E-Lert # 298 / Cyberavis no. 298

Friday October 10, 2008 / le vendredi 10 octobre 2008

Please note that there will not be an E-lert on Friday October 17. The next E-lert will be posted on Friday October 24. / Veuillez noter qu’il n’y aura pas de Cyberavis le vendredi 17 octobre. La prochaine édition du Cyberavis sera affichée le vendredi 24 octobre.

CARL COMMUNIQUE / COMMUNIQUÉ DE L’ABRC

The Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL) sent a list of pre-election questions to the offices of the federal parties. The questionnaire went out to the leaders of the five major federal parties. PDF Response from the Liberal Party of Canada PDF ( members only )

L’Association des bibliothèques de recherche du Canada (ABRC) a envoyée une liste de questions pré-électorales aux secrétariats des parties fédéraux. Les chefs des cinq parties fédéraux majeurs ont reçut le questionnaire. PDF
Réponse de la part du Parti libéral du Canada PDF ( réservé aux membres )

NEWS / NOUVELLES

Fed’s Funding Policy Misguided
Penni Stewart
CAUT Bulletin, Volume 55, Number 8, October 2008

Two big issues facing post-secondary education are funding and how that funding is allocated.
Although post-secondary education is a provincial responsibility, the federal government plays an important role in funding. In the mid-1960s the federal government initiated a system of block-grant transfers to the provinces, but without explicit conditions for provinces to account for their spending. Since then, post-secondary education has been losing the funding battle to health care. And, with no accountability mechanisms in place, it is impossible to know how much of the transfer funding reaches colleges and universities. HTML

Brisbane Declaration on Open Access
October 8, 2008

The Brisbane Declaration on Open Access at last puts some real practical policy content and substance into theBudapest/Bethesda/Berlin series, along the lines of the UK Select Committee Recommendation and Berlin 3. Following the conference on Open Access and Research held in September in Australia, and hosted by Queensland University of Technology, the following statement was developed and has the endorsement of over sixty participants.
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/472-Brisbane-Declaration-on-Open-Access.html

New Ratings of Humanities Journals Do More Than Rank — They Rankle
Jennifer Howard
The Chronicle of Higher Education, October 10, 2008

A large-scale, multinational attempt in Europe to rank humanities journals has set off a revolt. In a protest letter, some journal editors have called it "a dangerous and misguided exercise." The ranking project, known as the European Reference Index for the Humanities, or ERIH, is the brainchild of the European Science Foundation, which brings together research agencies from many countries. It grew from a desire to showcase high-quality research in Europe.
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v55/i07/07a01001.htm?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec et la Bibliothèque nationale de France annoncent la mise en ligne d’un site sur les relations France-Québec
7 octobre 2008

Le chercheur aguerri comme le simple curieux bénéficient désormais d’un nouvel outil de recherche sur tout ce qui touche les relations France-Québec depuis 1760. En effet, Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec (BAnQ) et la Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) annoncent aujourd’hui la mise en ligne d’une refonte majeure du site Relations France-Québec depuis 1760 au rfq.banq.qc.ca.
http://www.bnf.fr/pages/presse/communiques/france_quebec.pdf

Conservatives pledge to reintroduce copyright reform
Peter Nowak
CBC News, October 7, 2008

The Conservatives are promising to reintroduce controversial copyright-reform legislation if they are re-elected, according to the party's official platform. The Conservatives' previous copyright-reform legislation, Bill C-61, which died on the order paper when the election was called, was released in June to a wave of criticism. While a number of organizations that represent copyright holders, such as the Canadian Recording Industry Association and the Entertainment Software Association of Canada, praised the plan, it was roundly criticized as unfair by consumer advocates, artists, privacy watchdogs, education groups and other businesses.
http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2008/10/07/tech-conservatives.html

Open access publisher BioMed Central sold to Springer
Scientific American, October 7, 2008

BioMed Central publisher Matthew Cockerill announced the news in an email today to editors of BMC's journals. Those in the open access movement had watched BioMed Central with keen interest. Founded in 2000, it was the first for-profit open access publisher and advocates feared that when the company was sold, its approach might change
http://www.sciam.com/blog/60-second-science/post.cfm?id=open-access-publisher-biomed-centra-2008-10-07

ArXiv, Pioneering Online Scientific Repository Hits Major Milestone
Andrew Albanese
Library Journal, October 7, 2008

As SPARC and other organizers get ready for a conference on institutional repositories, Cornell University last week announced that arXiv, a pioneering repository of physics information, now hosted at the Cornell University Library (CUL), has reached a major milestone: it now hosts a half-million e-print postings. Considered the top resource for the physics community, arXiv was developed by Paul Ginsparg in 1991, at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. When Ginsparg came to Cornell as a faculty member in 2001, the repository came with him.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6602784.html?nid=2673&rid=reg_visitor_id&source=title

Les inscriptions augmentent dans les universités québécoises
Le Devoir, 5 octobre 2008

Le nombre d'inscriptions dans les universités québécoises a légèrement augmenté cet automne, pour atteindre 258 304, soit une hausse de 0,5 %. Cette augmentation est attribuable aux étudiants à temps plein (dont le nombre s'est accru de près de 1 %) et à ceux des cycles supérieurs (+1,8 % pour la maîtrise et +2,9 % pour le doctorat), tandis qu'on constate un léger recul pour le baccalauréat (-1,3 %) et les étudiants à temps partiel (-0,2 %), selon les données rendues publiques hier par la Conférence des recteurs et principaux d'universités du Québec (CREPUQ).
http://www.ledevoir.com/2008/10/04/209109.html

2 New Digital Models Promise Academic Publishing for Profit
Jennifer Howard
The Chronicle of Higher Education, October 2, 2008

Scholarly publishers are well aware that more and more readers and libraries want to get hold of monographs in electronic form. The trick has been how to deliver content digitally without going out of business. Two new models—one with an open-access component, one without—should help publishers test out ways to adapt and, maybe, thrive.
http://chronicle.com/free/2008/10/4842n.htm?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

IUPUI leads way in library digital repositories
Erika D. Smith
IndyStar, September 29, 2008

The days of librarians making sure books don't turn yellow and microfilm doesn't turn to dust are fading. In the digital age, preservation means something different. Increasingly, librarians that include those at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis are taking a leading role in working to save important online texts, videos, audio and photos from vanishing as Web sites change and die.
http://www.indystar.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080929/LOCAL18/809290359

ARTICLES

Asking more of public R&D institutions
Dr Peter Nicholson
RE$EARCH MONEY, Volume 22, Number 15, October 7, 2008

National innovation policies need to pay greater attention to the role and support of "public research and development institutions". These are national laboratories and research organizations of various kinds that are neither universities nor divisions of corporations but include pre-competitive R&D consortia of business, academia and government. In summary, the case is as follows: National economies today are relying more and more on innovation as the ultimate driver of competitiveness and prosperity. Yet, paradoxically, the business sector is doing less and less of the research that can underpin truly fundamental innovation, as distinct from the kind of incremental innovation that responds primarily to the demands of customers and the advice of plant floor engineers.

Liberal pledges for research and innovation easily outstrip Conservative commitments
RE$EARCH MONEY, Volume 22, Number 15, October 7, 2008

The Liberal Party of Canada is pledging more than $1 billion in new funding for university-based research, including massive increases to the base budgets of the granting councils and the indirect costs of university research. The election commitment is by far the most generous of any political party, easily outstripping the Conservative Party's plan to top up the Strategic Aerospace and Defense Fund (SADI) and the Automotive Innovation Fund (AIF) by $200 million each over four years.

A Comparison of Subject and Institutional Repositories in Self-archiving Practices
Jingfeng Xia
The Journal of Academic Librarianship, November 2008

The disciplinary culture theory presumes that if a scholar has been familiar with self-archiving through an existing subject-based repository, this scholar will be more enthusiastic about contributing his/her research to an institutional repository than one who has not had the experience. To test the theory, this article examines self-archiving practices of a group of physicists in both a subject repository and an institutional repository. It does not find a correlation between a disciplinary culture and self-archiving practices. HTML

LibraryH3lp: A New Flexible Chat Reference System
Pam Sessoms and Eric Sessoms
The Code4Lib Journal, Issue 4, September 22, 2008

LibraryH3lp is an integrated IM and web chat system designed specifically for Virtual Reference services in libraries. The software was designed for, and is currently used by, a night-time chat reference collaboration between several large academic libraries. LibraryH3lp is designed for the workflow of chat reference, supporting multiple simultaneous operators and routing to queues of operators in a particular service area.
http://journal.code4lib.org/articles/107

Virtual Worlds? Outlook Good.
AJ Kelton
EDUCAUSE Review, September/October, 2008

The idea of synchronous interactive spaces is not new, of course. Chat rooms, MOOs, MUDs, and other multi-user online experiences have been on the periphery of education for decades. The 3D interactive environment Active Worlds has been around since 1997. Yet more recently,
the mass cultural appeal of Second Life has caused a tectonic shift. Add the fact that more virtual worlds today are for the under-eighteen crowd than for the over-eighteen users, and we begin to hear what could be the rumblings of a massive shift in the educational paradigm.
http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ERM0850.pdf

RESOURCES / RESSOURCES

Workforce Issues in Library and Information Science (WILIS)

Workforce Issues in Library and Information Science (WILIS) is a collaborative research project designed to study the educational, workplace, career and retention issues faced by library and information science (LIS) graduates. WILIS is a partnership of f the UNC School of Information and Library Science and the UNC Institute on Aging. Part 1 of the project will focus on graduates from North Carolina's six library and information science programs, building an in-depth understanding of career patterns using a life course perspective. Part 2 of the project will use the methods developed in Part 1 to generate a transferable model for career tracking of LIS graduates nationally, called WILIS 2.
http://www.wilis.unc.edu/

Waterloo Copyright FAQ
October 9, 2008

This online FAQ provides general information on the Canadian Copyright Act as it affects researchers' work at the University. The information is organized under six headings: Copyright Basics; Copyright in the Campus Classroom; Copyright in the Digital Classroom; Copyright in the Library (Reserves, Inter-library Loan and Photocopying); Copyright and Course Packs; Copyright Contacts and Resources.
http://www.lib.uwaterloo.ca/copyright/index.html

Digitisation Strategy 2008-2011
British Library, August 2008

Over the centuries, very many researchers have traveled to London to use the British Library’s collections. More recently, the advent of the Internet and the ability to digitise large quantities of text and images and make them available over the Web has transformed ways of working.
http://www.bl.uk/aboutus/stratpolprog/digi/digitisation/digistrategy/

Formal and Informal Technology Transfer from Academia to Industry: Complementarity Effects and Innovation Performance
Christoph Grimpe and Katrin Hussinger
Centre for European Economic Research, 2008

Literature has identified formal and informal channels in university technology transfer. While formal technology transfer typically involves a legal contract on a patent or on collaborative research activities, informal transfer channels refer to personal contacts and hence to the tacit dimension of knowledge transfer. Research is, however, scarce regarding the interaction of formal and informal transfer mechanisms. The authors of this paper analyze whether these activities are mutually reinforcing.
ftp://ftp.zew.de/pub/zew-docs/dp/dp08080.pdf

Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database
Elisabeth Grant
American Historical Association, September 24, 2008

From datasets to CD-ROM to online project, the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database was decades in the making. And it was time well spent. Voyages (the web site of the project) allows users to experience information on nearly 35,000 slave voyages through a clean and well-designed interface.
http://blog.historians.org/resources/613/trans-atlantic-slave-trade-database

Best Practices for the Customer-Focused Library
Metropolitan Library System [U.S.], August 2008

This study looked at customer behaviour in four Chicago area libraries (public and academic). Use of the library was measured by tracking customers' movements within a library, by questionnaires and by video tracking of traffic flow, wait times and transactions times. Some results are surprising - 56% of people spent less than 10 minutes in the library and two-thirds did not know what they wanted before they arrived. The first half of the report outlines these and other key findings in brief paragraphs, and the second half contains best practice solutions, including suggestions for libraries with no budget, low budget or high budgets.
http://www.webjunction.org/c/document_library/get_file?folderId=8052623&name=DLFE-1830002.pdf

Beyond the Silos of the LAMs Collaboration Among Libraries, Archives and Museums
Diane M. Zorich et al
OCLC Programs and Research, 2008

The project that forms the basis of this report began in 2007, when Research Libraries Group Programs initiated work on the program, Library, Archive and Museum Collaboration. The goal of the program was threefold: to explore the nature of library, archive and museum (LAM) collaborations, to help LAMs collaborate on common services, and to assist them in creating research environments better aligned with user expectations - to move beyond the often-mentioned silos of LAM resources which divide content into piecemeal offerings.
http://www.oclc.org/programs/publications/reports/2008-05.pdf

eBooks – the End User Perspective
Springer, 2008

eBooks form a growing part of the collections at research and academic libraries. Although still in the early stages of adoption, eBooks have demonstrated advantages in the areas of accessibility, functionality, and cost-effectiveness. End users are just beginning to incorporate eBooks into their information experience and research habits. Libraries are eager to learn more about the rate of eBook adoption among their end users and the ways in which users are interacting with eBooks. In 2007, Springer surveyed librarians at six institutions to understand their views on eBook adoption and benefits. In 2008, Springer followed up that study with a survey of end users at five institutions to gauge their usage of and attitudes toward eBooks.
http://www.springer.com/cda/content/document/cda_downloaddocument/eBooks+-+the+End+User+Experience?SGWID=0-0-45-608298-0

EVENTS / ÉVÉNEMENTS

Powering Innovation: a National Summit
Toronto, Ontario, November 3 and 4, 2008

ORION and CANARIE - Ontario’s and Canada’s advanced research, education and innovation networks – will hold a national Summit. Join distinguished Canadian and global leaders and innovators in science, research, education and information technology to discuss and showcase new and innovative technologies that are transforming the way we conduct research, collaborate, teach and learn.
http://www.canarieorionsummit.ca/

Profession Culture 2009 : appel à candidatures pour les professionnels étrangers

Les candidatures pour des séjours à la Bibliothèque nationale de France en 2009 dans le cadre du programme international d'accueil "Profession Culture" sont ouvertes. La date limite de réception des dossiers est le vendredi 28 novembre 2008. La commission de sélection se réunira à la mi-décembre 2008. Les séjours débuteront en janvier 2009.Ceux d'entre vous qui seraient intéressés par ce programme sont invités à adresser par messagerie leur candidature à jacques.faule@bnf.fr.
http://www.bnf.fr/pages/znavigat/frame/infopro.htm