As the scholarly publishing landscape heats up with more talk of boycotts and Open Access mandates, research libraries increasingly find themselves at a crossroads between publishers and faculty — and eagerly working to provide new solutions to entrenched problems.  The California Digital Library’s (CDL) latest foray into this space, on behalf of the University of California system, focuses on supporting open source publishing infrastructure through a major development partnership with the Public Knowledge Project (PKP). As a result of this agreement, the CDL will assist with PKP’s ongoing development and support of its open source software suite — Open Journal Systems (OJS), Open Conference SystemsRead More →

Press Release from ITHAKA: ITHAKA is pleased to announce that Dr. Deanna Marcum has accepted the position of Managing Director, Ithaka S+R, effective January 1, 2012. Deanna will lead this growing not-for-profit service, which provides research and strategic consulting services that help transform scholarship and teaching. Dr. Marcum brings a background of extraordinary accomplishment to her new role. She joins Ithaka S+R from the Library of Congress, where she was the Associate Librarian for Library Services. Previously, she served as the President of the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) and the Dean of the Catholic University School of Library and Information Science. AsRead More →

Save the Date – November 30, 2011 Repositories in Science & Technology: Preserving Access to the Record of Science A One-Day Workshop Co-sponsored by CENDI and NFAIS Hosted by FLICC at the Library of Congress The Mumford Room, Library of Congress, 101 Independence Avenue, SE,  Washington, DC 20540 Wednesday, November 30, 2011  *  9:00 am – 4:30 pm  * WHO SHOULD ATTEND? The over-arching nature of this one-day workshop will appeal to a broad array of communities, including librarians, scientists/researchers, technologists, information professionals, both managerial and content providers, publishers, and futurists – anyone who is concerned with ensuring access to the record of science, both today and in the future!Read More →

News The W3C Library Linked Data Incubator Group (http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/lld/) has been chartered from May 2010 through August 2011 to prepare a series of reports on the existing and potential use of Linked Data technology for publishing library data. The group is currently preparing: A report which consists of “Benefits” “Vocabularies and Datasets” “Relevant Technologies” “Implementation challenges” “Recommendations” “Use Cases”, a survey report describing existing projects “Vocabularies and Datasets”, a survey report The group invites comments from interested members of the public. Feedback can sent as comments to individual sections posted on the dedicated blog or by email to a public mailing list (public-lld@w3.org, archived atRead More →

The University of California Riverside’s California Digital Newspaper Collection (CDNC) is expanding to include weekly papers in searchable archive. The full news story from June 21, 2011 is “California Weekly Newspapers to be Preserved Online” and it’s online here. This is great news about the California Digital Newspaper Collection’s growth and success! Also, there is a minor point in the news story that I wanted to clarify. The news story notes: Libraries in Minnesota and Florida also are collecting PDFs of newspaper pages, but do not offer the ability to search text across titles, Geiger said. Software developed to process historical newspapers in the CaliforniaRead More →

According to a blog story from the Boston Phoenix, “Google abandons master-plan to archive the world’s newspapers“: Google told partners in its News Archive project that it would cease accepting, scanning, and indexing microfilm and other archival material from newspapers, and was instead focusing its energies on “newer projects that help the industry, such as Google One Pass, a platform that enables publishers to sell content and subscriptions directly from their own sites.” While the ending of any innovative project, especially one that shares historical information with the public is always sad news, there is a positive side to this. The positives mentioned in theRead More →

News on News from DigitalPreservation.gov: CRL Report Describes Digital Newspaper Production May 5, 2011 — Preserving News in the Digital Environment: Mapping the Newspaper Industry in Transition (PDF) was produced for the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program by a team from the Center for Research Libraries. This report provides a vivid glimpse inside the workplaces that produce what – not long ago – we would have called newspapers.  As digital news-gathering and production methods proliferate, and as digital avenues for distribution emerge, these workplaces are being transformed in profound ways, with electronic facsimiles and websites (and probably more) overtaking the paper format. The reportRead More →

The news item below is from the newslib list-serve. I’m posting it because it connects to the work being done at the Price Library of Judaica at the University of Florida to build a Newspaper Digital Collection from the Price Library of Judaica. One of the projects is to build the Price Library of Judaica Anniversary Collection, which represents the first stage of a project to digitize a unique and important collection of over 200 anniversary editions of Jewish newspapers held in the Isser and Rae Price Library of Judaica. These jubilee issues have never been catalogued by the Library and until now have remainedRead More →

30 YEARS AFTER HIS DEATH, ERIC WILLIAMS MEMORIAL COLLECTION CELEBRATES CENTENARY OF HIS BIRTH “He made us proud to be who we were, and optimistic, as never before, about what we were going to be, or could be.” Arnold Rampersad, Sara Hart Kimball Professor in the Humanities, Stanford University PORT OF SPAIN, TRINIDAD (March 19, 2011) – March 22, 2011 will usher in the 13th anniversary of the inauguration of The Eric Williams Memorial Collection (EWMC) at The University of the West Indies in Trinidad and Tobago, by former US Secretary of State, Colin L. Powell. Powell heralded the country’s first Prime Minister, who diedRead More →

More than 160 U. S. Newspapers have either quit business or stopped publishing a print edition during the past three years.  How can we make sure that a community’s history and cultural record does not cease to exist?  How can we make sure that digital news products currently being created by online news organizations are preserved and accessible for citizens and scholars in the twenty-second century? On April 10-12, 2011, a diverse group of stakeholders will meet here at the Reynolds Journalism Institute (University of Missouri, Columbia) to have a conversation about preserving news content.  We’re calling it the Newspaper Archive Summit:  Rescuing orphaned andRead More →