New & noteworthy
Ex Libris and Endeavor to Merge
Francisco Partners, one of the world's largest technology-focused private equity funds, announced in late November 2006 that it has entered into a definitive agreement with Elsevier for the acquisition of 100 per cent of the shares of Endeavor Information Systems, Inc., an Elsevier company. Endeavor will be merged with Ex Libris, which was acquired by Francisco Partners earlier this year. The combined entity will be a leading force in the library software and services marketplace and will retain the Ex Libris Group name and be headed by Matti Shem Tov, president and chief executive officer of Ex Libris.
The acquisition of Endeavor will establish the new Ex Libris Group and its portfolio of library systems and services as the clear choice for libraries seeking proven solutions that are both forward looking and cost effective. In the coming years, the company will continue the development and support of flagship integrated library systems from both companies, Ex Libris ALEPH 500 and Endeavor's Voyager. New versions of both systems will be released as planned in 2007. The Ex Libris and Endeavor management teams will be working closely over the coming weeks, in consultation with industry leaders and customers, to complete the roadmap for the combined product portfolio.
Together, the Ex Libris and Endeavor customer communities include nine of the top ten universities in the world and 39 of the top 50, according to Newsweek International Edition ("The Top 100 Global Universities"); 25 national libraries; and five of the six largest libraries in the world.
Andrew Gray, a principal with Francisco Partners, commented, "Ex Libris and Endeavor are natural partners. With joined forces, the Ex Libris Group will carry on the two companies' longstanding tradition of collaborating with libraries and industry stakeholders to establish industry standards and will continue to deliver solutions that best serve the needs of libraries,information centers, and researchers."
The full press release and an FAQ document with more details are available from both the Ex Libris and Endeavor websites.
Ex Libris website: www.exlibrisgroup.com/
Endeavor website: http://endinfosys.com/
Francisco Partners: www.franciscopartners.com/master.php
Blog-Based OPAC Wins Mellon Award for Innovative Search Software for Libraries
Casey Bisson, information architect for Plymouth State University's Lamson Library, has received the prestigious Mellon Award for Technology Collaboration for development of WPopac, an innovative online public access catalog system inside the framework of WordPress, the popular blog management application. WPopac allows any library to make its online catalog interactive, by turning each library record into a blog page onto which users can post their own comments and content. The Award Committee noted WPopac's ability to enable online library access in libraries of any size, as well as the project's potential to engage patrons more deeply and interactively with libraries and their offerings. Plymouth State plans to use the award of $50,000 to purchase catalog content from the Library of Congress and make it freely available to all, thereby eliminating a substantial cost barrier to the online publication of catalogs by small libraries.
The award was presented at a ceremony hosted by the Mellon Foundation on Monday, December 4 at the fall meeting of the Coalition for Networked Information, in Washington, D.C. Bisson's project was selected as one of only ten recipients out of several hundred nominees for 2006, the first year the MATC awards have been granted. The decision was made by an all-star panel that included Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, and Mitchell Baker, CEO of the Mozilla Foundation.
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation supports the thoughtful application of information technology to a wide range of scholarly purposes, including developing digital technologies to enhance research, teaching, and distance learning, and new technical approaches to archiving text and multimedia materials. Christopher Mackie, program officer for the Mellon Foundation's Research in Information Technology section, was pleased with how well WPopac fits the foundation's criteria.
"The award committee was particularly excited by the way WPopac makes library patrons more active participants in their library experience",Mackie said. "By allowing patrons to add information to library records online, the software allows the community to work together to make their library resources more informative and more valuable. When you couple this with the reduced costs of access that WPopac permits, and the enthusiasm with which it has been received by librarians and patrons alike, the committee judged the project to have a truly revolutionary potential."
"For years we've been talking about the digital divide in terms of access, and we've been working hard to put computers and networks into every school and library", Bisson said. "But those same libraries, and their communities, are invisible to people online. If libraries are to be more than study halls in the Internet age, if they are to continue their role as centers of knowledge in every community, they need to be findable and available online. They need the tools to represent their collections, their services, and the unique history of their communities online. That's what WPopac does."
Lamson Library WPopac catalog: www.plymouth.edu/library/opac/
WPopac Web log: http://wpopac.blogs.plymouth.edu/
Cornell and Penn State Release Digital Publishing System
Cornell University Library and Penn State University Libraries and Press have announced the release of new electronic publishing software that will expand opportunities for creative communications among scholars worldwide. Digital Publishing System (DPubS) supports change in scholarly publishing by giving academic libraries and their partners the means to organize and disseminate scholarly communications electronically.
Funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, DPubS was developed by the academic library community for libraries and not-for-profit publishers. As libraries move into scholarly publishing and the dominant publishing model becomes electronic, DPubS provides a powerful and flexible platform for the delivery of journals, conference proceedings, and books. DPubS will help libraries build publishing programs and manage the dissemination of an expanding number of scholarly publications.
DPubS is uniquely customizable. It is based on an open-services architecture that lends itself well to enhancements and extensions made by an open-source community. It comes ready to publish journals, conference proceedings, and books, and can be configured to deliver and accept content in virtually any format. In addition, the software system includes administrative management tools for non-technical staff and supports both open-access and subscription-based publications. Future releases of DPubS will add editorial management tools to assist in the peer review process.
DPubS is written in Perl, runs on Solaris and Linux systems, and uses commonly available open-source software. The system has a flexible XML/XSLT driven user interface, allowing easy customization of a publication's Web presence, and it is OAI-PMH 2.0 compatible. If desired, DPubS can utilize Fedora as an underlying repository. Similar support for DSpace is being investigated.
Some examples of DPubS-supported publications include Cornell's Project Euclid (projecteuclid.org); Medieval Philosophy and Theology, formerly published by the Cambridge University Press (cip.cornell.edu/mpat); Indonesia,published by Cornell University's Southeast Asia Program (cip.library.cornell.edu/Indonesia);and Pennsylvania History, published by Penn State University (dpubs.libraries.psu.edu).
DPubS is now available free for download at: http://dpubs.org/
Empowering Libraries through Open Source Solutions: Launch of Eifl OSS Program
On 29-30 October 2006, the Electronic Information for Libraries (eIFL.net) international foundation hosted an international gathering of software developers, information access advocates and library representatives at the picturesque monastery of Eremo delle Grotte dei Frati Bianchi in the eastern Italian province of Ancona. Welcomed by the Mayor of Cupramontana to "create a new beginning in a place of quiet reflection",the purpose was to launch a new eIFL.net program to foster the use of Open Source Software (OSS) solutions for libraries.
"Open Source is all about empowerment", said Art Rhyno, a Systems Librarian at the University of Windsor and author of a book on OSS and a report for eIFL in 2005. "This is not about dropping packaged solutions into resource poor regions, this is about giving people the tools and training to create their own solutions at the local level", continued Rhyno. An immediate area of focus is the Integrated Library System (ILS), typically the biggest technology expense in a library budget and identified by eIFL members as a priority for new solutions. "The ILS is a huge drain on a library's resources", said Tigran Zargaryan, eIFL country representative for Armenia and Head of the Automation Department at Yerevan State University Library. "More flexible options for ILS will go a long way towards enabling libraries in eIFL countries to offer more services and make a greater impact on the communities they serve."
Erik Hatcher, author and a leading developer on Lucene, one of the world's premier search engine technologies, attended the Cupramontana meeting. "OSS represents the state-of-the-art in Information Retrieval systems", said Hatcher. "Libraries can put together systems in ways that were not possible before and the use of Open Source by libraries represents a perfect partnership of software and organizations that serve the common good", he continued. Marek Tuszynski, co-founder and partner of Tactical Technical Collective (TTC),best captured the spirit of the eIFL initiative in describing how TTC distribute OSS in packaged CD collections and organize regional training workshops for non-profits in developing and transition countries. It is envisaged that eIFL will model its OSS activities on the innovative and successful approaches developed by TTC.
The first step is to finalize membership of an eIFL OSS Advisory Board. This will be taken forward by Tigran Zargaryan and Bess Sadler, a librarian and software developer for the University of Virginia library, who will prepare revised Terms of Reference and will work with eIFL to identify potential partners. Sadler, who has worked as an international observer and has experience developing software and technical solutions for indigenous groups in Canada and Latin America, points to the historical role of libraries as a source of knowledge and empowerment. "Access to information is vital for any kind of positive change in society. Libraries do a good job of ensuring this access. Our role is to support libraries in eIFL member countries, so that a lack of financial resources need not mean a lack of available knowledge."
Further information: www.eifl.net/
Web Harvesting and Curation Open Source Software Released
On 22 September 2006, The National Library of New Zealand and The British Library announced the release of the Web Curator Tool as an open-source project. The tool, and its manuals, FAQs, mailing lists, source code, developer documentation, and other information, including a presentation, are available at http://webcurator.sf.net/.
The Web Curator Tool is a tool for managing the selective web harvesting process. It is designed for non-technical users in libraries and other collecting institutions who need to capture web material for archival purposes. The tool's workflow encompasses the following tasks:
Harvest authorization: seeking and recording permission to harvest web material, and to make it accessible to the general public.
Selection and scoping: determining what material should be harvested, be it a web site, a web page, a partial web site, a group (or collection) of web sites, or any combination of these.
Scheduling: determining when a harvest should occur, and when it should be repeated.
Description: describing harvests with basic Dublin Core metadata, and other specialized fields (or a by a providing a reference to an external catalogue).
Harvesting: the Web Curator Tool will download the selected web material at the appointed time using the Internet Archive's Heritrix web crawler – each installation can have multiple harvesters on different machines, each which can perform several harvests simultaneously.
Quality Review: tools are provided for making sure the harvest worked as expected, and correcting simple harvest errors.
Endorsing and submitting: if the harvest was a success, it is endorsed then submitted to an external digital archive.
The Web Curator Tool Project was a joint project undertaken by National Library of New Zealand and the British Library and working with standards emerging from under the auspices of the International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC). The software was built by Sytec Resources Ltd. in New Zealand. Each partner provided around half the funding and contributed personnel to the project team and the test teams. Other IIPC member organizations provided invaluable assistance along the way, particularly the National Library of Australia (procurement and design) and the Library of Congress (requirements and specifications).
Technical details: The Web Curator Tool is designed to run in an enterprise setting, and would normally be installed by a system administrator (it is not a desktop application). Users access the software through a standard web browser. It requires Java (version 1.5), Apache Tomcat (version 5.5), a relational database, an external archive and/or access tool (such as WERA or Wayback), and(optionally) an LDAP directory for user authentication. The software is tested on Solaris (version 9) and Red Hat Linux. It has been installed and run on Windows and on Debian Linux, and should work on any platform that supports Apache Tomcat. The Oracle and PostgreSQL databases are officially supported (by testing and installation scripts), MySQL has been used, and any database that Hibernate supports (including MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, and about 20 others)should be compatible.
The Web Curator Tool is Free Software, distributed under the terms of the Apache Public License (version 2.0). It incorporates parts or all of several other Free Software packages, including Acegi Security System, Apache Axis,Apache Commons Logging, Heritrix (version 1.8), Hibernate (database connectivity), Quartz (scheduling), Spring Application Framework, and Wayback(version 0.6).
Website: http://webcurator.sf.net/
CDL Melvyl Recommender Project Concludes
Steve Toub of the California Digital Library posted the announcement on 27 October 2006 that the Melvyl Recommender Project, which explored next-generation services for library catalogs, has reached its conclusion. This project was funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Popular commercial services such as Google, eBay, Amazon, and Netflix have evolved quickly over the last decade to help people find what they want,developing information retrieval strategies such as usefully ranked results,spelling correction, and recommendations. Library catalogs, in contrast, have changed little and are not well equipped to meet changing needs and expectations.
The Melvyl Recommender Project explored methods and feasibility of closing this gap. An additional extension project to the Melvyl Recommender Project carried out deeper explorations into the most interesting and promising questions raised during the original project, and to add obvious missing pieces of functionality. The principal area of investigation was the impact of adding full-text objects to what had previously been a metadata-only index.
Overall findings from both portions of the project include:
The text-based discovery application, the eXtensible Text Framework (XTF)that was the backbone of the project's system (known as "Relvyl") proved capable of scaling to millions of records and hundreds of concurrent users,indicating that this is an approach worth pursuing for providing ranking,recommendation and other types of functionality with an online catalog.
Use of an index based single word spelling correction algorithm addressed 90 per cent of misspelled single words.
Initial examination of faceted browsing and FRBR-like document groups indicated that each of these features could substantially improve the patron's experience of working with large result sets.
User assessment confirmed that users prefer relevance ranked results over unranked results, although more investigation is required to determine whether content-based ranking with or without different types of weights (based on circulation or holdings) is more effective.
Two types of recommendation strategies were explored: circulation- based ("patrons who checked this out also checked out…") and text- similarity ("More like this…"). User assessment was conducted against the first type and showed that users like getting recommendations, which are useful for performing academic tasks, and they can also serve a unique query expansion function.
Adjustments to keyword searching strategies, document scoring and the index-based spelling correction dictionary allowed for an effective combination of full-text and metadata only records into one system, in which neither type of record was privileged.
Much of the functionality explored in both phases of the project can be found in the Relvyl prototype.
More information about the entire project can be found on the CDL website.
Melvyl Recommender Project: www.cdlib.org/inside/projects/melvyl_recommender/
CDL website: www.cdlib.org/
CrossRef Initiatives AnnouncedExtension of CrossRef Web Services
New OAI-PMH interface, and partnerships with Scirus and EMBL-EBI
CrossRef, the reference linking network for scholarly publishing, announced in November 2006 the release of an Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) interface to its Web Services metadata distribution program. In addition, it announced that it had recently signed both Scirus and the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) as new Cross Ref Web Services CWS partners.
CWS is a suite of tools to enable authorized partners to collect metadata on a widespread, cross-publisher basis, potentially covering up to 23 million metadata records now included in CrossRef. CWS was developed earlier this year to standardize how published content is crawled, indexed, and linked to on the Web. Participation by CrossRef member publishers is optional.
CrossRef's new OAI-PMH repository interface will serve as the central point for the distribution of metadata from participating publishers. The service utilizes a robust and widely adopted technology targeted at consumers of large quantities of metadata (for more information, see www.openarchives.org); access to the CrossRef's metadata repository is controlled by IP authentication and can be tailored to provide specific content from select publishers to each authorized recipient.
In partnering with Scirus (www.scirus.com),Elsevier's free, science-specific search engine, CrossRef will allow Scirus to collect metadata from hundreds of participating publishers in order to give researchers, academics, students, and librarians enhanced searchability over authoritative, scientific published content.
EMBL-EBI (www.embl.org), a center for research and services in bioinformatics, intends to use the CrossRef metadata to systematically look up Digital Object Identifies (DOIs) for the purpose of displaying them alongside bibliographic references in its various databases and utilities, which aim to aid the scientific community in the understanding of genomic and proteomic data.
Simple-text query service officially launches
In October 2006, CrossRef announced the launch of its freely available Simple-Text Query service to facilitate DOI look-up for researchers and publishers. In partnership with Inera, CrossRef has deployed a custom version of Inera's eXtyles refXpress that parses unstructured, simple-text references into granular and valid XML and returns any matching DOIs for those references. The interface has been running on a more limited, trial basis since February of this year.
The link to the Simple-Text Query service is featured on CrossRef's homepage. A simple cut-and-paste form accepts references formatted in a wide range of bibliographic styles and returns the DOI for the publication if one is found in CrossRef. One or more references may be pasted into the form on this page. For editorial purposes, users can easily check the accuracy of a reference by clicking on the returned DOI and viewing the bibliographic information available directly from the publisher.
In addition to serving researchers who wish to check references and add DOIs prior to publication, many smaller publishers experience this interface as a viable alternative to CrossRef's XML-based batch query interface. The member-only version of the service will soon include a file-upload capability as well.
Since 1992, Inera (www.inera.com) has focused on supplying sophisticated editorial and production solutions to the publishing industry. Inera's eXtyles product family provides integrated tools for Microsoft Word and content management systems that automate editorial,reference linking, and XML production processes. eXtyles products are used in the production of over 500 prestigious journals worldwide.
CrossRef (www.crossref.org/) is a non-profit membership association, founded and directed by publishers. Its mission is to improve access to published scholarship through collaborative technologies. CrossRef operates a cross-publisher citation linking system, and is an official DOI registration agency.
IDPF Announces Container Format for eBooks
The International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF), the standards and trade association for digital publishing, announced in October 2006 the release of a new technical standard to facilitate digital content creation, distribution and use by consumers. IDPF, formerly the Open eBook Forum (OeBF), is the trade and standards association for the digital publishing industry. In addition to the Open eBook Publication Structure (OEBPS), an XML standard for authoring digital books, the IDPF has now released a new standard for packaging a digital publication, including the contents of the publication, metadata, signatures,encryption, rights and other information into one standard file. Entitled the OEBPs Container Format (OCF), the new IDPF standard will allow publishers to release a single standard file into their sales and distribution channels and will also enable consumers to exchange unencrypted eBooks and other digital publications between reading systems that support the new standard.
The standard specifies a ZIP-based packaging format that is an extension of OASIS' Open Document Format Standard (ISO/IEC 26300). The OCF specification and additional information can be found at www.idpf.org/ocf/ocf1.0. OCF files can easily be identified by the file extension".epub".
Over forty publishers, technology companies and organizations were involved in the OCF Working Group, the committee responsible for the creation of the standard, including Adobe Systems Inc., Benetech, DAISY Consortium, eBook Technologies Inc., Hachette Book Group, Harlequin, HarperCollins, iRex Technologies, Mobipocket (An amazon.com company), netLibrary, OverDrive Inc.,Random House, Simon & Schuster, WGBH and many others.
Both trade and academic publishers plan to use the OCF standard to deliver files through their distribution channels using the standard file. The OCF will be used in workflows where an electronic publication is sent from a publisher to a distributor or retailer and when an electronic publication is delivered to a consumer using software or hardware which has implemented the standard. IDPF member companies who have announced service offerings to produce digital publications using the OCF standard include: codeMantra, Green Point Technology Services, Publishing Dimensions, Rosetta Solutions, Inc. and techbooks.
Numerous software and hardware companies have also announced implementation plans for the new standard. Announced implementations are
Adobe Implementation – www.adobe.com
Product name: Adobe Digital Editions
Implementation Time Frame: Public beta available now
Product Details/Features: Natively supports PDF and OCF-packaged OEBPS content, based on in-preparation next-generation OEBPS specification.
Product URL: www.adobe.com/go/getdigitaleditions
eBook Technologies, Inc. Implementation – www.ebooktechnologies.com
Product Name: eBook Publisher
Implementation Time Frame: Public Beta Mac Tools supporting OCF available now; Windows and Server OCF support coming in Q4 2006
Product Details/Features: eBook production tools supporting processing of OEBPS, Word, PowerPoint, text and HTML into eBooks for desktop preview and delivery into the ETI Reading System
Mobipocket (An amazon.com company) Implementation – www.mobipocket.com
Product name: Mobipocket Reader/ Mobipocket Creator
Implementation Time Frame: Q1 2007
Product Details/Features: Mobipocket Reader brings rich eBook content to all mobile platforms (Windows Mobile, Symbian smartphones, Blackberry, Palm) as well as desktops and laptops (MS Windows).
Product URL: www.mobipocket.com/en/DownloadSoft/default.asp
OSoft Implementation – www.dotreader.com
Product name: dotReader with OCF plug-in
Implementation Time Frame: Jan 2007
Product details/features: The dotReader is a cross-platform, open source documentation platform that renders multiple XML and other formats and will support the OCF format for the dotReader. The OCF format will take advantage of all of dotReader's capabilities including advanced search and public, private,and group annotations.
Product URL: www.dotreader.com
OCF and the OEBPs: OCF requires inclusion of an OEBPS version of the publication, an XML standard for digital books maintained by the IDPF. For reading systems that can display OEBPS files, publishers will be able to simply allow for the sale of the OCF. Platform-targeting or the application of digital rights management (DRM) will be the responsibility of the target software. For content that is not secured by DRM, digital publications in OCF will be able to be exchanged between conformant software, improving content interoperability for the consumer. In addition to the OEBPS version of the publication, OCF will also allow for the transport of alternate renditions of the publication, including PDF and other targeted eBook formats.
The OEBPS standard is currently being updated in the IDPF. A draft of the next version of OEBPS will be released by the end of the year. The draft updates the standard to include better control of content rendering, navigation,accessibility and alignment with other standards efforts. OEBPS content is expected to offer publishers National Instructional Materials Accessibility Standard (NIMAS) compliance. It is the production and consumer standard for reflowable digital content.
Additional Relevant Information:
Open eBook Publication Structure Container Format (OCF) Version 1.0: www.idpf.org/ocf/ocf1.0
Open eBook Publication Structure (OEBPS) Specification Version 1.2:
OCF Working Group: www.idpf.org/idpf_groups/oebpscontainerwg.htm
OEBPS Working Group: www.idpf.org/idpf_groups/oebpswg.htm
IDPF Specifications and Documents: www.idpf.org/specs.htm
IDPF Working Groups: www.idpf.org/idpf_groups.htm
IDPF meetings and teleconference schedule: www.idpf.org/events.htm
IDPF membership information: www.idpf.org/membership.htm
New eBook Reader Named Best Gadget of 2006
The Sony Reader portable reader system, released in September, has been named a Grand Award Winner in the Gadget category of Popular Science magazine's 2006"Best of What's New" top 100 tech innovations of the year.
Retailing for about $350, the Sony Reader uses an innovative electronic paper display developed by the E Ink Corporation. Products made with E Ink's revolutionary electronic ink possess a paper-like high contrast appearance,ultra-low power consumption and a thin, light form. The Reader's high-resolution electronic paper display delivers a realistic print look that rivals traditional paper and results in crisp text and graphics that are easy on the eyes and readable even in bright sunlight. Since there is no backlight, readers will not experience the fatigue associated with long term reading on an LCD. And, as the technology renders each page as a static image, there is no flicker or constant screen refresh to add to eyestrain. Users with impaired or limited eyesight will enjoy the Reader's fully adjustable text size, which can be magnified or reduced on demand. Roughly the size of a paperback novel, but thinner than most (about 0.5 inches thin), the device can store hundreds of books in internal memory with the addition of an optional Memory Stick or Secure Digital (SD) flash memory card. With a battery life equivalent to roughly 7,500 page turns, avid readers can devour a dozen bestsellers plus War and Peace without ever having to recharge.
The Reader can store and display personal documents in Adobe PDF format,favorite web content like blogs or news feeds, and JPEG photos. Sony has also announced the premiere of its CONNECT eBook store. Agreements with a number of major publishing companies have made more than 10,000 eBook titles available to download to the Reader via the companion PC software. New publishers working with Sony to provide titles for Reader through the Sony Connect eBook store include: Hyperion, McGraw-Hill Professional, Cambridge University Press,Harlequin Enterprises Limited, National Geographic, Kensington Publishing and Regnery Publishing, among others. These firms join Penguin-Putnam, Simon and Schuster, Random House, HarperCollins, Hachette Book Group USA and Holtzbrinck Publishers along with TOKYOPOP, whose commitment to providing titles for Reader was announced earlier this year. "Our collaboration with publishers will be a key factor in growing the popularity of eBooks", said Lee Shirani, vice president for eBooks at Sony CONNECT.
Sony Reader: www.sony.com/reader
CONNECT eBook store: http://ebooks.connect.com/
E Ink Corporation: www.eink.com/
SearchMash
SearchMash, a new search engine being developed by Google, Inc., lets users search the internet in new ways. The service is constantly evolving as the developers come up with ideas and figure out what works and what does not. Users are invited to check back from time to time to see what has changed, and also to give feedback on which features are useful. Among the features offered:
Start typing! It is not necessary to have the cursor in the search box to start typing a query,
Streamlined display, without distracting links and text,
Related results panel shows categories of additional results for the query,e.g. images, blogs, videos, Wikipedia entries, and
Feedback panel allows users to give instant feedback to the developers. www.searchmash.com/
Microsoft Releases Live Search Books in Beta
Microsoft released Live Search Books, its competitor to Google Book Search,in beta in early December 2006. Live Book Search is a service that enables Web searchers to find answers from authoritative, trusted book content. Scanned books already available through the beta release come from early participants in the project, including the Open Content Alliance, The British Library, the University of California and the University of Toronto and include only non-copyright books. Plans call for scanned titles from New York Public Library,Cornell University and the American Museum of Veterinary Medicine to be added soon. In a later release, Microsoft will also be adding copyright works that publishers have given permission to include in the scanning project.
Live Search Books: http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=&scope=books#q=
Library of Congress Establishes Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control
Advances in search-engine technology, the popularity of the Internet and the influx of electronic information resources have greatly changed the way libraries do their work. To address those changes, the Library of Congress has convened a Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control to examine the future of bibliographic description in the 21st century.
Libraries are looking at ways to catalog the avalanche of both print and digital materials that come to them for classification and control, and library managers worldwide recognize the need to examine critically the role of the catalog and its relationship to other methods of finding information. Building on the work and results of the Library's Bicentennial Conference on Bibliographic Control for the New Millennium (2001), the new group will:
Present findings on how bibliographic control and other descriptive practices can effectively support management of and access to library materials in the evolving information and technology environment,
Recommend ways in which the library community can collectively move toward achieving this vision, and
Advise the Library of Congress on its role and priorities.
Deanna Marcum, associate librarian for Library Services, hosted the first meeting and thanked the Working Group members for volunteering their time and expertise. Marcum is the convener of the group and will receive its recommendations.
During its inaugural meeting at the Library of Congress November 2-3, Working Group members concluded that, rather than planning a single summit meeting on the future of bibliographic control, it would schedule three regional meetings during 2007. The venues will be in or near large airports in different regions of the USA to make it easier for a broad range of participants to travel to the meetings. The Working Group also organized issues and affected parties into three broad categories: Uses and Users, Structures and Standards, and Economics and Organization. Each category will be the focus of one regional meeting in 2007. The meetings will be preceded by distribution of a background paper that gives an overview of the current environment in which bibliographic control operates.
In July or August, after the three meetings have taken place, the Working Group will meet again to draft a report and recommendations by 1 September for public comments, which will be taken into account in the group's final report,to be issued by 1 November 2007.
Members of the Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control
José-Marie Griffiths of the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (chair)
Richard Amelung for the American Association of Law Libraries
Diane Dates Casey, Janet Swan Hill, and Sally G. Smith for the American Library Association
Brian E.C. Schottlaender, Olivia M.A. Madison, and Judith Nadler representing the Association of Research Libraries
Gary Price for the Special Libraries Association
Robert Wolven for the Program for Cooperative Cataloging
Daniel Clancy for the Google Company
Jay Girotto for the Microsoft Corporation
Clifford A. Lynch of the Coalition for Networked Information
Lorcan Dempsey of OCLC
Assisting the Working Group from the Library of Congress is Library Services Executive Secretariat Beth Davis-Brown.
LC Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control website: www.loc.gov/bibliographic-future/
Participatory Networks – The Library as Conversation: Technology Brief for OITP
The American Library Association's (ALA) Office for Information Technology Policy has contracted the Information Institute of Syracuse to research and write a detailed technology brief on the topic of participatory networks. Lead authors of the brief, School of Information Studies professors R. David Lankes and Joanne Silverstein, will emphasize interactive and social web applications such as blogs, social networks, and include a survey of the general "Web 2.0"and "Library 2.0" development world. "We hope to create a comprehensive document library decision makers can use to understand the new wave of social Internet applications", says Lankes, director of the institute. "We also hope to devise strategies for libraries to respond to potential opportunities and threats."
The rise of new web applications that both facilitate and depend upon user contributions has exposed a number of serious issues that today's libraries must face. These web services allow users to easily build digital collections such as on popular web sites YouTube and Flickr. They also enable users to join and create social networks such as MySPACE and Facebook, or to self-publish through such outlets as Blogger and LiveJournal.
The advance of these tools has had impacts in multiple areas. One clear example is on software developers and consumers. Software developers now release early betas of software to a community for testing and refinement –sometimes creating permanent betas that never get officially finished. Software developers also often look to a loosely coupled cadre of programmers to create and/or maintain software and standards through open source. These shifts in the Internet software community have already begun to impact libraries. User expectations for the online catalog and the services of a library they can access online have changed, and libraries must keep up.
The drafted brief will outline a series of actions that libraries can take to help be at the forefront of these new technologies and services. The document was shared with ALA as well as experts in the field for initial comments in September and October. A final brief will be presented at the ALA Midwinter meeting in January 2007.
Participatory Networks: http://iis.syr.edu/projects/PNOpen/
What You Need to Know to be Library 2.0 Conversant
Public Library of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County's (PLCMC) Learning 2.0 project was developed to encourage staff to experiment and learn about the new and emerging technologies that are reshaping the context of information on the Internet today. The objectives of this program are to:
encourage exploration of Web 2.0 and new technologies by PLCMC staff.
provide staff with new tools (that are freely available on the Internet) to better support PLCMC's mission: "Expanding minds, Empowering individuals and Enriching our community".
reward staff for taking the initiative to complete 23 self-discovery exercises.
The 23 self-discovery exercises cover areas including: blogging, photos and images, RSS and newsreaders, LibraryThing and cataloging, Rollyo and search tools, tagging, folksonomies and Technorati, wikis, podcasts, video, and downloadable audio. The exercises are arranged to be worked through over a nine week period.
The Learning 2.0 program was designed by Helene Blowers, PLCMC Technology Director, with the support and assistance of several staff and is loosely based upon Stephen Abram's article, 43 Things I (or You) might want to do this year(Information Outlook – Feb 2006) and the website 43 Things (www.43things.com/).
The design of this online program was completely built on Web 2.0 technologies that are freely available on the Internet. These sites include:Blogger, Flickr, Odeo, YouTube, PBWiki and Bloglines.
PLCMCL Learning 2.0: http://plcmcl2-things.blogspot.com
Report on Widespread Use of Digital Images Released
Digital images are changing the way professors teach at colleges and universities – although often at great personal expense of time and resources, according to a new study by David Green, Principal in Knowledge Culture, a consultancy offering research services, and resources for cultural heritage professionals. "Using Digital Images in Teaching and Learning:Perspectives from Liberal Arts Institutions", published in October 2006,details the results of an intensive study of digital image use by more than 400 faculty at 33 liberal arts colleges and universities in the northeast United States.
Commissioned by Wesleyan University and the National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education (NITLE), the study focuses on the pedagogical implications of the widespread use of digital formats. But, while changes in teaching and learning were at the core of the study, related issues concerning supply,support and infrastructure rapidly became part of its fabric. The report suggests how the teaching profession as a whole can better harness these new resources, and it makes recommendations for optimizing their deployment on campus.
In addition to the report and the executive summary, two spaces have been established for readers to interact with the author David Green, and with one another. The full report and an executive summary are available at Academic Commons, an online forum for new technologies and liberal education: www.academiccommons.org/imagereport
DC-2006 Presentations Available for Download
This year's Dublin Core conference, DC-2006, was held 3-6 October 2006 in Manzanillo, Colima, Mexico, and hosted by the University of Colima, with 250 participants from 24 countries. Key topics were model-based interoperability,controlled vocabularies, and practical deployment issues. Presentations are available for download from the conference program.
DC-2006 program: http://dc2006.ucol.mx/program.htm
DC-2006 website: http://dc2006.ucol.mx/
IWAW 2006 Proceedings Available for Download
Proceedings of the 6th International Web Archiving Workshop (IWAW06) are available to download. The Workshop was held in September 2006 in Alicante,Spain. The purpose of the workshop was to provide a cross domain overview on active research and practice in all domains concerned with the acquisition,maintenance and preservation of digital objects for long-term access, with a particular focus on web archiving and studies on effective usage of this type of archives. It was also intended to provide a forum for interaction among librarians, archivists, academic and industrial researchers interested in establishing effective methods and developing improved solutions for data acquisition, ingest, and accessibility maintenance. Other presentations made during the workshop (particularly on tools development) are also available from the IWAW06 website.
IWAW06 Proceedings (pdf): www.iwaw.net/06/PDF/iwaw06-proceedings.pdf
IWAW06 Website: www.iwaw.net/06/
