E-Lert # 293 / Cyberavis no. 293
Friday September 5, 2008 / le vendredi 5 septembre 2008
CARL COMMUNIQUE / COMMUNIQUÉ DE L’ABRC
The Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL) is holding a meeting on institutional repositories in conjunction with the Access2008 conference. The meeting will be held from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. on October 1st at the Sheraton Hotel in Hamilton, Ontario.
The purpose of the meeting is to provide an opportunity for those working with IRs to network with colleagues. The meeting will be fairly informal and involve a high level of participation by attendees.
The morning session will be a round table, in which participants describe the activities and challenges of their institution in regards to institutional repositories. The afternoon session will be a discussion of "hot topics", one of which will be an update on Canadian funding agency open access policies. Other hot topics will be determined by participants.
The meeting is free, and open to all those interested in attending. Please email Kathleen Shearer (mkshearer@videotron.ca) by September 19th if you plan to attend.
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L’Association des bibliothèques de recherche du Canada (ABRC) tiendra une réunion sur les dépôts institutionnels concurremment avec la conférence Access2008. La réunion aura lieu de 9 h à 6 h le 1er octobre à l’hôtel Sheraton à Hamilton, Ontario.
Le but de la réunion est de fournir à ceux qui sont impliqués dans le développement des DI de se faire partie des réseaux avec des collègues. La rencontre sera informelle et interactive.
La session du matin sera une table ronde pendant laquelle les participants définiront les défis et les opportunités à leurs institutions à l'égard des dépôts institutionnels. La session de l’après-midi sera une discussion de sujets «brulants d’actualité», dont une mise à jour des politiques des organismes subventionnaires par rapport au libre accès. Le groupe des participants déterminera d’autres sujets à discuter.
La réunion est gratuite et ouverte à tous ceux qui sont intéressés à participer. Veuillez S.V.P. contacter Kathleen Shearer (mkshearer@videotron.ca) au plus tard le 19 septembre si vous voulez y participer.
NEWS / NOUVELLES
Medical Wiki Backed by Prominent Colleges Will Go Live by Year's
End
Maria José Viñas
The Chronicle of Higher Education, September 5, 2008
Medpedia, a new online medical encyclopedia to be written and edited by
a collaborative group of thousands, with support from several leading medical
schools, is calling for volunteers. But not everyone will be accepted. Only
those who hold an M.D. or Ph.D. in a biomedical field need apply. That is
one way in which the ambitious project, which plans to go live by the end
of this year, hopes to set itself apart from existing medical Web sites.
http://chronicle.com/free/v55/i02/02a01702.htm?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
You own those documents? So you think
Loren Steffy
Houston Chronicle, September 4, 2008
Google Docs is a free service that works much like a word processor, except
the documents are stored online and can be accessed from anywhere. Because
of its flexibility, it's becoming the Internet's Next Big Thing. But the
technological promise has a dark lining: once you put your data —
or notes or story drafts — on a cloud, they're not really yours anymore.
Many companies consider data on their server to be theirs, even if it's
data about someone else. Medical marketing companies, for example, routinely
collect prescription drug data from pharmacies and sell it. It's not our
data, it's merely data about us that may reveal our private medical conditions.
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/business/steffy/5984591.html
A Cat-and-Mouse Tale of Textbook Piracy Continues
Jeffrey R. Young
The Chronicle of Higher Education, September 4, 2008
A college student out there somewhere on the Internet has been facing off
against textbook publishers in recent months, with both sides claiming the
moral high ground in the latest phase of illegal file sharing on campus.
The student calls himself Geekman (he refuses to give his real name or location
for fear of legal action against him), and he runs a directory of online
books called Textbook Torrents. Ever since The Chronicle first wrote
about the site, publishers have taken steps to enforce their copyrights
and keep the site from encouraging the trading of their books.
http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/index.php?id=3292&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
JHOVE and the Development of JHOVE2
The Library of Congress, September 4, 2008
In late 2003, engineers at Harvard University Library and JSTOR developed
an open-source tool called JHOVE
(the JSTOR/Harvard Object Validation Environment) to validate file formats.
JHOVE was designed to process a digital object and determine what the object
claims to be (identification), if the object conforms to requirements (validation)
and the properties of the object (characterization). When JHOVE finds a
file that it cannot validate, it flags the file. Though the process is automated,
only a human can decide whether to accept the file as is or try to get a
better version.
http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/news/2008/20080902news_article_JHOVE2.html
Contentious copyright bill would die with election
David Akin
National Post, September 2, 2008
Made-in-Canada copyright legislation is among the bills that will die if
Prime Minister Stephen Harper goes ahead with a widely expected election
call at the end of this week, a prospect that bitterly disappoints many
artists. It will be the second time in as many governments that copyright
legislation designed for the era of the iPod has died on the order paper
at the dissolution of Parliament. The Liberals had tabled copyright legislation
in 2005 but it was killed when they lost power in early 2006.
http://www.nationalpost.com/news/canada/story.html?id=764309
Library and Archives Canada: A Core Partner of the Open Library
Environment (OLE) Project
September 2, 2008
Library and Archives Canada (LAC) is pleased to announce that it is participating
in the Open Library Environment (OLE) Project joining other core partners,
with Duke University as the project lead. With funding from the Andrew W.
Mellon Foundation, the OLE Project will develop a design document for a
next-generation open-source library automation system that fits modern expectations
for library work flows and is built on a modern service-oriented architecture.
This library system will be able to meet the changing and complex needs
of modern libraries and library users. The small group of core partners
will be highly involved in all phases of the project, by participating in
all the activities, by engaging other members of the library community in
planning activities and by writing the final project design document.
http://www.librarytechnology.org/ltg-displayarticle.pl?RC=13516
Chrome : un pas de plus vers le tout-Google
Estelle Dumout
Le Monde, 3 septembre 2008
Jusqu'à présent, le marché des navigateurs était
dominé par Internet Explorer (IE), de Microsoft. Sa part de marché,
qui oscille entre 70 et 90 % selon les régions, a été
bâtie sur le fait qu'IE était pré-installé sur
Windows. Depuis quatre ou cinq ans, on a vu arriver un concurrent assez
sérieux en la personne de Firefox. Ce navigateur a une autre philosophie
qui est celle du logiciel libre. D'autres navigateurs existent, comme Safari
d'Apple, Opéra, etc. Mais leurs parts de marché sont réduites.
Google, avec Chrome,
arrive dans ce contexte avec l'envie de bousculer le marché. Pour
Google, le navigateur, c'est la porte d'entrée vers Internet et vers
ce que l'utilisateur y fait concrètement. C'est une position très
stratégique et un changement de perspective.
http://www.lemonde.fr/technologies/article/2008/09/03/avec-chrome-google-veut-bousculer-le-marche_1091134_651865.html#ens_id=1091143
First Open Access Day to be held October 14, 2008
August 28, 2008
SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), the
Public Library of Science (PLoS), and Students for FreeCulture have jointly
announced the first international Open Access Day. Building on the worldwide
momentum toward Open Access to publicly funded research, Open Access Day
will create a key opportunity for the higher education community and the
general public to understand more clearly the opportunities of wider access
and use of content. Open Access Day will invite researchers, educators,
librarians, students, and the public to participate in live, worldwide broadcasts
of events. In North America, events will be held at 7:00 PM (Eastern) and
7:00 PM (Pacific).
http://www.arl.org/sparc/media/08-0828.shtml
ARTICLES
Towards a Data Sharing Culture: Recommendations for Leadership
from Academic Health Centers
Heather A. Piwowar et al
PloS Medicine, Volume 5, Issue 9, September 2008
Sharing biomedical research and health care data is important but difficult.
Recognizing this, many initiatives facilitate, fund, request, or require
researchers to share their data. These initiatives address the technical
aspects of data sharing, but rarely focus on incentives for key stakeholders.
Academic health centers (AHCs) have a critical role in enabling, encouraging,
and rewarding data sharing. The leaders of medical schools and academic-affiliated
hospitals can play a unique role in supporting this transformation of the
research enterprise. The authors propose that AHCs can and should lead the
transition towards a culture of biomedical data sharing.
http://medicine.plosjournals.org/archive/1549-1676/5/9/pdf/10.1371_journal.pmed.0050183-L.pdf
Evolution to Revolution to Chaos? Reference in Transition
Stephen Abram
Searcher, Volume 16, Number 8, September 2008
It cannot be denied that our reference stats are down, though this is not
the case with our research requests, training activities, and one-on-one
contact with clients. In the academic and college space, change is moving
apace with e-learning and learning commons initiatives growing and major
technologies expanding, such as OpenURL, federated search, portals and portlets,
APIs, and more innovation in user experiences aimed at learning and research
missions. Reference and research services, the front line of library service,
are dealing with a far-less-predictable future. The fate of reference has
come into clearer focus in Web 2.0/Library 2.0 discussions and debates.
The emphasis has moved from understanding and learning the technology to
understanding end-user behaviors in context.
http://www.infotoday.com/searcher/sep08/Abram.shtml
Lines and Bubbles and Bars, Oh My! New Ways to Sift Data
Anne Eisenberg
The New York Times, August 30, 2008
At an experimental Web site, Many Eyes, (www.many-eyes.com), users can
upload the data they want to visualize, then try sophisticated tools to
generate interactive displays. The site was created by scientists at the
Watson Research Center of I.B.M. in Cambridge, Mass., to help people publish
and discuss graphics in a group. Those who register at the site can comment
on one another’s work, perhaps visualizing the same information with
different tools and discovering unexpected patterns in the data.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/31/technology/31novel.html?th&emc=th
What Google's New Encyclopedia Means for Students and Professors
Andrea L. Foster
The Chronicle of Higher Education, September 5, 2008
When college students begin researching Margaret Mead, Einstein's theory
of relativity, Marxism, or any other weighty topic, their first stop is
often Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia created by the masses. So in July,
when Google unveiled Knol, another Web-based collection of user-generated
articles that the company calls "authoritative," the question
for faculty members - many of whom are not fond of Wikipedia as a research
tool - was whether students might begin to turn to this new source. The
answer from those who study online encyclopedias is, Not likely.
http://chronicle.com/free/v55/i02/02a01701.htm?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
Next Steps for E-Texts
Andy Guess
Inside Higher Ed, August 26, 2008
Predicting when e-textbooks will become a viable alternative to the dead-tree
variety churned from printing presses to millions of college students a
year is a bit like asking whether newspapers will give way to the Internet.
Everyone thinks they will, but it’s a question of when, and what the
new paradigm will look like.
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/08/26/etextbooks
Versioning in Repositories: Implementing Best Practice
Jenny Brace
Ariadne, Issue 56, July 2008
Until recently, there has not been a huge amount of time dedicated to versioning
issues, but we do know it is a recognized problem. In the Version Identification
Framework (VIF) survey carried
out in autumn of 2007, only 5% of academics and 6.5% of information professionals
surveyed found it easy to identify versions of digital objects within institutional
repositories. Across multiple repositories the figures were only 1.8% of
academics and 1.1% of information professionals. Moreover, a third of information
professionals who work with repositories stated that they either have no
system currently in place or ‘don’t know’ how they deal
with versioning at present.
http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue56/brace/
RESOURCES / RESSOURCES
Big Data
Nature, Volume 455 Number, 7209, September 4, 2008
Researchers need to adapt their institutions and practices in response
to torrents of new data — and need to complement smart science with
smart searching. The Internet search firm Google was incorporated just 10
years ago this week. Going from a collection of donated servers housed under
a desk to a global network of dedicated data centres processing information
by the petabyte, Google's growth mirrors that of the production and exploration
of data in research. All of which makes this an apt moment for this special
issue of Nature, which examines what big data sets mean for contemporary
science.
http://www.nature.com/news/specials/bigdata/index.html
L'Economie de l'attention
Eric Scherer
Agence France Presse MediaWatch , Printemps / Eté 2008
Les vagues de la révolution numérique continuent de déferler,
rapides, continues, imprévisibles. A ce rythme, même les “challengers”,
comme Yahoo!, deviennent vite des “defenders”. Des vagues abruptes,
d’une puissance inouïe, qui brisent les modèles d’affaires,
détruisent de la valeur, chamboulent les oligopoles, bouleversent
l’activité marchande, effacent les frontières, emportent
les certitudes, noient sous un flot grandissant d’informations. Qui
l’emportera ? Contenu ou mise en relation? Gratuit ou payant? «
Old media ou new media »? Les Anciens ou les Modernes? Personne ne
sait, bien sûr.
http://mediawatch.afp.com/public/AFP-MediaWatch_Printemps-Ete_2008.pdf
Managing Electronic Resources: New and Changing Roles for Libraries
Peter Webster
Chandos Publishing (Oxford) , September 2008
The ongoing movement to electronic collections presents many exciting new
service opportunities for libraries, as well as creating materials management,
resource, and service challenges. This book looks at how online resources
are causing the roles and practices of libraries to change. The book is
aimed at librarians, library policy makers’ and students, as well
as e-content and service vendors, and everyone who are interested in the
developing electronic content environment, the changes it is bringing about
in library practice.
http://www.chandospublishing.com/chandos_publishing_record_detail.php?ID=186
The International Survey of Library & Museum Digitization Projects
Primary Research Group, 2008
The International Survey of Library & Museum Digitization Projects
presents detailed data about the management and development of a broad range
of library special collection and museum digitization projects. Data is
broken out by type of digitization project (ie text, photograph, film, audio,
etc) size and type of institution, annual spending on digitization and other
variables. The report presents data and narrative on staffing, training,
funding, technology selection, outsourcing, permissions and copyright clearance,
cataloging, digital asset management, software and applications selection,
marketing and many other issues of interest to libraries and museums that
are digitizing aspects of their collections.
http://www.primaryresearch.com/200808181-Libraries--Special-Collections.html
EVENTS / ÉVÉNEMENTS
Collaborative Library Resource Sharing: Standards, Developments,
and New Models for Cooperating a NISO Educational Forum
Atlanta, Georgia, October 6 – 7, 2008
Not every institution can have every journal, book, film or resource. Increasingly,
many institutions are running out of space for the materials that they do
have. Also, the costs for collecting, managing, and preserving these materials
are constantly increasing. Institutions are finding new ways to share their
resources and work collaboratively to meet the needs of the user community.
This meeting will engage participants to explore areas where collaborative
effort and standards can help improve library efficiency through resource
sharing. This includes the area of interlibrary loan, physical resource
management, collaborative storage and preservation, and related open source
developments.
http://www.niso.org/news/events/2008/resshar08/
DRAMBORA Auditors' Training
Prague, Czech Republic, October 13 – 17, 2008
Based on practical research and developed jointly by the DigitalPreservationEurope
(DPE) and Digital Curation Centre (DCC), the Digital Repository Audit Method
Based on Risk Assessment (DRAMBORA) provides a methodology for self-assessment
of digital preservation repositories. The toolkit, now available as an interactive
online audit tool (http://www.repositoryaudit.eu),
has been evaluated and applied across a diverse range of organisations,
such as national libraries, scientific data centres and archives. DPE is
organizing a series of training courses to train new DRAMBORA auditors.
The first of these will be held in association with the Wepreserve
training event in Prague, in October 2008.
http://www.repositoryaudit.eu/training/prague-2008/
The 14th International Conference on Virtual Systems and Multimedia:
Digital Heritage: Our Hi-tech-STORY for the Future
Limassol, Cyprus, October 20 – 26, 2008
The main goal of the event is to illustrate the programs underway, whether
organized by public bodies (e.g. UNESCO, European Union, National States,
etc.) or by private foundations (e.g. Getty Foundation, World Heritage Foundation,
etc.) in order to promote a common approach to the tasks of recording, documenting,
protecting and managing world cultural heritage. The 14th VSMM Conference
will definitely be a forum for sharing views and experiences ,discussing
proposals for the optimum attitude as well as the best practice and the
ideal technical tools to preserve, document, manage, present/visualize and
disseminate cultural heritage.
http://www.vsmm2008.org/
Scholarly Communication Outreach: Crafting Messages that Grab Faculty
Attention
Seattle, Washington, March 11 – 12, 2008
Are you already working with faculty and researchers on your campus for
change? Do you want to develop a deeper understanding of how scholars’
communication practices are changing and how the landscape appears to them?
Librarians supporting scholarly-communication programs want to know how
to identify issues that will resonate with faculty at their institutions
and how to present those issues in ways that generate positive engagement
with faculty. In the tradition of other Institute events, this workshop
will emphasize active learning and hands-on work by participants, both individually
and in groups.
http://www.arl.org/sc/institute/inst-events/0309workshop.shtml
