E-Lert # 318 / Cyberavis no. 318

Friday March 20, 2009 / le vendredi 20 mars 2009

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CARL COMMUNIQUÉ / COMMUNIQUÉ DE L’ABRC

On March 18, 2009, the Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL) wrote a letter to the Right Honourable Stephen Harper, Prime Minister of Canada, expressing its grave concern about plans recently revealed by the National Research Council (NRC) that would see the budget of the Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (CISTI)—Canada’s national science library—cut by 50 percent, with another 20 percent removed as spin-offs of cost-recovery programs. (PDF ) The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) also expressed its serious concerns regarding the CISTI budget reductions in a letter to National Research Council Canada President Dr. Pierre Coulombe on March 12, 2009. (PDF )

L’Association des bibliothèques de recherche du Canada (ABRC) a envoyé une lettre le 18 mars 2009 au très honorable Stephen Harper, premier ministre du Canada, exprimant la grave préoccupation que suscitent les plans récemment révélés au Conseil national de recherches du Canada (CNRC) visant à réduire de 50 % le budget de l’Institut canadien de l’information scientifique et technique (ICIST)—la bibliothèque scientifique nationale du Canada—et d’une autre tranche de 20 % qui découle des programmes de recouvrement des coûts. (PDF ) L’Association of Research Libraries (ARL) a aussi exprimé ses graves préoccupations concernant les réductions du budget de l’ICIST dans une lettre au président du Conseil national de recherches Canada, M. Pierre Coulombe, le 12 mars 2009. (PDF , en anglais)

NEWS / NOUVELLES

MIT adopts a university-wide OA mandate
Open Access News, March 18, 2009

The MIT faculty unanimously adopted a university-wide OA mandate. Each Faculty member will now grant the Massachusetts Institute of Technology “nonexclusive permission to make available his or her scholarly articles and to exercise the copyright in those articles for the purpose of open dissemination.”*
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2009/03/mit-adopts-university-wide-oa-mandate.html

Recording industry slams Canada's 'out of date' laws
Vito Pilieci
Ottawa Citizen, March 18, 2009

Severely outdated copyright laws have opened the door for frivolous lawsuits in Canada, according to the Canadian Recording Industry Association. The association is responding to a recent petition in the British Columbia Supreme Court, in which a private company asked the court to decide whether search engines should be held accountable for the copy-protected content they find online.*
http://www.canada.com/Technology/Recording+industry+slams+Canada+date+laws/1403232/story.html

Harvard Kennedy School Faculty Votes for Open Access for Scholarly Articles
March 16, 2009

The faculty of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University voted overwhelmingly to make all faculty members’ scholarly, peer-reviewed article manuscripts publicly available online at no charge, to allow for the widest possible dissemination of faculty research and scholarship. This historic vote adds the Harvard Kennedy School to a growing list of faculties at the university to endorse Open Access by way of institutional repositories.*
http://www.hks.harvard.edu/news-events/news/press-releases/open-access-vote

Librarians Confront New Uncertainties Over Training and Jobs
Jennifer Howard
The Chronicle of Higher Education, March 16, 2009

How many academic librarians does the world need? More than it will likely have in a few years, as the baby-boom generation ages out of the work force, according to what has been the prevailing theory. However, the economic crisis may be changing that, and the job prospects and skills of tomorrow's librarians were hot topics at the 14th biannual conference of the Association of College and Research Libraries. *
http://chronicle.com/daily/2009/03/13690n.htm?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

Map of Knowledge
Nicholas Wade
The New York Times, March 14, 2009

Scientists have assembled a new map of knowledge at the research library of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. The map is based on electronic data searches in which users moved from one journal to another, thus establishing associations between them. The map includes both the sciences and the humanities in a hub and wheel arrangement, with the humanities at the center and the sciences arrayed around them. Research team leader Johan Bollen said the arrangement fell out naturally from the data and was not contrived.*
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/16/science/16visuals.html?_r=2

Mash-up doc argues that creativity begins where copyright ends
Guy Dixon
Globe and Mail, March 14, 2009

The director of a new documentary about mash-ups, legal bash-ups and the pile-up of issues surrounding copyright law knew he needed to exercise caution in using footage of Mickey Mouse. Film and documentary in particular, is a medium burdened by permissions and legal waivers at every turn. One risks being sued when using any picture or sound one does not own.*
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20090314.ARIP14/TPStory/TPEntertainment/Television/

Just Don’t Compare Kosmix to Google
Miguel Helft
The New York Times, March 14, 2009

A well-financed Silicon Valley start-up, KOSMIX, is described on blogs and news sites as a search engine that might rival Google. The notion vexes co-founders Venky Harinarayan and Anand Rajaraman as flattering as it sounds. It is not because other start-ups making similar assertions have fallen laughably short of the mark, but rather because they are creating something different from traditional Web search. For a key word or topic that a user enters, Kosmix gathers content from across the Web to build a kind of multimedia encyclopedia entry on the fly. For many queries, the results appear as if human editors, not a computer, have compiled them.*
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/15/business/15ping.html?th&emc=th

Government MPs form caucus on higher ed
Nick Taylor-Vaisey
University Affairs, March 9, 2009

Conservative MP Rod Bruinooge (Winnipeg South) recently convened a new postsecondary caucus of Conservative MPs. The caucus plans to meet monthly and engage in a variety of activities, including: meeting with university administrators and student groups; monitoring how the government meets the needs of the postsecondary sector; and providing advice to the ministers responsible for postsecondary issues to ensure that policy is effectively implemented.*
http://www.universityaffairs.ca/government-mps-form-caucus-on-higher-ed.aspx

CAUT Presses Government on Budget Research Shortfall
CAUT Bulletin, March, Volume 56, Number 3, March 2009

CAUT continues to voice concerns over the Conservative government’s under-funding of research provided through the granting councils, and the targeting of specific projects. It’s not just inadequate funding for basic research that many in the scientific community see as problematic, but also that the Conservatives are increasingly stipulating which research gets funded.*
http://www.cautbulletin.ca/

ARTICLES

Google & Books: An Exchange
Paul N. Courant et al
The New York Review of Books, Volume 56, Number 5, March 26, 2009

University Librarian and Dean of Libraries Paul N. Courant, at the University of Michigan, and others respond to Robert Darnton’s article Google and the Future of Books that appeared in the February 2009 edition of the New York Review of books. The article also includes a reply from Mr. Darnton.
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22496

Time to Change Our Thinking: Dismantling the Silo Model of Digital Scholarship
Stephen Nichols
Ariadne, Issue 58, January 2009

There is nothing exotic about digital humanities projects anymore. Nearly every humanities faculty has at least one. However, like humanities disciplines themselves, digital projects too often exist in isolation, each in their own sub-disciplinary silos. Whether they pursue online projects involving traditional or newer topics, teams of humanities scholars pursue their objectives independently more often than not. Neither the scholars nor the sites they create interact with one another in any meaningful way. Nichols makes a case for replacing the silo model of digital scholarship with collaborative ventures based on interoperability and critical comparison of content.*
http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue58/nichols/

Canadiana.org Bulletin
Volume 9, Number 1, February 2009

Covered in this issue: Canadiana.org Digital Collection Builder, an open-source application enabling libraries and other heritage institutions to make their unique digitized collections available to the world; a report on the OLA Superconference 2009; the Library and Archives Canada Survey: Digital Preservation Practices, and more.*
http://www.canadiana.org/pdf/en/bulletin_200902.pdf
[Bulletin en français: PDF ]

Canadian Journal of Higher Education Special Issue: Open Access in Higher Education

The increasing adoption of an Open Access approach to knowledge production and dissemination has presented the higher education community with a wide range of challenges and opportunities. The Canadian Journal of Higher Education (CJHE) endeavors to provide leadership in the field of higher education by fostering a dialogue on this multifaceted topic. Working titles and abstracts (1000 words) in either English or French are due March 31, 2009. Authors who are invited to submit papers will be notified by April 30, 2009. (PDF )

RESOURCES / RESSOURCES

ACRL 2009 Strategic Thinking Guide for Academic Librarians in the New Economy
Kathryn Deiss and Mary Jane Petrowski, March 2009

The ACRL 2009 Strategic Thinking Guide examines the effects of the current economic and financial turmoil on all of higher education. The current situation is critical according to Gordon Gee, president of The Ohio State University. Speaking at the American Council on Education annual meeting in February 2009, Mr. Gee issued a call for “intentional upheaval at our colleges and universities just when fiscal chaos already places us on the edge.” Our choice, he said, is between “reinvention or extinction.” Notable library leaders have, over the past decade, also called upon librarians to embrace systemic change.*
http://www.acrl.org/ala/mgrps/divs/acrl/issues/future/acrlguide09.pdf

Journal authors’ rights: perception and reality
Sally Morris
Publishing Research Consortium (PRC), 2009

It is regularly asserted that publishers’ agreements prevent journal authors from doing the things that they want, and ought, to do with their own article manuscripts; the way round this is for authors to retain copyright. An objective analysis of what authors say they want, what they think their agreements allow, and what publishers’ agreements actually allow, has been absent from discussions on scholarly communication. Morris attempts to provide this, by looking in detail at two major surveys: A survey of authors’ wishes and perception, and Scholarly Publishing Practice 3 (2008).*
http://www.publishingresearch.net/documents/JournalAuthorsRights.pdf

Synthèse de l'étude d'évaluation de l'expérimentation de la mise à disposition d'ouvrages sous droits via la bibliothèque numérique de la BnF Gallica 2
mars 2009

Depuis le Salon du Livre 2008, Gallica 2, la nouvelle version de la bibliothèque numérique de la Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF), signale des ouvrages de l'édition contemporaine soumis au droit d'auteur en complément de ses collections patrimoniales numérisées. L'accès en ligne, depuis un point d'entrée unique, à des documents patrimoniaux libres de droit consultables dans leur intégralité, et à des ouvrages de l'édition contemporaine dont le feuilletage d'extraits respecte strictement le droit des auteurs et des ayants-droits, constitue une première mondiale.*
http://www.bnf.fr/pages/dernmin/pdf/evaluation_gallica2.pdf

University of Manitoba Researchers Publish Open-Source Handbook on Educational Technology
Steve Kolowich
The Chronicle of Higher Education, March 19, 2009

Technology is changing the way students learn. To what extent is it changing teaching practices at colleges and universities? Not enough, according to George Siemens, associate director of research and development at the University of Manitoba’s Learning Technologies Centre. Mr. Siemens and Peter Tittenberger, director of the center, have created a Web-based guide, entitled the Handbook of Emerging Technologies for Learning, to inspire thinking about how professors might adapt their teaching styles and methods to the new ways students absorb and process information.*
http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/article/3671/u-of-manitoba-researchers-publish-open-source-handbook-on-educational-technology?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

DPC Response to Digital Britain: The Interim Report
March 2009

The Digital Preservation Coalition welcomed the government consultation and offered knowledge transfer between sectors as a way to promote long term access to digital content. Recommendations in the DPC’s response to the Digital Britain report include:

Greater clarity and consideration of digital legacy
Consideration of the long-term of digital content will deliver long-term competitive advantage to the UK economy
Greater collaboration between the producers of content and memory institutions charged with curating and preserving this generation's digital legacy
Greater knowledge transfer between the digital curation and preservation skills sector (such as DPC members) and the creative industries producing new digital content
http://www.dpconline.org/graphics/reports/digitalbritain.html

Media Cloud
Berkman Center for Internet & Society (Harvard University)

As print newspapers declare bankruptcy nationwide, high-profile blogs are proliferating. Media companies are exploring business models in an increasingly Internet-dominated landscape. It is difficult to know, in the midst of this upheaval, what is actually happening to the shape of our news. Media Cloud is as a working proof-of-concept, built and maintained by the Berkman Center, and can generate visual or textual results based on user queries. The system automatically assigns relevant terms for each story from a given news source. Terms, and the stories they describe, are then displayed in relation to the rest of the interconnected network of media sources.*
http://www.mediacloud.org/
[Reported in the Chronicle of Higher Education on March 11, 2009]

Measuring the Information Society - The ICT Development Index
International Telecommunications Union, 2009

The ICT Development Index captures the level of advancement of ICTs in more than 150 countries comparing progress made between 2002 and 2007. The report also measures the global digital divide with an analysis of its development in recent years, and features a new ICT Price Basket, which combines fixed, mobile and broadband tariffs for 2008 into one measure compared across countries. A series of statistical tables providing country-level data for all indicators included in the Index complement the 2009 ICT Development Index.*
http://www.itu.int/ITU-D/ict/publications/idi/2009/index.html

Brainify lets users share info resources
Harmeet Singh
University Affairs, March 9, 2009

Even though for many students and professors, the days of physically leafing through hundreds of books when conducting research is fading fast scholars still face the same essential challenge of finding the most reliable information resources. Computer science professor at the University of British Columbia and founder of WebCT Murray Goldberg seeks to make that search a little bit simpler. He has created Brainify.com, a social bookmarking site designed to help academics share high-quality internet resources.*
http://www.universityaffairs.ca/brainify-lets-users-share-info-resources.aspx

Enquête sur l’équipement et le marché de l’informatisation des bibliothèques
Livres Hebdo, Numéro 767, 6 mars 2009

Pour la quatorzième année consécutive, Livres Hebdo publie l’enquête réalisée par Marc Maisonneuve, chez Tosca Consultants, sur l’équipement et le marché de l’informatisation en bibliothèque. Comme l’an passé, l’enquête ne se contente pas de décrire seulement les systèmes de gestion informatique, mais l’ensemble des logiciels proposés aux bibliothèques, en particulier les systèmes de gestion de bibliothèques numériques et de ressources électroniques.*
http://www.livreshebdo.fr/cache/upload/pdf/enquete_tosca_2008.pdf

EVENTS / ÉVÉNEMENTS

2nd International PKP Scholarly Publishing Conference
Vancouver, British Columbia, July 8-10, 2009

This conference will provide opportunities for those involved in the organization, promotion, and study of scholarly communication to share ideas and discuss innovative work in scholarly publishing. One of the main themes will be the contribution that open source publishing technologies (such as, but not restricted to, PKP’s OJS, OCS, OMP, Lemon8-XML, and OA Harvester) can make to improving access to research and scholarship on a global and public scale.*
http://pkp.sfu.ca/ocs/pkp/index.php/pkp2009/pkp2009

Digital Libraries à la Carte 2009
Tilburg University, the Netherlands, 28 July - 5 August 2009

This event will include seven one-day modules. The themes of the modules centre on re-aligning and reaffirming research library services in the 21st Century: Strategic Developments and Library Management; Change - Making it Happen in Your Library; Tomorrow's Library Leaders; Integrated Search Solutions Toward Catalogue 2.0; Institutional Repositories - Preservation and Advocacy; Libraries and Research Data - Embracing New Content ; Libraries and Collaborative Research Communities. Information for each module is available on the course brochure.*
http://www.tilburguniversity.nl/services/lis/ticer/09carte/index.html

*Text adapted from source / Texte adapté de la source