New & noteworthy
Article Type: New & noteworthy From: Library Hi Tech News, Volume 25, Issue 10.
Google, Authors and Publishers Announce Settlement
The Authors Guild, the Association of American Publishers (AAP), and Google in October 2008 announced a settlement agreement on behalf of a broad class of authors and publishers worldwide that would expand online access to millions of in-copyright books and other written materials in the USA from the collections of a number of major US libraries participating in Google Book Search. The agreement, reached after two years of negotiations, would resolve a class-action lawsuit brought by book authors and the Authors Guild, as well as a separate lawsuit filed by five large publishers as representatives of the AAP's membership. The class action is subject to approval by the US District Court for the Southern District of New York.
The agreement acknowledges the rights and interests of copyright owners,provides an efficient means for them to control how their intellectual property is accessed online and enables them to receive compensation for online access to their works. If approved by the court, the agreement would provide:
More access to out-of-print books – generating greater exposure for millions of in-copyright works, including hard-to-find out-of-print books, by enabling readers in the USA to search these works and preview them online;
Additional ways to purchase copyrighted books – building off publishers' and authors' current efforts and further expanding the electronic market for copyrighted books in the USA, by offering users the ability to purchase online access to many in-copyright books;
Institutional subscriptions to millions of books online – offering a means for US colleges, universities and other organizations to obtain subscriptions for online access to collections from some of the world's most renowned libraries;
Free access from US libraries – providing free, full-text, online viewing of millions of out-of-print books at a designated computer in US public and university libraries; and
Compensation to authors and publishers and control over access to their works – distributing payments earned from online access provided by Google and, prospectively, from similar programs that may be established by other providers, through a newly created independent, not-for-profit Book Rights Registry that will also locate rights holders, collect and maintain accurate rights holder information, and provide a way for rights holders to request inclusion in or exclusion from the project.
Under the agreement, Google will make payments totaling $125 million. The money will be used to establish the Book Rights Registry, to resolve existing claims by authors and publishers and to cover legal fees. The settlement agreement resolves Authors Guild vs Google, a class-action suit filed on September 20, 2005 by the Authors Guild and certain authors, and a suit filed on October 19, 2005 by five major publisher-members of the AAP: The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. (NYSE: MHP); Pearson Education, Inc. and Penguin Group (USA)Inc., both part of Pearson (LSE: PSON; NYSE: PSO); John Wiley & Sons,Inc. (NYSE: JWa and JWb); and Simon & Schuster, Inc. part of CBS Corporation (NYSE: CBS.A and CBS). These lawsuits challenged Google's plan to digitize, search and show snippets of in-copyright books and to share digital copies with libraries without the explicit permission of the copyright owner.
Holders worldwide of US copyrights can register their works with the Book Rights Registry and receive compensation from institutional subscriptions, book sales, ad revenues and other possible revenue models, as well as a cash payment if their works have already been digitized.
Libraries at the Universities of California, Michigan, Wisconsin and Stanford have provided input into the settlement and expect to participate in the project, including by making their collections available. Along with a number of other US libraries that currently work with Google, their significant efforts to preserve, maintain and provide access to books have played a critical role in achieving this agreement and, through their anticipated participation, they are furthering such efforts while making books even more accessible to students,researchers and readers in the USA. It is expected that additional libraries in the USA will participate in this project in the future.
Google Book Search users in the USA will be able to enjoy and purchase the products and services offered under the project. Outside the USA, the users'experience with Google Book Search will be unchanged, unless the offering of such products and services is authorized by the rights holder of a book.
For more information about this agreement, including information about whether you may be a class member, please visit http://books.google.com/booksrightsholders. Class members include authors (the Author Sub-Class) and publishers (the Publisher Sub-Class), and their heirs and successors, of books and other written works protected by US copyright law.
Full press release: www.google.com/intl/en/press/pressrel/20081027_booksearchagreement.html
More information from Google blog: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/10/new-chapter-for-google-book-search.html
Selected library reaction:
Paul Courant's Blog (University of Michigan): http://paulcourant.net/2008/10/28/the-google-settlement-from-the-universal-library-to-the-universal-bookstore/
Harvard Crimson article: www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref524989#
The Googlization of Everything blog: www.googlizationofeverything.com/2008/10/my_initial_take_on_the_googlep.php
Speakers at Universal Access Digital Library Summit Call For Action to Protect the Public Domain
At a gathering organized by the Boston Library Consortium, Inc. (BLC) in cooperation with the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, leaders from the academic and research communities voiced concerns about restrictions on use of public domain works that are being scanned for commercial purposes from library collections. The Universal Access Digital Library Summit, held on September 24 and 25 at the Boston Public Library, was framed as a call for new approaches to the digitization of library collections that will unleash their full potential and turn back erosion of the public's rights.
Co-conveners Dr Mark Huddleston, President, University of New Hampshire, Dr Peter Nicholls, Provost, University of Connecticut, and Dr Jack Wilson,President, University of Massachusetts challenged their fellow university and library administrators, educators and public interest advocates to join with the nonprofit world, the government, and business partners to ensure that the fruits of human knowledge and human culture are freely available to people everywhere.
Issues that have emerged as library scanning has scaled up in recent years are laid out in “Free Our Libraries! Why We Need a New Approach to Putting Library Collections Online”, a white paper by Richard K. Johnson, senior advisor to the Association of Research Libraries, that was commissioned by BLC for the summit. Johnson challenges libraries to devise new funding strategies,coordinate their action, and adopt forward-looking principles to guide their digitization. He suggests, “It's time to sort out the right roles and responsibilities for companies, libraries, governments, and private funders and to get about the work of building an Internet public library that puts the public first”.
Speakers contrasted two major digitization projects. The Internet Archive,working in cooperation with the Open Content Alliance, has digitized 500,000 works from library collections at an approximate cost of $30 per volume(or 10 cents/page), making these materials accessible universally. The Google Book Project has digitized at least one million items that are available only through the Google search engine.
Keynote speakers at the event included: Senator Chris Dodd (Connecticut) who transmitted his remarks in a video recording from Washington; Maura Marx,Executive Director of the newly formed Open Knowledge Commons; Dr Robert Darnton, Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor and Director of the University Library, Harvard University; and Siva Vaidhyanathan, Professor Media Studies and Law, University of Virginia. Other speakers included representatives from the Internet Archive, the Google Book Project, HarperCollins, Oxford University Press, Science Commons, Columbia University, American University, NASULGC, and Berkeley Electronic Press.
The BLC, the first large-scale library consortium to self-fund digitization of its member's collections, announced that it has pledged an additional million dollars to the project, bringing the total BLC funding to two million dollars since it began in 2007.
A groundbreaking partnership between two BLC members, the State Library of Massachusetts and the University of Massachusetts Boston's Healy Library, was also announced at the summit. The two libraries will scan and electronically preserve 250,000 pages of Massachusetts state laws from 1620 to the present,making it easier for students, legislators, historians, genealogists, policy researchers and interested citizens to have access to the vast wealth contained in these volumes.
Materials from both BLC projects are being scanned by the Internet Archive (www.archive.org) at the Boston Public Library under the Open Content Alliance Principles (www.opencontentalliance.org/participate.html).
“Free Our Libraries!” white paper: www.blc.org/news/BLC_summit_white_paper_9-29-08.pdf
Major Library Partners Launch HathiTrust Shared Digital Repository
A group of the nation's largest research libraries are collaborating to create a repository of their vast digital collections, including millions of books, organizers announced today. These holdings will be archived and preserved in a single repository called the HathiTrust. Materials in the public domain will be available for reading online.
Launched jointly by the 12-university consortium known as the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC) and the 11 university libraries of the University of California system, the HathiTrust leverages the time-honored commitment to preservation and access to information that university libraries have valued for centuries. UC's participation will be coordinated by the California Digital Library, which brings its deep and innovative experience in digital curation and online scholarship to the HathiTrust.
“This effort combines the expertise and resources of some of the nation's foremost research libraries and holds even greater promise as it seeks to grow beyond the initial partners”, says John Wilkin, associate university librarian of the University of Michigan and the newly named executive director of HathiTrust. Hathi (pronounced hah-tee), the Hindi word for elephant incorporated into the repository's name, underscores the immensity of this undertaking, Wilkin says. Elephants also evoke memory, wisdom, and strength.
As of today, HathiTrust contains more than 2 million volumes and approximately 3/4 of a billion pages, about 16 per cent of which are in the public domain. Public domain materials will be available for reading online. Materials protected by copyright, although not available for reading online, are given the full range of digital archiving services, thereby offering member libraries a reliable means to preserve their collections. Organizers also expect to use those materials in the research and development of the Trust.
Volumes are added to the repository daily, and content will grow rapidly as the University of California, CIC member libraries, and other prospective partners contribute their digitized content. Also today, the founding partners announce that the University of Virginia is joining the initiative.
Each of the founding partners brings extensive and highly regarded expertise in the areas of information technology, digital libraries and project management to this endeavor. Creation of the HathiTrust supports the digitization efforts of the CIC and the University of California, each of which has entered into collective agreements with Google to digitize portions of the collections of their libraries, more than 10 million volumes in total, as part of the Google Book Search project. Materials digitized through other means will also be made available through HathiTrust.
HathiTrust provides libraries a means to archive and provide access to their digital content, whether scanned volumes, special collections or born-digital materials. Preserving materials for the long term has long been a mission and driving force of leading research libraries. Their collections, accumulated over centuries, represent a treasury of cultural heritage and investment in the broad public good of promoting scholarship and advancing knowledge. The representation of these resources in digital form provides expanded opportunities for innovative use in research, teaching and learning, but must be done with careful attention to effective solutions for the curation and long-term preservation of digital assets.
“The CIC Libraries have always worked at a large scale, with big collections, big user communities and high expectations for service. They are not intimidated by big challenges, and will bring their comfort with this to the development of the shared digital repository”, says Mark Sandler, director of the CIC Center for Library Initiatives.
HathiTrust: www.hathitrust.org/
Federal Agencies Collaborate on Guidelines for Digitization
The Library of Congress is among a dozen federal agencies launching an initiative to establish a common set of guidelines for digitizing historical materials. Basing its efforts on a combination of collaborative research and combined experience, the Federal Agencies Digitization Guidelines Initiative will address a variety of issues related to the complex activities involved in the digitization of cultural heritage items.
Two working groups have been formed, one addressing content that can be captured in still images, the other involved with content categorizing sound,video or motion-picture film. The initiative includes a just-launched Web site, www.digitizationguidelines.gov
The Federal Agencies Still Image Digitization Working Group will focus its efforts on content such as books, manuscripts, maps and photographic prints and negatives. Its members include the Library of Congress, the National Agricultural Library, the National Archives and Records Administration, the National Gallery of Art, the National Library of Medicine, the National Technical Information Service, the National Transportation Library, the Smithsonian Institution, the US Geological Survey, and the US Government Printing Office. An Advisory Board of technical experts from industry and academia will also contribute to the initiative.
The Federal Agencies Audio-Visual Working Group, which will address standards and practices for sound, video and motion picture film, includes the Defense Visual Information Directorate of the Department of Defense, the Library of Congress, the National Agricultural Library, the National Archives and Records Administration, the National Library of Medicine, the Smithsonian Institution,the Government Printing Office and the Voice of America.
The agencies began meeting in 2007 to identify common practices for digitizing cultural heritage materials in a sustainable way. Establishing guidelines is expected to increase the quality and consistency of digitized documents and media that are made available to the public, streamline workflows and reduce costs, promote the exchange of research, and encourage collaboration across agencies. The guidelines will also provide common benchmarks for digitization service providers and manufacturers.
The Web site currently features two documents developed by the Still Image Digitization Working Group that are open for comment until mid-November. The first proposes a minimal set of embedded TIFF metadata for use in historical and cultural heritage digital imaging. The second two-part document presents a taxonomy of digital image characteristics and provides corresponding metrics and criteria to describe and validate imaging performance and quality. The Web site also provides a glossary of digitization terms and concepts, and presents digitization-related news and events on the subject from the participating agencies.
This collaborative effort initially formed under the auspices of the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP), a Library of Congress-led program initiated by Congress in December 2000 to develop a national strategy to collect and preserve digital content. For more information on NDIIPP visit www.digitalpreservation.gov.
Federal Agencies Digitization Guidelines Initiative: www.digitizationguidelines.gov/
Permanent Access to the Records of Science in Europe: the PARSE.Insight Project
PARSE.Insight, a two-year project co-funded by the European Union under the Seventh Framework Programme, started its work in March 2008. The project is concerned with the preservation of digital information in science, from primary data through analysis to the final publications resulting from the research. The problem is how to safeguard this valuable digital material over time, to ensure that it is accessible, usable and understandable in future. The rapid pace of change in information technology threatens media, file formats and software with obsolescence, and changing concepts and terminology also mean that, even if data can be read, it might not be correctly interpreted by future generations.
Many initiatives are already under way in this area, and the aim of the PARSE.Insight project is to develop a roadmap and recommendations for developing the e-infrastructure in order to maintain the long-term accessibility and usability of scientific digital information in Europe. The project will conduct surveys and in-depth case studies of different scientific disciplines and stakeholders and will base its results on these findings, as well as knowledge of ongoing developments.
Nine partners from the fields of libraries, research, journalism and politics are working together in PARSE-Insight. Project partners are: Science and Technology Facilities Council, UK (STFC) (Lead), Goettingen State and University Library (UGOE/SUB), Max Planck Society (MPG/MPDL), European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), European Space Agency (ESA/ESRIN), University of Hagen(FUH), International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers(STM), National Library of the Netherlands (KB), and the German National Library(DNB).
PARSE.Insight is closely linked to the Alliance for Permanent Access to the Records of Science. The output from the project is intended to guide the European Commission's strategy about research infrastructure.
Further information: www.parse-insight.eu/
DRIVER and eIFL.net Sign Memorandum of Understanding
DRIVER and eIFL.net – Electronic Information for Libraries – have identified demand for cooperation in order to progress and enhance the provision, visibility and application of European research outputs through digital repositories.
eIFL.net is an international foundation that enables access to knowledge through libraries, supports and advocates for the wide availability of electronic resources in more than fifty transition and developing countries. This global network embraces millions of users in Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe,the former Soviet Union and the Middle East.
DRIVER is a joint initiative of European stakeholders, co-financed by the European Commission, to establish a flexible, robust and scalable infrastructure for all European and world-wide digital repositories, managing scientific information in an Open Access model increasingly demanded by researchers,funding organizations and other stakeholders. DRIVER's mission is to expand its content base, supporting the global research community with high quality research output, including textual research papers and complex forms of scholarly electronic publication.
Rima Kupryte, Director of eIFL.net, said “eIFL.net and DRIVER share the vision that research institutions should contribute actively and cooperatively to a global, interoperable, trusted and long-term data and service infrastructure based on Open Access digital repositories. This agreement includes joint approaches to consolidation of national communities for the European repository network and active joint dissemination of best practices of Open Access scholarly communication in countries and regions without such formal policy”.
Norbert Lossau, Scientific Coordinator of DRIVER and Director of the Goettingen State and University Library commented: “DRIVER can only be successful through collaborating with all relevant stakeholders and by including all countries. eIfL has an excellent track record in supporting developing countries. Cooperation with eIFL will contribute to the joint vision through an established communication network and enthusiastic pioneers in many countries”.
Further information: www.eifl.net/
Infovell Offers Research Engine for the Deep Web
Infovell has announced general availability of its research engine for the Deep Web – the 99 per cent of the internet currently overlooked by conventional search engines. On the heels of a successful company launch at DEMOFall 08 in San Diego in September 2008, Infovell officially lifted the curtain on its research engine for users who preregistered for the service. In addition, Infovell announced that it has reached agreements with several major publishers in the science and medical communities, greatly enhancing the scope of content indexed by Infovell's research engine. Interested individuals who haven't yet signed up for Infovell are invited to sign up for a risk-free 30-day trial at www.infovell.com. Once the trial period expires, those users will have the opportunity to enroll at an early adopter rate of $45 per month.
With something as vast as the Deep Web, sourcing the right information is paramount. To that end, Infovell goes directly to the source of the industry's leading articles, journals and information-rich databases. By partnering with the publishers that create and control access to this valuable information,Infovell is able to reach parts of the Deep Web that other search engines simply cannot access. Infovell has recently added content to its index from a number of major sources, including:
Annual Reviews provides the worldwide scientific community with an expert synthesis of the primary research literature for 37 focused disciplines within the biomedical, life, physical and social sciences. Annual Reviewspublications are among the most highly cited in the scientific literature. Infovell's index of Annual Reviews literature includes articles from 1932 through the present.
BioOne is the product of an innovative collaboration between scientific societies, libraries, academe and the private sector, resulting in a sophisticated collection of core research across the biosciences. Infovell's index of BioOne content provides insight into a uniquely valuable aggregation of the full texts of 155 high-impact bioscience research journals from 113 society publishers.
SAGE Publications is a leading international publisher of journals, books and electronic media for academic, educational and professional markets,spanning a wide range of subject areas including business, science, humanities,social sciences, technology and medicine. SAGE publishes more than 485 journals,including those of more than 245 learned societies and institutions, including the American Journal of Sports Medicine, Angiology and Clinical Pediatrics.
Life Sciences News includes breaking stories in biotechnology,medical research and science from major online news bureaus like The New York Times, Forbes.com, CNN, Financial Times and Reuters, as well as open-access industry websites like Nature, WebMD, Pharmaceutical Online and Genetic Engineering News.
A new section of reference sources includes all of Wikipedia, along with information from government and other public agencies. These include clinical evidence about medical efficacy and safety, clinical guidelines and price information.
Conventional search is adequate for most casual web surfing, but falls short when it comes to mining the Deep Web for highly specialized content. By working directly with publishers of some of the most coveted information within the Deep Web, Infovell is able to uncover content that other engines cannot reach. Using Infovell's KeyPhraseTM algorithm, users will be able to take research to a new level:
Better information: users will have access to the best information from the surface web, all the way down to the Deep Web.
Easier to use: users will no longer have to describe what they are looking for in three words or less. Infovell takes the complications out of writing a query. Start with a few words, or cut and paste an entire article as the query. From there, users click “More Like This” to find all related articles and results.
Faster finding: Infovell comes with tools and features that allow users to sort, filter, share and save their queries and results. They can also accelerate their time to discovery by organizing their results into visual folders or setting up alerts to notify them of new findings.
Infovell's research engine is available now as a premium service for individual researchers and corporations who are seeking more affordable access to expert information. Later this year, Infovell will be beta-releasing a free version of its research engine on a limited basis for those individuals who want to search the Deep Web, but do not have the need for some of the advanced features available in the premium version.
Infovell website: www.infovell.com/
LibLime and OPLIN Develop Ohio Web Library Search
LibLime, a leader in open-source solutions for libraries, and Ohio Public Library Information Network (OPLIN) announced in October 2008 that their Ohio Web Library search has gone live. Ohio Web Library is a collection of online resources and databases (proprietary and open content) accessible to all Ohioans. The Ohio Web Library search provides a fast, user-friendly search interface to the entire collection.
The Ohio Web Library search was developed in-house by OPLIN using Pazpar2, an open-source middleware technology created by LibLime's partner, Index Data. Access to subscription content is provided by OpenTranslators, a new web service offered by LibLime that offers a simple gateway interface to over 9,000 subscription databases.
Responding to focus groups, the goal of Ohio Web Library federated search was to bring the “Google” experience to libraries and their patrons by eliminating the repetitious search process. Ohio Web Library provides a single search interface to all databases, merges and deduplicates the results, and does it all at astounding speeds.
“We investigated several commercial options including WebFeat Express and Google Custom Search Engine (CSE)”, says Stephen. “However,these solutions either did not offer us as much control as we wanted over search result rankings or could not index proprietary databases such as EBSCO which require authentication to access”. OPLIN decided to build their new search solution in-house, using Index Data's open-source Pazpar2 metasearching middleware. Pazpar2 is the driving middleware technology in a growing number of federated search tools including MasterKeyTM, a federated search and discovery system, (http://liblime.com/products/masterkey)and ‡bibliosTM, an open-source cataloging suite (http://biblios.org).
Since not all database vendors use the Z39.50 protocol, OPLIN also contracts with LibLime for OpenTranslators, a hosted web service that provides access to over 9,000 subscription and free content databases as well as Websites. OpenTranslators is an enabling service that makes it easy to build search systems for subscription databases that do not support standards.
OPLIN took advantage of the benefits of open source in their development of Ohio Web Library, including the freedom to customize the software in-house and the ability to contract with developers for additional customizations. OPLIN installed a custom version of the JavaScript that writes the search results to the page for more control over the appearance of the search results page. OPLIN also enlisted customizations which would change the default Pazpar2 JavaScript behavior and allow them to group several related databases into one “category”search (for instance, Health, Careers or Business). They then built a drop-down box on the search page containing these “category” options.
Other in-house customizations include the addition of the Yahoo Spell-checker API and a “searching” status bar to let users know the search is still retrieving results (important since pazpar2 begins returning results instantaneously!). OPLIN uses EZProxy for authentication and has even included a“Librarians:24 × 7” link to Ohio KnowItNow 24/7 reference service (www.knowitknow.org). All of this is aimed at offering Ohio libraries and their patrons a convenient and user-friendly experience. OPLIN plans to continue making adjustments to the site based on librarian feedback.
Ohio Web Library: http://ohioweblibrary.org
LibLime website: http://liblime.com
Pazpar2 information: www.indexdata.dk/pazpar2/
WeKnowIt: Collective Intelligence for Personal, Organizational and Social Use
WeKnowIt is a three-year integrated project with a total budget of 8.054k€being co-financed by the European Commission's Seventh Research Framework Programme. It started on April 1, 2008.
Due to advances in communications, mobile devices, Web technologies and especially Web 2.0 approaches, it is nowadays easy for users and organizations to generate and share content, individually or within communities. However, such digital content rapidly reaches a mass that makes relevant information extremely complex and costly to handle.
The main objective of WeKnowIt is to develop novel techniques for exploiting multiple layers of intelligence from user-contributed content, which together constitute Collective Intelligence, a form of intelligence that emerges from the collaboration and competition among many individuals, and that seemingly has a mind of its own. Currently Web 2.0 methodologies lack such an “Intelligence”layer over existing manually generated information that would enable the exploitation of the knowledge hidden in the user contributed content.
WeKnowIt will demonstrate the wide applicability of its achievements through the elaboration on two distinct case studies: an Emergency Response and a Consumer Social Group case study. The two case studies pertain to different topics, target at a wide range of intended users and involve heterogeneous business models so that WeKnowIt achieves the highest possible social impact.
The project, lead by CERTH (GR), the Centre for Research and Technology Hellas, involves several European institutions and companies: Universität Koblenz-Landau (DE), Lycos Europe GmbH (DE), Motorola Limited (UK), University of Sheffield (UK), University of Karlsruhe (DE), Vodafone Panafon, Hellenic Telecommunications Company S.A. (GR), Software Mind Sp. (PL), The Sheffield City Council (UK) and Brno University of Technology (CZ).
For more information: www.weknowit.eu/
IBM Creates Center for Social Software
IBM announced in September 2008 the creation of the IBM Center for Social Software, bringing together the brightest minds from IBM to work with clients,partners, university students and faculty, creating a premier industry incubator for the research, development and testing of social software. The IBM Center is an example of Tomorrow at Work, an IBM initiative that examines a changing work world and anticipates trends in technology, business, society and culture. The Center will be located in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
The ability to form and interact within a community is becoming increasingly important as internet-based technologies make their way into corporate environments and companies seek to collaborate more with their customers,partners and employees. The goal of the IBM Center is to create a new type of collaborative environment to tackle some of the toughest questions about social software, identify new business models, help discover next-generation Web 2.0 applications, and determine how and why people form viral communities and the implications they have on our daily lives.
Dow Jones and the Healthcare business of Thomson Reuters are the first companies that intend to participate in the Center's Corporate Residency program. The goal of this program is to make IBM's expertise more accessible than ever before, giving businesses hands-on availability to IBM's research pipeline. Selected participating organizations can send employees to the IBM Center to be matched with a team of IBM researchers to work on specific social computing projects, testing out new ideas and helping to solve key collaboration challenges within their organizations.
Additionally, IBM intends to collaborate with members of the academic,scientific and biotechnology communities around the world. IBM intends to share the findings of the research with local universities and the IT community on the use of social software systems.
The goals of the facility are to:
Explore, innovate and commercialize best practices in social networking.
Work with forward-thinking businesses to pilot and customize enterprise social networks unique to their industry profile.
Create jointly funded research collaborations with government, academia,industry and venture capital participation.
Design the future of IBM's Web 2.0 collaboration portfolio, including social discovery, social search and new scalable architectures for social software including cloud computing.
Further social software governance: formal policies encouraging or constraining the uses of social networking in organizations.
Develop the science of social software: quantifying social networking.
Explore cultural differences in the use of social software.
Researchers from IBM's Research labs in Cambridge, Mass., New York, San Jose,Haifa, Israel, Tokyo, and Beijing, as well as experts from across IBM may participate in a special visiting scientist program, enabling IBM employees from across the globe to rotate into the Center to work on specific projects.
More information on the IBM Center for Social Software: www.research.ibm.com/social
Harbinger Group Releases TeemingPod
In September 2008 Harbinger Knowledge Products unveiled TeemingPod, a platform for embedded social interactions. For Web developers, TeemingPod provides a platform that helps build social interactions right inside their web applications or web sites. For users, TeemingPod provides a small place on any Web page to get together and to interact on-the-spot, while staying on the page. It enables users to poll, debate, question, leave links and search.
TeemingPod is the sequel to FlockPod, Harbinger's earlier product for building on-the-spot social interactions. TeemingPod includes all the features of FlockPod, and adds flexibility as well as new features which help build powerful social interactions.
TeemingPod developers can easily customize the pod user interface. Users can view TeemingPod in three different orientations. Depending on how much screen space users need for their interactions, they can display TeemingPod in several sizes from a thumbnail to a full screen. Users access TeemingPod from any web page by simply installing a TeemingPod browser extension. With TeemingPod's search feature, users can search for content inside a specific activity or across activities in a pod. Search results provide convenient jump-off points to get directly into the activity where search content is found.
“With this release, FlockPod customers will be migrated to TeemingPod. This allows them to take advantage of the extensibility, configurability,powerful search and browser extension features in the new product at no extra cost”, said Seema Chaudhary, Director – Business Development.“TeemingPod also extends FlockPod language support to several languages in addition to English”.
TeemingPod is provided as a software subscription service.
TeemingPod Product Information: www.teemingpod.com
Harbinger Group website: www.harbingergroup.com
OverDrive Now Provides Digital Audiobook Support for Zune Player
OverDrive, a global digital distributor of download audiobooks, eBooks, and more to libraries, schools and retailers, announced in September 2008 digital audiobook support for Microsoft's Zune digital media player with the OverDrive Media Console v3.1 release. This makes OverDrive's library download platform the only service compatible with Zune's 3.0 firmware and virtually all MP3 players including iPod® and Creative devices. Users from more than 8,500 OverDrive partner libraries can now transfer both DRM-protected OverDrive WMA Audiobooks and DRM-free OverDrive MP3 Audiobooks to their Zune players. OverDrive Media Console v3.1 can be downloaded for free at www.overdrive.com/software/omc/download.asp.
OverDrive's support for Zune comes on the heels of the digital media player's recent 3.0 firmware update, which opened the device to download audiobooks from public libraries for the first time. The new Zune firmware also creates a visually-stunning, personal listening experience, with the intuitive Mixview feature, an FM radio tuner with “Buy from FM” functionality, and WiFi purchasing capabilities through Zune Marketplace.
The OverDrive Media Console organizes and plays audiobook downloads from libraries, schools and retailers. Other top features available in the OverDrive Media Console v3.1 release include direct transfer support for hundreds of media players, a built-in Burn Wizard for creating audio CDs for titles with burn permissions, support for the iPod-compatible OverDrive MP3 Audiobook format,MediaMarkerTM navigation with bookmarking features, and CD-length Parts for easy downloading.
More information: www.overdrive.com
Plastic Logic Previews New Ebook Reader
Current products in the electronic reader industry focus on leisure reading and ignore a large and untapped market: business users. In September 2008, at the DEMOfall 08 technology conference, Plastic Logic previewed a new device designed to easily combine business information with powerful business productivity tools. Core to the Plastic Logic product is its plastic electronics display technology.
Plastic Logic's display technology, first developed at Cambridge University,uses high resolution transistor arrays on flexible plastic substrates,manufactured at a low temperature. The promise of plastic electronics is to disintermediate the traditional silicon based semiconductor industry with components and products that are lighter, less expensive and more environmentally friendly.
Differentiated by a form factor (the size of 8.5 × 11-inch paper), the Plastic Logic reader features a big readable display. However, it is thinner than a pad of paper, lighter than many business periodicals, and offers a high-quality reading experience. “Research confirms professionals read much more business content than recreational content. They require access to all formats of digital content at their fingertips, and want a large readable screen”,said Plastic Logic CEO Richard Archuleta.
The Plastic Logic reader supports a full range of business document formats,such as Microsoft Word, Excel and Powerpoint, and Adobe PDFs, as well as newspapers, periodicals and books. It has a gesture-based user interface and powerful software tools that will help business users to organize and manage their information. Users can connect to their information either wired or wirelessly and store thousands of documents on the device. The reader incorporates E Ink technology for great readability and features low power consumption and long battery life. The Plastic Logic reader is scheduled to ship in the first half of 2009.
Plastic Logic website: www.plasticlogic.com
Springer Launches MyCopy
Springer Science + Business Media is launching MyCopy, a pilot project to expand its services to eBook users. MyCopy allows a library's registered patrons to order softcover copies, for their personal use, of those Springer eBooks that the library has purchased. Library patrons can order the titles they want by clicking on the MyCopy button on SpringerLink. Initially more than 20 selected libraries and other research institutions in the USA and Canada will take part in the pilot project, and orders can be placed from November 2008.
The MyCopy offer is currently valid for more than 11,000 electronic Springer books published since 2005. The cover of the book will be printed in color,while the book content itself will be in black and white. MyCopy books can only be ordered by registered patrons at libraries. The order and shipping process will be handled by Springer in cooperation with the print-on-demand provider. All books will be sold at the same price, USD 24.95. This price includes shipping and handling within the USA and Canada.
“Springer is well known for providing users with content in the format they like most, and MyCopy is yet another example of how we are making our eBook packages even more attractive for the science and research communities”,explained Dr Olaf Ernst, President eProduct Management & Innovation at Springer. “In addition to rapid access to electronic content, MyCopy provides library patrons with the option of buying a more basic, printed copy of their preferred titles at an attractive price. After the trial phase has been completed, we will evaluate the data and decide on extending this offer”.
Springer website: www.springer-sbm.com/
Springer Releases End User Ebooks Survey White Paper
A survey conducted by Springer Science + Business Media, in conjunction with five leading academic institutions, highlights prominent research and academic usage of eBooks. The survey was conducted to better understand the adoption of eBooks, the use of eBooks, and user perception of eBook advantages and disadvantages.
The new survey revealed that, despite the recent emergence of eBooks, most users were already aware of their existence and had used them at least once,whether through libraries or other sources. The study also found that most users access eBooks for research and study purposes and that the types of eBooks frequently used were reference works and textbooks. The survey also focused on some of the perceived advantages of eBooks, citing the ability to gain 24/7 access for multiple users, convenient full-text searchability, and easy access to information. However, difficulty of reading books from a screen and preference for traditional print books were cited as the primary disadvantages.
Participating university libraries included: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; University of Turku, Finland; Centre for Mathematics and Computer Science (CWI) Amsterdam, the Netherlands; University of Muenster,Germany; and the JRD Tata Memorial Library, Indian Institute of Science,Bangalore, India.
“Mostly the advantage of using eBooks would be their convenience”,said a user at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “Instead of going through the hassle of tracking down a specific work and checking it out,eBooks provide me with easy access to the information I need way at my own convenience and leisure”.
Added Olaf Ernst, President eProduct Management and Innovation, Springer,“The survey results show that eBooks are best suited for research purposes or in a search environment. eBooks have the potential to stimulate new forms of book content usage. The feedback provided in this survey can help us accommodate their needs as their eBook collections grow”.
The full-text PDF of the white paper, “eBooks – The End User Perspective” can be found at: www.springer.com/ebooks
White Paper (pdf): www.springer.com/cda/content/document/cda_downloaddocument/eBooks+-+the+End+User+Experience?SGWID=0-0-45-608298-0
OverDrive Experiences Working with EPUB Standard
OverDrive will joined Sony Reader, Random House UK, and the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF) to present initial experiences with EPUB eBook distribution at the Frankfurt Book Fair in October 2008. The session titled“Digital Publishing and the EPUB Standard” was part of the Frankfurt Book Fair Digital Lunch program.
As a 20-year veteran of the eBook marketplace and early advocate of the EPUB format, OverDrive brought its unique perspective of working with publishers,booksellers, end users and hardware and software developers to the panel. OverDrive is the first distributor to provide EPUB eBook fulfillment services for online retailers including Waterstone's (www.waterstones.com), WHSmith Online (www.whsmith.co.uk),Books on Board (www.booksonboard.com), A1Books (www.a1books.co.in),and others. OverDrive also expects to offer EPUB eBooks to its network of more than 8,500 public libraries in the near future.
EPUB is a reflowable, XML-based format for eBooks and other digital publications developed by IDPF (www.idpf.org) and adopted by leading publishers and technology firms as the industry standard. OverDrive will release a white paper on preparing and distributing EPUB titles and optimizing files for the Sony Reader Digital Book later this month. Publishers can send requests for the EPUB white paper to EPUB@overdrive.com.
OverDrive is distributing eBooks in the EPUB format for some of the largest trade publishers including Simon & Schuster, Hachette Livre,HarperCollins, Harlequin Mills & Boon, Penguin Group, Random House,Summersdale Publishers, Macmillan Publishers, Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, Taylor & Francis, Faber & Faber and Bloomsbury Publishers. “The launch of Adobe Digital Editions and the Sony Reader Digital Book with EPUB-reading capabilities provide great opportunities for participating in the digital marketplace”, said Steve Potash, president and CEO of OverDrive.
OverDrive provides digital download distribution for hundreds of publishers and e-retail solutions for Borders.com, eFollett.com, Papyless (Japan), hundreds of college bookstores and other online retailers. It is the co-developer and operator of ADEPT, the hosted application service designed to protect digital publications, including those in the EPUB format, for use with Adobe Digital Editions. OverDrive is also a strategic partner to Microsoft (including Microsoft Reader eBook distribution), Mobipocket, and other leading technology firms. OverDrive also powers download media catalogs at thousands of libraries worldwide, including institutions in New York, Singapore, Boston and Toronto.
Video from Frankfurt Book Fair: www.book-fair.com/en/company/press_pr/newsletter/daily/review/00850/index.html
EPUB information: www.idpf.org/
Overdrive website: www.overdrive.com
AAUP Partners with Tizra to Facilitate E-Publishing
In September 2008 the Association of American University Presses (AAUP)announced a new cooperative venture with Tizra, Inc., an e-publishing service provider. Through this agreement, AAUP members will be eligible for discounted access to the Tizra Publisher platform. The Tizra Publisher platform is a flexible, web-based application for distributing and selling electronic books and similar content. Publishers signing up for the service will get their own customized ebook websites, and retain complete control over the presentation,organization and sales terms of their content through an easy-to-use web control panel. MIT Press recently launched an ebook site providing an example of the capabilities at http://cisnet.mit.edu.
“It is part of AAUP's strategic mission to help our members move more of their content online, where university press authors and readers are increasingly looking to find them”, says AAUP Executive Director Peter Givler. “The Tizra Publisher platform has been garnering interest from our membership, and we're very excited to be offering this program to make the service accessible to a wide range of presses”, added Brenna McLaughlin,AAUP Electronic and Strategic Initiatives Director. “Tizra's service is affordable for small presses, and scales to handle large content collections and extensive customization, meeting the range of needs of our AAUP membership”.
The AAUP-Tizra discount program is particularly well-suited to presses with staff who are taking on more responsibilities as they balance print and electronic format publishing. “AAUP presses are exactly the kinds of organizations we designed Tizra Publisher to help”, said Tizra CEO David Durand. “They have great content and great marketing ideas but often lack the technical resources we provide to build a successful ebook program”.
The non-exclusive agreement between AAUP and Tizra provides discounted subscription rates at all product tiers to AAUP members, modest revenue back to the association, and the opportunity for presses of any size to move into the electronic sale and delivery of content collections with very little technology expertise needed.
Tizra website: http://tizra.com
AAUP website: www.aaupnet.org
Transfer Code of Practice Version 2.0 Released
The UK Serials Group (UKSG) has announced that following extensive consultation Version 2.0 of the Transfer Code of Practice has been released.
The TRANSFER Code of Practice responds to the expressed needs of the scholarly journal community for consistent guidelines to help publishers ensure that journal content remains easily accessible by librarians and readers when there is a transfer between parties, and to ensure that the transfer process occurs with minimum disruption. Publishers are being asked to publicly endorse and follow the Code of Practice which is a set of voluntary “best practices” for the industry. Assuming the Code of Practice succeeds in gaining broad acceptance, the TRANSFER Working Group will consider some next steps, which may include establishing a more formal international committee composed of librarians, publishers, societies, agents and other interested parties. The committee could consider such issues as:
The development of guidelines for publishers on practical aspects of implementing the Code of Practice.
The development of a simple TRANSFER Alerting Service to provide a central location for publishers to register basic details of transfers that would be openly available to libraries and other interested parties.
The development of policies and procedures for ongoing oversight of the Code, conducting periodic reviews of the effectiveness of the Code and considering future revisions to the Code.
The Code and any policies and procedures developed around the Code will be guided by openness and fairness and will be to the benefit of libraries,readers, users and other consumers. With the release of the publishers are being asked to sign up to the Code by emailing marketing@uksg.org and stating that they endorse the Code. Publishers endorsing the Code will be listed on the Publisher Endorsement page at: www.uksg.org/Transfer/Transfer_Publishers
Transfer Code of Practice ver. 2.0: www.uksg.org/Transfer/Code
Tech Static Technology Book Review Site
It was announced in October 2008 that The Tech Static, a new technology book review outlet for librarians would be launching in November. The reviews are intended to assist (primarily public and academic) libraries with collection development in this area.
The Tech Static's creator, Rachel Singer Gordon, wrote Library Journal's“Computer Media” review column from 2002 until it was retired in October 2008. She launched The Tech Static to fill the resulting gap in the library literature; few library-oriented publications currently review computer books.
The Tech Static is focused on technology-related collection development in libraries. To this end, it contains:
(1) Reviews of current computer books.
(2) Reviews of technology-related titles targeted at librarians.
(3) Collection development articles (weeding, “must-haves”,balancing a computer book collection).
(4) Prepublication alerts.
(5) Publisher press releases.
(6) DVD and ebook reviews.
The Tech Static: www.thetechstatic.com
eXtensible Catalog Project Launches New Website
The eXtensible Catalog (XC) Project launched a new website at: www.extensiblecatalog.org/. This new website will be the main vehicle for distributing the open-source software once it is released in 2009. In the mean time, the website contains a wealth of information regarding the project, including publications, an overview of the software being developed and the technologies that software will use, and a blog that has already been in use.
The XC Project is working to design and develop a set of open-source applications that will provide libraries with an alternative way to reveal their collections to library users. XC will provide easy access to all resources (both digital and physical collections) across a variety of databases, metadata schemas and standards, and will enable library content to be revealed through other services that libraries may already be using, such as content management systems and learning management systems. XC will also make library collections more web-accessible by revealing them through web search engines.
Since XC software will be open source, it will be available for download at no cost. Libraries will be able to adopt, customize and extend the software to meet local needs. In addition, a not-for-profit organization will be formed to provide the infrastructure to incorporate community contributions to the code base, encourage collaboration and provide maintenance and upgrades.
The project is hosted at the University of Rochester and funded through a generous grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Scholarly Communications Program as well as through significant contributions from and in collaboration with XC partner institutions. The project is in a design and development phase until July 2009, at which point the software will be released under an open-source license.
XC project: www.extensiblecatalog.org
Library Students to Get “Leading-Edge” Training Thanks to IMLS Grant
A newly funded project is expected to advance the way educators train students to become librarians and information professionals.
The University of Arizona's School of Information Resources and Library Science has received a three-year grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services that will allow for a more hands-on approach to teaching and learning digital library technologies.
The grant, totaling nearly $540,000, with a matching award of about$328,000, made the UA's school the only institution in the state of Arizona to receive an award from the federal agency's National Leadership Grants for Libraries. The grant becomes effective October 1.
The project, “Improving Student Learning of Advanced Digital Technologies in an Online Laboratory: A Research Approach” is meant to bring to the classroom the type of learning that students would have had to seek out in an internship. “This project as a whole is fairly unique –it's primarily because of the approach to authentic instruction and hands-on learning as a way of introducing the discipline to students”, said Bruce Fulton, the school's digital project librarian.
The project is an indication of the field's movement toward data management and more complex research in a data-driven world. “One of the things we have is a mandate in both our certificate and master's programs to teach students how to use digital content technology to build digital libraries and to manage them. That's the new role of libraries”, said Jana Bradley,director of the school, also known as SIRLS.
The UA school's partners are the UA Libraries, UA University Information and Technology Services, the Harvard University Herbaria and the Missouri Botanical Gardens. Each of the partner institutions will provide SIRLS with information that then will be recorded and catalogued, then developed into databases– with SIRLS students responsible for these tasks. So, instead of simply having Web sites that simulate the work they would be doing as professionals,the students will have the actual software and other tools to perform more complex work.
SIRLS will use VMWare Lab Manager software as the program's platform to build a virtual online laboratory. “This grant gives us the infrastructure we need to really let us create practical and realistic exercises for students”,said Peter Botticelli, an assistant professor of practice at the school, also the co-principal investigator on the grant. “They will be mimicking the tasks they would see in a library setting”, he said. “It gets beyond the theory and is merging theory and practice”.
Simultaneously, SIRLS will study the effectiveness of the technologies used and how well students are learning in the applied format.
University of Arizona's School of Information Resources and Library Science: http://sirls.arizona.edu/
Library of Congress Releases Legislative Handles
Legislative Handles are a new persistent uniform resource locator (URL)service for creating links to US legislative documents from the THOMAS web site(http://thomas.loc.gov). With a simple syntax, Legislative Handles make it easy to type in legislative links to bibliographies, reference guides, emails, blogs or web pages. Legislative Handles, for instance, http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.uscongress/legislation.110hconres196,are a convenient way to cite legislation.
Handles are web addresses that do not change over time. The goal of the Handles project is to minimize the impact of any future search engine or database changes by providing persistent predictable links. Handles are an additional way to access legislation. The current link structure for THOMAS has not changed.
A Handle is a form of uniform resource identifier that resolves to a URL. As a stable pointer, the Handle will not change even if the underlying URL changes over time or the object moves to a new directory. The Global Handle Registry(TM) is run by CNRI (Corporation for National Research Initiatives), making it possible to resolve Handles from any computer on any network. The actual page URL, not the Handle, is shown in the browser address bar when the page is displayed.
Handles are being introduced in stages and currently apply only to legislation in the Bill Summary and Status database from the 93rd to the current Congress.
Legislative Handles Help Page: http://thomas.loc.gov/home/handles/help.html
