New & Noteworthy
Introduces Google Scholar
A new, specialized search interface, Google Scholar is designed to search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses,books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research. Google Scholar allows users to find articles from a wide variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web.
Just as with Google Web Search, Google Scholar orders search results by how relevant they are to the query. The relevance ranking takes into account the full text of each article as well as the article’s author, the publication in which the article appeared and how often it has been cited in scholarly literature. Google Scholar also automatically analyzes and extracts citations and presents them as separate results, even if the documents they refer to are not online. This means the search results may include citations of older works and seminal articles that appear only in books or other offline publications.
Google Scholar provides full text of articles from open access journals and preprint repositories, as well as preprints on the web. For licensed content,Google advises the user of Google Scholar to visit a nearby academic library. As of November 2004, Google Scholar is in beta release, and invites authors and publishers of scholarly works to contact Google to explore ways of working together to improve the service.
Open WorldCat
Pilot Becomes Permanent Program
After a successful pilot with approximately 12,000 academic, public and school libraries from June 2003 into the fall of 2004, Open WorldCat has officially moved into production as a program. The Open WorldCat program is now an ongoing benefit of OCLC membership for libraries that contribute ownership information to the WorldCat database and subscribe to the WorldCat database on the OCLC FirstSearch service. At present, approximately 23,000 OCLC member libraries are participating in the Open WorldCat program.
The Open WorldCat program makes records of library-owned materials in OCLC’s WorldCat database available to web users on popular internet search,bibliographic and bookselling sites. A web user visits a site such as Yahoo!Search or Google and enters a search phrase that matches the title of a library-owned item. The returned search results include a link to the Open WorldCat “Find in a Library” interface, where they can enter geographic information that helps them locate the item at a library in their city, region or country.
In November 2004, OCLC recorded approximately 5 million clicks to WorldCat records from all partner web sites (including Google and Yahoo!). The result:OCLC member libraries are more visible on the web, and their catalogs are more accessible from the sites where many people start their search for information.
One enhancement planned for the Open WorldCat program in 2005 is the release of a usage statistics site for libraries. These statistics will make it possible for libraries to monitor the number of times someone reaches their catalog, web site, or FirstSearch fulfillment links from the Open WorldCat interface.
OCLC and Yahoo!
Introduce Toolbar with WorldCat Search Feature
OCLC Online Computer Library Center and Yahoo! Inc. have announced a pilot program that leverages the strength of the Yahoo! Toolbar and Yahoo! Search to enable users to explore the web as well as a subset of the OCLC WorldCat database. The companies have collaborated on a co-branded toolbar that provides consumers with one-click access to 2 million of the most popular records found in WorldCat.
The Yahoo!/OCLC toolbar is a project associated with Open WorldCat, an OCLC initiative designed to increase the online visibility of libraries and their collections. OCLC will be promoting the co-branded toolbar on its web site,providing consumers access to information that was previously only available through libraries. The toolbar enables consumers to narrow their search results to the WorldCat database and helps them locate libraries in their vicinity that have the record, book or document that they are looking for. OCLC and Yahoo!will work together to increase accessibility to more of WorldCat’s 56 million records as they become available.
To access WorldCat’s most popular records, users simply enter a query in search box located in the toolbar and either click the WorldCat logo or use the drop-down menu which features a “libraries” link. Users will then be prompted for their zip code to determine if the library materials they are looking for are available in a nearby library. The toolbar features Yahoo!Search, which provides consumers with a rich research technology to help them access both online and offline repositories of data.
The Yahoo!/OCLC Toolbar also includes a drop-down menu, located next to the WorldCat logo, which provides access to the OCLC FirstSearch service; the NetLibrary eBook service; the OCLC member library list; the OCLC web site; and a link to the About WorldCat site which leads to more information on the database.
Ourmedia Project
Provides Global Home for Grassroots Media
Ourmedia (formerly Open Media) is an open-source initiative devoted to creating, sharing and storing works of personal media. The Ourmedia project was started jointly by members of the creative and technology communities in the summer of 2004. The project has the backing of Brewster Kahle, founder of the prestigious Internet Archive, who has offered support for the idea of a permanent repository for grassroots media. The site will serve as a permanent repository for video, music, photos, audio clips and other personal media of grassroots artists willing to share their works with a global audience. The site will also serve as a central gathering spot where professionals and amateurs come together to share works, offer tips and tutorials, and interact in a combination community space and virtual library.
Ourmedia web site: www.open-media.org/
Internet archive: www.archive.org/
DCC
Digital Curation Centre Launched, Director Appointed
The UK funding bodies for universities, colleges and research councils have combined to fund the Digital Curation Centre (DCC), with an annual budget of over £1 million a year. Formally launched at a ceremony in November in Edinburgh, the DCC is charged with raising awareness and providing practical tools and support to a new breed of digital curators, drawn from research units,archives, libraries and computing centers. The research community has decided to make concerted effort to secure its investment in the digital. Additionally,Chris Rusbridge, previously Director of Information Services at the University of Glasgow, has been appointed as the Director-designate of the DCC and will start full time in February 2005.
There are changes in IT as media change, from paper tape, to laser disk, 5¼in floppies to memory stick; there are changes to operating systems and to software; and there are changes to data format and encoding schemes. Any and all of this means that data and results, important as record and evidence for decision making, can become unreadable, even they are not actually lost or accidentally over-written or destroyed. The recent rescue of the BBC Doomsday project from technological obsolescence was one popular example of the significance of digital preservation to safeguard against the loss of irreplaceable digital data and information. There are other examples of “born-digital”information (that which has no print equivalent) which have been lost or have required expensive resort to digital archaeology.
The DCC has been set up to meet these preservation needs. Although there are a number of initiatives around the world looking at information preservation,these initiatives are, however, largely uncoordinated and dispersed. Funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee, (JISC) and the e-Science core program,the DCC is run by a consortium of institutions (University of Edinburgh (lead partner) and the University of Glasgow, UKOLN, at the University of Bath; the Council for the Central Laboratory of the Research Councils).
An important aspect of the work of the DCC will be to bring existing expertise together from different professions and disciplines, and to establish agreed strategies and procedures for appraisal (of what is worth keeping), for preservation (taking note of representation format), of storage (of both the bits and this representation information) and for subsequent re-discovery and successful retrieval.
Digital Curation Centre web site: www.dcc.ac.uk
LOCKSS Program
Demonstrates Format Migration for Web Content
On November 15, 2004, The LOCKSS program demonstrated transparent format migration of preserved web content at the National Archives Partnerships in Innovation Symposium, National Archives at College Park, Maryland.
The LOCKSS digital preservation system collects content by crawling the web and preserves it in the format supplied by the publisher. As standards and formats evolve over years, browsers will presumably lose the ability to handle content in old formats. The process of converting old content to a newer format that browsers can render accurately is called format migration. The LOCKSS system has designed and tested an initial implementation of format migration for web content that is transparent to readers, building on the content negotiation capabilities of HTTP.
This implementation is capable of transparently presenting content collected in one web format to readers in another web format, with no changes needed to browsers. The reader need take no special action to cause this to happen, nor even be aware that it is happening. This appears to be the first time that a production digital preservation system has demonstrated transparent format migration of live content collected from the web for end users.
For complete technical details, a pre-print is available: http://arxiv.org/abs/cs.DL/0411077
Library of Congress
Announces Additions to Prints and Photographs Online Catalog
The Library of Congress’s Prints and Photographs Division has announced that a variety of colorful offerings are now available in the Prints and Photographs Online Catalog (PPOC) www.loc.gov/rr/print/catalog.html
These include: “Prokudin-Gorskii Collection Color Composite Digital Images” – Between ca. 1905 and 1915 Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii took photographs of the Russian Empire using an early color process. He photographed through color filters onto triple-frame glass negatives, producing images that could be printed or projected in color. In response to researcher interest, the Library of Congress contracted with Blaise Agera y Arcas to make digital color composites of all the negatives through an automated process. A description of the process is available at: http://lcweb2.loc.gov/pp/prokhtml/prokcompos.html
More information about the Prokudin-Gorskii Collection is available at: http://lcweb2.loc.gov/pp/prokhtml/prokabt.html
“Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Color Transparencies, 1939-1944: New High Resolution Scans” – These already popular early Kodachrome transparencies include scenes in the USA,Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands, showing work, home and community life, and preparations for war. The new scans were also used to produce the illustrations for Bound for Glory, a new book by Paul Hendrikson about the color FSA/OWI photographs, co-published by the Library of Congress and Harry N. Abrams.
For further information, see “About the FSA/OWI Color Transparencies”http://lcweb2.loc.gov/pp/fsacabt.html
“Cartoon Prints, British” – About 500 of the Library’s 10,000 British political and satirical prints dating ca.1621-ca. 1853 have been digitized and cataloged online. With colorful and often biting humor, the cartoons highlight aspects of British political life, including tensions with its colonies and other nations, as well as society, fashion, manners, and theater. The online records can now be searched together in the “Cartoon Prints, British” collection, which also features new contextual information and a bibliography.
For more information, see http://lcweb2.loc.gov/pp/cpbrhtml/cpbrabt.html
The Library of Congress’s Prints and Photographs Online Catalog (PPOC)contains catalog records and digital images representing a rich cross-section of still pictures held by the Prints and Photographs Division and other units of the Library of Congress:
The catalog provides access through group or item records to about 65 percent of the Division’s holdings.
About 90 percent of the records are accompanied by one or more digital images. In some collections, only thumbnail images display to those searching outside the Library of Congress because of potential rights considerations.
Cataloging and Digitizing Toolbox: www.loc.gov/rr/print/cataloging.html
Los Alamos National Laboratory
Receives Grant from LC
The Laboratory’s Research Library has been awarded a $750,000 grant from the Library of Congress. The grant will be used to support research and development of tools that will help address complex problems related to collecting, storing and accessing digital materials. Herbert van de Sompel will be the principal investigator of the project.
The federal grant is awarded through the Library of Congress’ National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program. This is a congressionally approved plan to develop a national strategy, in collaboration with other entities, for policies, protocols and strategies for the long-term preservation of digital materials. In 2000, Congress authorized a $99.8 million congressional appropriation to establish the program. The goal is to build a network throughout the country of committed partners working through a digital library preservation architecture with defined roles and responsibilities.
The complete text of the “Plan for the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program” is available at www.digitalpreservation.govonline. It includes an explanation of how the plan was developed, who the Library of Congress worked with to develop the plan and the key components of the digital preservation infrastructure.
More information: www.lanl.gov/orgs/pa/newsbulletin/2004/11/02/text02.shtml
C-SPAN
Covers Library of Congress Lecture Series
C-SPAN will be covering the Library of Congress’ new evening lecture series, “Digital Future”. The John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress presents a series of evening lectures on “Managing Knowledge and Creativity in a Digital Context” featuring some of the best known experts in digitally networked communications. All are free and open to the public, and no reservations are required. The lectures are held in the Montpelier Room,sixth floor of the James Madison Building, 101 Independence Avenue S.E.,Washington, D.C.
The series began with a talk by David Weinberger, an expert on blogging, who discussed how and in which situations blogs work and their value in children’s education. The lecture airs Monday’s, 6.30-8 p.m. ET, live on C-SPAN.
Participate in the series by emailing questions to digital@loc.gov, or find more information about the series and archived video on the C-SPAN web site at www.cspan.org/congress/libraryofcongress.asp
Past lecture topics include:
Monday, December 13 – Brewster Kahle, a digital librarian and directorand co-founder of the Internet Archive. He will explain how and why capturing material on the web is important, and discuss the challenges of selecting pertinent content.
Monday, January 31 – Brian Cantwell Smith, dean of the Faculty of Information Studies at the University of Toronto. The title of his talk is“And Is All This Stuff Really Digital After All?”.
Future lecture topics include:
Monday, February 14 – David Levy, professor at the Information School of the University of Washington.He will discuss the shift of the experience of reading from the fixed page to digital, and the effect that has had on language.
Thursday, March 3 – Lawrence Lessig, professor at Stanford Law School and founder of the Stanford Center for Internet and Society. He will discuss digital copyright issues.
Monday, March 14 – Edward Ayers, dean of the College and Graduate School of Arts & Sciences at the University of Virginia. He will address the implications of creating and distributing knowledge in today’s digital environment.
Monday, March 28 – Neil Gershenfeld, director for the Center of Bits and Atoms at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His talk is titled“From the Library of Information to the Library of Things.”
Visit www.c-span.org/congress/libraryofcongress.aspfor more information.
TAPIR for DSpace
Now Available
The Edinburgh University Library (EUL) has developed an additional set of tools to add extra functionality to the DSpace software. Previously known as the“EUL-DSpace Add-On”, these tools have been renamed TAPIR –Theses Alive Plugin for Institutional Repositories. It has been developed as part of the Theses Alive! Project under funding from the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), as part of the Focus on Access to Institutional Resources (FAIR) Programme. It is intended that this product will be an open source, freely available addition to DSpace.
The current version of TAPIR provides the ability within DSpace to operate a supervised authoring facility, allowing Thesis and Dissertation Supervisors to observe the ongoing work by their student on their project, to comment and to even make changes. This comes with an addition to the DSpace administration area to manage the supervising groups and their access policies to the student’s work. It is envisaged that although developed specifically with ETDs (Electronic Theses and Dissertations) in mind, that this software may also find other applications.
In addition, two submission interfaces (one for E-prints and other documents,and one for E-theses) are now supported, with the option to choose between them. Each of these submission interfaces provides custom metadata collection and licensing options for submissions.
More information on TAPIR, including a download of the source code, is available on SourceForge. The source code for DSpace may also be obtained at SourceForge.
The TAPIR: www.thesesalive.ac.uk/dsp_home.shtml
TAPIR source code: http://sourceforge.net/projects/tapir-eul
DSpace source code: http://sourceforge.net/projects/dspace/
Dublin Core Services
Releases DescribeThis
Dublic Core Services has announced the release of the first version (1.0 beta) of DescribeThis, a service designed for the automatic extraction of metadata from online resources. The site offers an easy to use interface where you can indicate the resource to analyze and how to download the results as XML,XHTML or RDF files.
In the current version (1.0 beta), the site’s engine is able to find the resources to process using keywords, full URLs or more complex queries with operators, like “ISBN”, used to collect the bibliographic data for published documents. In the first case it works as a metasearch engine using other search engines to locate the best sites where the resource can be found. The results returned back contains all the recognized and generated Dublin Core elements for the requested resource and can be downloaded as RDF, XML or XHTML collections.
DescribeThis’s main fields of applications:
To support and extend the application and development of the DublinCore format as one of most appropriate metadata standards to describe or catalog resources, digitalsor not.
To use the site as a tool to support the cataloguing of online resources,oriented to information specialists and Internet users in general.
To deliver services of automatic metadata management, designed for managers of bibliographic and content databases.
To create an efficient way for administrators and web site authors to dynamically provide metadata information about their sites to page crawlers,bots, spiders, agents, worms and other automatic indexing and site classification systems, with the aim of contributing to the improvement of the whole Internet content organization.
DescribeThis serves as a gateway to the functions of analysis, automatic conversion and filtration of digital resources and formats, included as part of a group of web services and tools called Sand Dublin Core Services (DCS). DCS provides support and software infrastructure to develop metadata management applications and servicesIn this version, DCS can automatically analyze and to generate metadata registers for the following formats:
HTML and XHTML Documents.
Dublin Core/RDF.
Dublin Core/XML.
Dublin Core/HTML (META tags).
GIF, JPG (EXIF) and other image formats.
RSS
bibTex.
proprietary Formats XML (ex.: Amazon XML Web Services).
Web site: www.describethis.com/
OCKHAM Initiative
Adds Alerting Service
The OCKHAM Initiative seeks to promote the development of digital libraries via collaboration between librarians and digital library researchers. The intent is to bridge the gap between digital library development and the adoption of digital library systems by traditional library communities by promoting component-based, open approaches and standards for digital library tools,services, and content. The OCKHAM Initiative received a $425 thousand grant from the National Science Foundation to develop a network of services that will improve the deployability of the National Science Digital Library (NSDL) in traditional libraries.
OCKHAM has recently begun implementing an alerting (current awareness)service using the National Science Foundation Digital Library as content and SRU as the means of creating user profiles. It demonstrates a standards-based method for collecting content, providing access to it, and disseminating it on a regular basis in the form of an alerting service. The method includes:
identifying OAI repositories with content of interest;
using OAI to harvest content and store it in a central pile;
exporting MARC data from library catalogs and storing it in the central pile;
indexing the content of the central pile;
providing an SRU interface to the index;
allowing users to save the SRU URL’s as “profiles”;
allowing users to have the profiles executed on a regular basis;
making the results of searches available as HTML, e-mail, RSS, etc.; and
returning to step 1.
OCKHAM web site: http://ockham.org
OCKHAM Initiative wiki: http://wiki.osuosl.org/display/OCKPub/Home
OCKHAM alerting service: http://alert.ockham.org./
Qfilter Software
Improves Database Security
Researchers at the Pennsylvania State University have developed software that more quickly and efficiently ensures that databases do not release unauthorized information. The software, QFilter, “sits” between users and databases and filters or culls out unauthorized requests for data before a database responds to a query. “We have shifted the thinking from data filtering to query filtering,” said Dongwon Lee, assistant professor in Penn State’s School of Information Sciences and Technology (IST). “This is a practical solution to the ongoing problem of database access controls.”
Businesses and organizations know a critical security guarantee for their databases is that only authorized users can access approved data. That security is managed currently through access control-modules built separately into individual databases. QFilter can implement database security without those modules. This means it can be used with off-the-shelf databases and without requiring substantial changes to existing databases. According to Lee, that difference not only makes the security check of QFilter very practical, but it also significantly improves query-response time by rejecting unauthorized requests early on.
To capture and determine who can access what information, QFilter uses a specialized model of computation known as non-deterministic finite automata(NFA). NFA stores a large number of access control policies in an efficient and non-redundant fashion. NFA monitors when users’ queries pass through and filters out parts of queries asking for unauthorized access.
Work on QFilter continues as the software is not in its final version, said Lee, who anticipates developing other applications for QFilter. Lee’s co-authors are Bo Luo, IST doctoral student; Peng Liu, assistant professor of information sciences and technology; and Wang-Chien Lee, associate professor of computer science and engineering at Penn State.
New Chat Group
Formed to Discuss Digital Audiobooks
A new chat group has been created to enable libraries to share information,news and experiences related to digital audiobooks. With several vendors announcing the debut of services related to network accessible digital audiobooks there was a perceived need for a library discussion group to discuss this new service. The Yahoo! group requires subscription but the archives are viewable by the public.
To join go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/digitalaudiolibraries/
IMIRSEL
Two New Music IR E-mail Lists
As part of the International Music Information Retrieval Systems Evaluation Laboratory (IMIRSEL) project, two new e-mail lists have been created to help facilitate communications among those involved in establishing a TREC-like evaluation programme for Music Information Retrieval and Music Digital Library researchers. Background information on the IMIRSEL project can be found at: ismir2003.ismir.net/papers/Downie.pdfThe IMIRSEL project is being supported by Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the National Science Foundation.
LIST 1: M2K – mirmodules@lists.lis.uiuc.edu
This mail list is designed to facilitate communications among those using and contributing to the Music to Knowledge (M2K) subset of the Data to Knowledge(D2K) framework and toolkit.
Information about D2K can be found at: http://alg.ncsa.uiuc.edu/do/downloads/d2k
Subscription information is available at: http://mail.isrl.uiuc.edu/mailman/listinfo/mirmodules
Information about M2K can be found at: http://music-ir.org/evaluation/tools.html
LIST 2: MIREX – evalfest@lists.lis.uiuc.edu
This list is designed to facilitate communications among those involved in planning, executing and participating in MIREX 2005. “MIREX” (Music Information Retrieval Evaluation eXchange) is the newly minted moniker for the TREC-like evaluation programme the MIR/MDL research community is setting up. This builds upon and expands the initial work recently done at the “Audio Description Contest” which took place during the 5th ISMIR Conference in Barcelona, Spain, October 10-14, 2004 (http://ismir2004.ismir.net/ISMIR_Contest.html)
Subscription information is available at: http://mail.isrl.uiuc.edu/mailman/listinfo/evalfest
Digital Rights
Policy Report Available
A new Mellon Foundation report authored by Simon Tanner, Director, King’s Digital Consultancy Services is now available: “Reproduction Charging Models & Rights Policy for Digital Images in American Art Museums”.
This study explores the cost and policy models adapted by US arts museums in arriving at pricing structures for delivering imaging and rights services. It examines the new market realities and opportunities cultural institutions face due to the transition to digital collections. A total of 100 US art museums were surveyed and in-depth interviews were carried out with 20 museums.
Among the most significant results of the study are:
Museums do not carry out image creation or rights and reproduction activity because of its profitability.
The primary driving factors for providing these services are:–to serve the public and educational use;– to promote the museum and its collections;– to serve publishers and commercial picture use.
5 percent of those interviewed do less than 500 transactions a year.
56 percent of those interviewed received less than $50,000 a year from rights transactions.
99 percent of those surveyed charge less for educational use than commercial use.
The largest revenue earners were those museums where money was assigned directly back to the service department to offset or recoupedagainst costs.
The disconnect between the imaging and rights services and the museum’s core audience means they do not receive the credit they deserve for enabling the wide dissemination, retailing and publication of the collection.
The lack of business planning and clear cost accounting for the actual cost of service provision is undermining museum efforts.
Most museums are setting pricing on the perceived market rate rather than with reference to the cost of actual service provision.
There is a demonstrable commitment gap towards the rights function in some museums.
The recommendations from this study include:
Museums use this report as a means to review their priorities in providing imaging and rights services. It would ensure that the whole museum has a clear understanding of the purpose of these services and the way they link to the museum’s mission.
The rights service function should be centralized. Doing this will increase revenue and reduce the litigation exposure for the museum.
The rights function is recommended to be given a full-time position that is considered as a professional activity in its own right and not an adjunct to any other function.
Wherever possible revenue should be assigned back to the department that was responsible for making the revenue possible for the museum.
Museums should consider establishing prices with reference to the actual cost of service provision using this reports suggested pricing model.
The final report is now publicly available at: www.kcl.ac.uk/kdcs/USart.htm
OSS
New White Paper on Implications of Open Source in the Context of Education
Open Source Software (OSS) refers to software programs whose licenses permit users the freedom to run the program for any purpose, to study and modify the program, and to freely redistribute copies of the original or modified program. Because of the rise in popularity and consideration of open source applications in all markets from education to government to business, it is critical for all decision makers to understand what open source applications are and what the implications are for their organization.
The R-Smart Group has released a new paper, “Open Source – Opens Learning: Why Open Source Makes Sense for Education”. This white paper offers a simple, yet thorough definition of open source in the context of education, describes the new market models, and dispels the myths about open source.
