsoft and some publishing trade associations is accepted, the courts may enjoin and destroy GBS, just as Napster was shut down a decade ago.
The Article aims at a preliminary estimate of the economic impact of mass digitization projects, using GBS as a case in point. It finds little support for the much-discussed hypothesis of the Association of American Publishers and Google’s competitors that the mass digitization of major U.S. libraries will reduce the revenues and profits of the most-affected publishers. In fact, the revenues and profits of the publishers who believe themselves to be most aggrieved by GBS, as measured by their willingness to file suit against Google for copyright infringement, increased at a faster rate after the project began, as compared to before its commencement. The rate of growth by publishers most affected by GBS is greater than the growth of the overall U.S. economy or of retail sales. Thus, the very publishers that have sued Google have seen their revenues grow faster than retail sales or the U.S. economy as a whole (measured by gross domestic product). This finding parallels some of the research that has been done since the Napster case on the economic impact of peer-to-peer file sharing on sales of recorded music. Future studies may provide a more granular estimate of the economic impact of frequent downloads or displays of pages of particular books on the sales of such books. »
URL : http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1634126