Citation
(2013), "New & Noteworthy", Library Hi Tech News, Vol. 30 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/lhtn.2013.23930daa.002
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2013, Emerald Group Publishing Limited
New & Noteworthy
Article Type: New & Noteworthy From: Library Hi Tech News, Volume 30, Issue 4
“From the Version of Record to a Version of the Record”: video from CNI meeting
The opening plenary from Coalition for Networked Information’s (CNI) Spring 2013 membership meeting, “From the Version of Record to a Version of the Record” by Herbert Van de Sompel, is now available on CNI’s two video channels.
In the past two decades, scholarly communication has evolved significantly to become mainly digital and network-based. This transition has brought along changes in the nature of the assets that are being communicated. The atomic and static PDF files of the early e-journals days are rapidly being replaced by bundles of dynamic and interdependent resources that are distributed across the web. These changes present technical challenges regarding information interoperability and long-term preservation, but they also yield broader challenges related to stewardship, access, the delineation of the scholarly record, and the very notion of the version of record. In the same time frame, both the web and our understanding of its architecture have evolved, which has motivated recent information interoperability efforts – OAI Object Reuse and Exchange, Memento, and ResourceSync – to look at technical challenges from a web-centric, instead of a repository-centric, perspective, possibly marking a trend to fully embrace the web as infrastructure for scholarly communication.
Links to Van de Sompel’s opening plenary presentation.
On YouTube: http://youtu.be/fhrGS-QbNVA
On Vimeo: http://vimeo.com/63941159
Look for more announcements soon on videos of other sessions from the Spring 2013 CNI meeting. To see all videos available from CNI, visit CNI’s video channels on YouTube (www.youtube.com/cnivideo) and on Vimeo (http://vimeo.com/channels/cni).
Publishers use Ingram’s CoreSource® for UK legal deposit e-book compliance
Ingram Content Group, Inc. recently announced that it has expanded its CoreSource® platform to include direct distribution to the British Library, making it easy for publishers to comply with UK legal deposit law.
“The principle of legal deposit has been well established for over four centuries, and has helped the British Library build an unrivalled collection of publishing,” said Andrew Davis, Legal Deposit & Digital Acquisitions Manager at the British Library. “Through new legal deposit regulations, we are now beginning to build a comprehensive library of electronic publications, and we are pleased that the Ingram® CoreSource platform will help us achieve that.”
By law, a copy of every UK print publication must be given to the British Library by its publishers, and to five other major libraries that request it. This system is called legal deposit and has been a part of English law since 1662. From 6 April 2013, legal deposit also covers material published digitally and online, so that the legal deposit libraries can provide a national archive of the UK’s non-print published material, such as web sites, blogs, e-journals and CD-ROMs. The legal deposit libraries are: the British Library, the National Library of Scotland, the National Library of Wales, the Bodleian Libraries, Oxford, the University Library, Cambridge, and the Library of Trinity College, Dublin.
Ingram has developed a distribution option within its CoreSource platform to allow publishers to seamlessly submit content to the British Library and comply with e-book submission legal requirements. Many publishers use the CoreSource platform for digital asset management in the UK, and Taylor & Francis and Kogan Page will be among the first to use the platform to furnish the British Library with e-book content. The British Library intends to work with up to 25 UK e-book publishers in 2013 as it begins to scale up digital collecting under the digital legal deposit regulations.
The CoreSource platform from Ingram is an easy-to-use, online solution for storing, managing, and distributing digital content. The platform delivers a secure, searchable content repository and a high-capacity data distribution network, allowing publishers to move digital content easily and swiftly from their organization to any channel partner or organization globally.
For more information on legal deposit: www.bl.uk/aboutus/legaldeposit/introduction/
More about Ingram’s CoreSource: www.ingramcontent.com/pages/digital-asset-management-distribution.aspx
Amazon.com acquires Goodreads
Amazon.com, Inc. has announced that it has reached an agreement to acquire Goodreads, a leading site for readers and book recommendations that helps people find and share books they love.
“Amazon and Goodreads share a passion for reinventing reading,” said Russ Grandinetti, Amazon Vice President, Kindle content. “Goodreads has helped change how we discover and discuss books and, with Kindle, Amazon has helped expand reading around the world. In addition, both Amazon and Goodreads have helped thousands of authors reach a wider audience and make a better living at their craft. Together we intend to build many new ways to delight readers and authors alike.”
“Books – and the stories and ideas captured inside them – are part of our social fabric,” said Otis Chandler, Goodreads CEO and Co-founder. “People love to talk about ideas and share their passion for the stories they read. I’m incredibly excited about the opportunity to partner with Amazon and Kindle. We’re now going to be able to move faster in bringing the Goodreads experience to millions of readers around the world. We’re looking forward to inspiring greater literary discussion and helping more readers find great books, whether they read in print or digitally.”
Following the acquisition, Goodreads’s headquarters will remain in San Francisco, CA. Founded in 2007, Goodreads now has more than 16 million members and there are more than 30,000 books clubs on the Goodreads site. Over just the past 90 days, Goodreads members have added more than four books per second to the “want to read” shelves on Goodreads.
Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. Subject to various closing conditions, the acquisition is expected to close in the second quarter of 2013.
More about Goodreads: www.goodreads.com/about/us
Elsevier acquires Mendeley research management and social collaboration platform
Elsevier, a world-leading provider of scientific, technical and medical information products and services, has announced the acquisition of Mendeley, a London-based company that operates a global research management and collaboration platform. Researchers worldwide use Mendeley’s desktop and cloud-based tools to manage and annotate documents, create citations and bibliographies, collaborate on research projects and network with fellow academics.
“Mendeley is an innovative company with great culture, talent and collaborative spirit, and we will keep it that way,” said Olivier Dumon, Managing Director of Academic and Government Research Markets at Elsevier. “Not only that, but together we intend to scale and evolve Mendeley in ways that benefit the entire research community. We will provide greater access to content, data, and analytics tools to Mendeley’s users and its flourishing third-party app ecosystem, all of which will enable us to increase both Elsevier’s and Mendeley’s engagement with researchers.”
“Our vision is to make science more collaborative and open, and now we have the support of the world’s largest science information provider, whose resources will enable us to accelerate our progress towards this vision,” said Victor Henning, PhD, Co-founder and CEO of Mendeley. “Above all, we will remember what has made Mendeley a success: ensuring that everything we do makes our users’ lives easier.”
Launched in late 2008, Mendeley was the brainchild of three PhD students wanting an easier way to manage their research papers and collaborate with colleagues overseas. They developed a desktop app that could automatically extract metadata and keywords from PDFs, thus turning loose collections of PDFs into structured, searchable research paper databases that were synchronized to the cloud.
From the start, they were thrilled by the idea that this crowd-sourced data would allow Mendeley to analyse research trends across academic disciplines in real time, show readership statistics for individual research papers, connect researchers with similar interests and generate research paper recommendations based on collaborative filtering.
To welcome Mendeley’s individual users, Elsevier is increasing the product’s Freemium offer. The free storage level has expanded from 1 to 2 GB, and the amount of storage provided in the premium levels has expanded as well. For institutions, the Mendeley Institutional Edition (MIE) will continue to be available. MIE is a tool that helps universities analyse research activity in real time, complementing the traditional impact factor system of academic citations. It also enables librarians to extract more value from resources by optimizing their subscriptions and providing a better service to their researchers by tracking which journals are being read by faculty and students.
This union extends a history of collaboration between the two companies that began in 2009. For example, Elsevier has referred users to Mendeley, invited Mendeley to build apps on ScienceDirect using its open APIs, and sponsored Mendeley’s Science Online London conferences on Open Science.
More information and updates on this news can be found on Elsevier Connect, Elsevier’s online community, and on the Mendeley blog.
Elsevier Connect (blog): http://elsevierconnect.com/elsevier-welcomes-mendeley/
Q&A from the Mendeley blog: http://blog.mendeley.com/press-release/qa-team-mendeley-joins-elsevier/
Credo adds text to speech through partnership with ReadSpeaker
Credo, an industry leader for information skills solutions, has announced it is integrating technology from ReadSpeaker, a world leader in online text to speech, into its Literati solutions. ReadSpeaker’s text-to-speech technology is one of many recent additions to the innovative learning technologies that Literati combines with authoritative scholarly content and customizable services to help libraries do more.
The new text-to-speech technology is now available to the growing number of libraries that subscribe to Literati Public, the SIIA CODiE 2013 winner for Best General Reference Service. Text to speech will soon be added to Literati Academic, a CODiE award finalist for Best Education Reference Solution, as well as to Literati School and Literati Student Athlete, which were both launched earlier this year.
“At Credo, we’re focused on making authoritative information accessible to all users. Text to speech removes barriers for auditory learners, learners who are visually impaired and those who are learning English as a second language,” said Carol Helton, Credo’s Executive Vice President of Marketing and Customer Solutions. “ReadSpeaker pioneered online text to speech in 1999, so we are very excited to leverage their experience, expertise and technologies to make Literati an even stronger solution for libraries and the diverse user base that they serve.”
“Literati is unique in that it helps individuals hone information skills that transfer beyond the classroom to the workplace and everyday life,” said Joop Heijenrath, ReadSpeaker Co-founder and responsible for ReadSpeaker’s business operations. “We are proud to partner with Credo to enhance Literati and support such an important mission.”
Earlier this year ReadSpeaker announced the addition of several new features to its popular document-reading solution ReadSpeaker docReader.
Support for ePub, PowerPoint, and Excel documents has been added. ReadSpeaker docReader can now provide document reading for the following formats: ePub (.epub); Microsoft Excel (.xls, .xlsx); Microsoft PowerPoint (.pps, .ppt, .pptx); Microsoft Word (.doc, .docx); OpenOffice/OpenDocument Presentation (.odp); OpenOffice/OpenDocument Spreadsheet (.ods); OpenOffice/OpenDocument Text (.odt); and Portable Document Format (.pdf).
New languages have been added, such as Faroese and Arabic. Text can now be read either left to right, right to left, or both directions if a document has text in both a left-to-right language and a right-to-left language and if the chosen voice is able to handle mixed languages.
More about ReadSpeaker: www.readspeaker.com/
WorldCat Live! API enables developers to incorporate live WorldCat data
The WorldCat Live! API provides a real-time stream of newly added records of library collections and published materials to WorldCat, the world’s largest online database for discovery of library resources. The API is an RSS feed that can be filtered and parameterized to return the records in a variety of formats.
Developed rapidly by OCLC Research’s Innovation Lab in response to a user’s request, the WorldCat Live! API is freely available under the Open Data Commons Attribution License (plain language summary). Examples of its current uses include a Python module for interacting with the WorldCat Live! API by Ed Summers; Highscores, a retro arcade game for original cataloging performed daily, by Ed Summers and Sean Hannan; and the WorldCat Live! Visualization Interface created by the Innovation Lab.
The Innovation Lab’s WorldCat Live! Visualization Interface provides three interactive visualizations of the WorldCat Live! API data. The first visualization is geographic, it displays where OCLC members are adding items to WorldCat in real-time around the globe. This “geography” visualization displays clusters on a world map that can zoom into the institution level where individual pins can be selected to view the institution’s name. The second and third visualizations track language and formats by displaying colored bubbles that grow as new items are added. The “language” visualization displays the languages of the item currently being added, and the “format” display shows the formats of the items being added, such as book, journal or map.
The Innovation Lab is the technology-based incubator that infuses innovation into all aspects of the OCLC cooperative to help it become more agile and responsive to library needs. It does this by creating experimental services to discover and learn from new ways to share data, cooperate, and grow the community. The Innovation Lab provides an important source of expertise, development and consultation and welcomes users’ ideas and feedback at innovation@oclc.org.
WorldCat Live! API: http://experimental.worldcat.org/xwwg/
Innovation Lab home: www.oclc.org/research/innovationlab.html
Ringgold launches ProtoView: enhanced metadata creation and dissemination
Ringgold has announced a new service for publishers which simplifies the process of creating and disseminating comprehensive metadata for web-scale discovery and demand-driven acquisition. ProtoView puts quality book, e-book and database information in the hands of end-users at the point of use and purchase.
ProtoView is a cost effective, single source solution for publishers to enhance content discoverability. It includes the creation of standards compliant, enriched and normalized metadata about each title which is fed directly into the scholarly supply chain, including discovery services, aggregators, and vendors.
Publishers provide Ringgold with their content, either in print or online, along with any existing metadata. Ringgold’s professional writers produce an objective and keyword-rich summary of each title. Ringgold builds an extensive metadata record from MARC records, original research, standard identifiers and our authoritative Identify database. Records are distributed in accepted industry standard formats to our network of licensees.
All metadata is also provided on ProtoView.com. This fully searchable web site was designed for librarians and patrons to search and browse, and to set new title alerts according to their interests.
Laura Cox, Chief Marketing Officer of Ringgold said: “We are excited to announce this new service, which we believe is timely given the rapidly changing discovery and acquisition environment. Our aim is to help publishers gain the most from these new landscapes and maximize exposure to their content. ProtoView has been developed from existing services acquired in 2012 and reinvented as a next generation promotional service for scholarly content.”
ProtoView home: www.protoview.com/
EPUB specification for indexes now available for public comment
The American Society for Indexing (ASI) has announced that the draft version of the EPUB specification for indexes is now available for public comment. The draft includes examples of encoded indexes and an Appendix with suggestions as to how publishers and reading systems might use this structured data to provide a better experience for the user.
Although indexes are highly useful specialized navigational tools, in e-books to date they have often been inadequately implemented or left out entirely. Indexes make the content within publications more accessible, and the EPUB standard has the potential to make indexes even more useful by providing access to them from all parts of a publication, by integrating them with other navigation approaches such as search, and by making possible novel means of access that are not possible with print books (e.g. filtering of an index to show only figure references, or display of all index entries applied to a selected range of text).
This draft is the culmination of efforts that began in October of 2011, when ASI spearheaded the creation of an EPUB Indexes Working Group within the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF). The Working Group currently includes representatives of other indexing associations as well as publishers, reading system developers, invited experts and other interested parties. The group’s charter was to develop and define a consistent way of encoding the structure and content of indexes in EPUB publications. Reading systems can exploit this encoding to offer not only the benefits of a print index but also interactive functionality and features not possible in a print book.
EPUB Indexes 1.0 (draft): www.idpf.org/epub/idx/epub-idx-20130307.html
NISO publishes recommended practice on presentation and identification of e-journals
The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) announces the publication of a new recommended practice: PIE-J: presentation and identification of e-journals (NISO RP-16-2013). This recommended practice was developed to provide guidance on the presentation of e-journals – particularly in the areas of title presentation, accurate use of International Standard Serial Number (ISSN), and citation practices – to publishers and platform providers, as well as to solve some long-standing concerns of serials, collections, and electronic resources librarians. The recommendations ensure long-term online accessibility to scholarly journals even after title and publisher changes.
In addition to the recommendations, the document includes extensive examples of good practices using screenshots from various publishers’ online journals platforms; a discussion of helpful resources for obtaining title history and ISSN information; an overview of the ISSN and key points for using it correctly; an explanation of the digital object identifier (DOI®), the registration agency CrossRef, and tips on using DOIs for journal title management; and a review of related standards and recommended practices.
“Citations form the basis for much scholarly research. Unless journal websites accurately and uniformly list all the titles under which content was published, user access to desired content is considerably diminished,” explains Cindy Hepfer, Continuing E-Resource Management and Cataloging Librarian at the State University of New York at Buffalo and Co-chair of the NISO PIE-J Working Group. “For example, many e-journal publishers and aggregators now place digitized content originally published under an earlier title on the website for the current title, using the current ISSN, thus seriously impeding the researcher’s ability to find or identify the content being sought. The PIE-J project was initiated to address these issues.”
“The publishers and providers of e-journals take great pride in the diverse designs of their websites,” states Bob Boissy, Manager, Account Development & Strategic Alliances at Springer and Co-chair of the NISO PIE-J Working Group. “Yet how these websites present, identify, and link together the publications that they display can make the end-users’ task of discovering articles and accessing them easy, frustrating, or completely fruitless. Application of the PIE-J recommended practice guidelines will result in improved discovery and access that will benefit researchers, authors, librarians, online providers, and publishers.”
“The PIE-J Recommended Practice provides a clear and succinct list of guidelines that publishers can easily implement to facilitate long-term access to their e-journal content,” declares Todd Carpenter, NISO Executive Director. “This constructive advice will aid publishers with the presentation of born-digital content as well as supporting the continued digitization of content from journals originally published only in print.”
The PIE-J Recommended Practice and a brochure summarizing the recommendations are available from the NISO PIE-J workroom web site at: www.niso.org/workrooms/piej/
COUNTER considers Ringgold’s new subject taxonomy for classifying journals
Ringgold, Inc. has announced the publication of its new subject taxonomy, Ringgold Subjects, and that the new taxonomy is being considered for adoption by COUNTER for use in classifying journals for the journal usage factor (JUF).
Ringgold has engaged with its customers to develop a suitable and granular subject taxonomy to classify the subject interests of institutions over the last year. It undertook detailed research and a lengthy consultation process with publishers, which resulted in a widely accepted subject taxonomy that meets publishers’ needs in mapping their content to the subject interests of institutions.
COUNTER has been developing the JUF since 2007 in consultation with a large number of industry leaders, and with publishers participating in a number of project phases. The draft code of compliance for the JUF is available on the COUNTER web site for the purpose of public consultation.
Peter Shepherd, COUNTER Director, said “We have explored a number of subject taxonomies for the classification of journals within the JUF and have found Ringgold’s Subjects to be the best fit, with the most international approach, widest coverage and least geographical bias”.
Ringgold will be applying the Ringgold subjects to its institutional database of over 350,000 institutional entities, by assessing their products, services, research interests and departmental structure. This is part of a larger re-classification of Ringgold’s identify database that will be rolled out in phases over the next two years. The subject element of the re-classification has been published on the Ringgold web site and is openly available for use by all.
JUF home: www.projectcounter.org/usage_factor.html
Draft code of compliance for the JUF: www.projectcounter.org/documents/Draft_UF_R1.pdf
Ringgold subjects: www.ringgold.com/pages/subjects.html
Mellon grant awarded to NISO to encode e-resource license templates in ONIX-PL
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded the NISO a grant to support the encoding of a collection of template licenses for e-resources into the ONIX for Publications Licenses (ONIX-PL) format. The encodings will be deposited into the GOKb and KB+ knowledgebase for free distribution to the library, publishing, and library systems community. The deposited encodings – made available under a Creative Commons Public Domain (CC-0) license – will allow libraries that license electronic content to import the template licenses into their own electronic resource management systems for further local customization to match their negotiated license and implementation. The project will also fund publicly available training resources that will inform community members on how to use those encodings for their own purposes.
Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) Collections, a division of the UK’s JISC that manages electronic content acquisitions for member institutions of higher learning in the UK, has already encoded all of the licenses for JISC Collections-subscribed content and deposited them in their KnowledgeBase Plus (KB+) database. While KB+ has proven a useful tool for institutions in the UK, it has not moved beyond this venue because the encodings produced by the JISC Collections are restricted to JISC members’ usage. To encourage ONIX-PL adoption and the use of encoded licenses, JISC Collections provided additional funding to support the project and provide training in the encoding format and the ONIX-PL editing software.
“The Global Open Knowledgebase (GOKb) is an element of the larger Kuali OLE initiative to provide open source management systems to the library and academic communities,” explains Nettie Lagace, NISO’s Associate Director for Programs. “Now that the GOKb system is rapidly advancing, there is an opportunity to populate the system with useful library management information, such as these template license encodings. Much like the success that the KB+ project has had in the UK, the GOKb project has the potential to advance the state of library encodings in the broader library community.”
“NISO has contracted with Selden Lamoureux to obtain the template licenses, encode them in ONIX-PL format, and deposit the files in the GOKb and KB+ knowledgebases,” states Todd Carpenter, NISO’s Executive Director. “Selden has a long career working with electronic resource management issues, licensing, and license encoding as Electronic Resources Librarian at both North Carolina State University (NCSU) and at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She was instrumental in developing the NISO SERU (Shared Electronic Resource Understanding) Recommended Practice, was a key leader in NISO’s work while she was at NCSU, and served as Co-chair of NISO’s SERU initiative.”
“ONIX-PL is elegant but very complex, since it’s designed to describe the nuances of licenses which are extremely variable,” explains Selden Lamoureux, Principle at SDLinforms and the consultant for this project. “The use of the ONIX-PL standard to encode e-resource licenses has suffered from a ‘Catch-22’ situation. Publishers and librarians have little incentive to invest the time and effort to become proficient at ONIX-PL encoding until there is a demonstrated benefit. Systems developers have not prioritized implementation of ONIX-PL formatted licenses in ERM systems because there was no source of encoded licenses to import. The creation and availability of these template licenses will encourage the use and adoption of the ONIX-PL standard, which, in turn, will lead to greater ease and efficiencies in managing e-resources.”
“To ensure the use of these encodings and ongoing sustainability of the project, NISO will be producing at least four recorded 60-to-90-minute video training sessions,” states Juliana Wood, NISO Educational Programs Manager. “The training will show librarians how to export a template license from GOKb+, import it into an ERM system, and customize the template to match an organization’s specific license terms. Some training will be directed towards publishers, explaining how to encode using ONIX-PL and deposit those encodings into GOKb and KB+. Thus, publishers will be able to update their own template licenses as needed.
The training materials will be available from the NISO website under a Creative Commons Attribution license (CC BY).”
More information, including the project proposal, is available on the NISO web site at:
www.niso.org/workrooms/onixpl-encoding/
JHOVE2 format characterization tool Version 2.1.0 released
The JHOVE2 development community has announced the release of Version 2.1.0 of the open-source JHOVE2 format characterization tool.
JHOVE2 is an open source next-generation application and framework for format-aware characterization of digital objects. JHOVE2 is the successor to JHOVE, the original characterization system developed by Harvard University and JSTOR Electronic Archiving Initiative (now known as Portico). The JHOVE2 project aims to build on the success of JHOVE and to offer significant new features. The JHOVE2 project generalizes the concept of format characterization to include identification, validation, feature extraction, and policy-based assessment. The target of this characterization is not a simple digital file, but a (potentially) complex digital object that may be instantiated in multiple files.
Version 2.1.0 of JHOVE2 includes three new format modules, one new identifier module, one new displayer module, and several bug fixes and enhancements from the issues page on the JHOVE2 Wiki.
The new format modules included in this release are for the ARC, WARC, and GZIP formats.
The new identifier module uses the UNIX “file” utility, giving JHOVE2 users the choice of employing either DROID or file for identification of file formats.
The new XSLDisplayer module (which extends XMLDisplayer) can do XSLT transformations on the XML output before displaying it.
This release also reflects a new milestone in the JHOVE2 development community. The new format and identifier modules are the contribution of developers from institutions (Bibliothéque Nationale de France and NETARKIVET.DK) beyond the original project participants (California Digital Library, Portico, and Stanford University Libraries).
For detailed information about the release, and for information about configuring JHOVE2 to use the new identifier module, see the release notes at: https://bitbucket.org/jhove2/main/downloads
The JHOVE2 development community welcomes all interested members of the preservation community to contribute to improving and extending the JHOVE2 tool.
JHOVE2 development community: www.jhove2.org
Newspaper digitisation in European libraries: the Europeana Newspapers project
What is the extent of newspaper digitisation in European libraries? As part of the Europeana Newspapers project, which aims to aggregate and refine newspaper content to the freely accessible online service Europeana, The European Library undertook a survey to identify and analyse all newspaper collections digitized by national, research and public libraries in Europe by 2012. A series of 12 questions was circulated with a focus on newspaper titles and time range, metadata in use, data distribution capabilities, and quality of digitisation including the technologies used for refinement. The survey also helped identify new potential partners. The most important findings of the survey are set out below:
Access to digitised newspapers is nearly always free of charge: Of the 47 respondents, at least 40 (85 percent) offered free access to their digitised newspapers. Only one library had pay per view, whilst another three offered subscription services for users (i.e. paid access per day or per month). Only four libraries licensed their newspaper contents to other groups (e.g. schools and universities).
Access to twentieth-century content remains problematic: over half of the surveyed libraries (27 out of 47; 57 percent) have a cutoff date beyond which they will not publish digitised newspapers on the web. Most frequently, this is based on a 70 year sliding scale, meaning that content after 1942 is inaccessible in digital form. 23 percent (11 out of 47) had an agreement with a rights organisation so that in-copyright digitised newspapers could be published. However, this tended to be restricted to individual titles rather than collective agreements for complete collections.
There is still much to be done to exploit the richness of digitised newspaper content: 36 percent (17 out of 47) of the surveyed libraries have not used any form of optical character recognition (OCR) on their digitised newspaper content, meaning that searching through the full text of newspaper content is not possible. And while 64 percent have used OCR, only 17 of the libraries (36 percent) exposed the resulting full text to the viewer, indicating that they had reservations about the quality of the OCRed text. There were also low numbers (36 percent) for those that had undertaken zoning and segmentation and only six libraries (13 percent) had included features such as facetted browsing or extracting entities such as place or name.
The Europeana Newspaper project will extend its network. Associated partners and network partners will be able to attend project workshops, information days and relevant meetings and are asked to provide content to the Europeana Foundation. During the survey, 35 libraries indicated they wished to be considered as associate partners. Guided by a series of principles from the survey, the General Assembly approved of the following 11 associate partners: National Library of Czech Republic; National Library of Wales; National and University Library Ljubljana, Slovenia; National Library of Portugal; National and University Library of Iceland; National Library of Spain; National and University Library Zagreb, Croatia; National Library of Belgium; St Cyril and Methodius National Library, Bulgaria; National Library of Luxembourg; and Lucian Blaga Central University Library, Cluj-Napoca, Romania.
Europeana Newspapers Survey Report: http://tinyurl.com/newspapers-survey-report
Europeana Newspapers Project home: www.europeana-newspapers.eu/
Papers, presentations from Research Data Management Implementations Workshop
The Research Data Management Implementations Workshop (RDMI), organized by a planning team from the University of Chicago and supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) in collaboration with the Coalition for Academic Scientific Computation (CASC), was held 13-14 March 2013 in Arlington, VA. RDMI brought together research computing communities and leading experts in data management to discuss actual implementation architectures as they relate to discipline-specific workflows and deployments.
Position and experience papers and speaker presentations from RDMI describe implementations of discipline-based data management infrastructure and services, and the ways in which those solutions leverage resources within and outside their institutions. The workshop also engaged participants in a discussion of how a coordinated effort among research computing centers may accelerate the implementation of effective research data management workflows, and contribute to national efforts and initiatives.
Building on the results of the NSF-funded Research Data Lifecycle Management Workshop held at Princeton University in 2011, RDMI shifted focus to implementations of solutions and encouraged open discussion of available strategies for data management in specific fields based on actual case studies. Speaker presentations, experience and position papers, and a recorded webcast of the RDMI workshop are now available on the workshop web site.
Presentations: https://rdmi.uchicago.edu/page/speaker-presentations
Experience and position papers: https:// rdmi.uchicago.edu/page/experience-position-papers-1
Webcast recording: https://rdmi.uchicago.edu/page/recorded-webcast
Weave: The Journal of Library User Experience
Matthew Reidsma, Web Services Librarian, Grand Valley State University Libraries, has announced the launch of an open-access, peer-reviewed journal for library user experience professionals – Weave: The Journal of Library User Experience (WeaveUX).
From Reidsma’s blog: “Libraries now provide services rather than collections, and so the experience of library users is more important than ever. While new jobs are being created for User Experience librarians and Circulation departments are being renamed ‘User Experience’ Teams, there is still no comprehensive, rigorous publication for Library UX professionals to share with and learn from their colleagues. Weave UX helps practitioners and theorists come together to make libraries better.”
WeaveUX is currently looking for library UX professionals interested in getting involved as peer or book reviewers. A call for proposals is forthcoming, for the first issue later this year.
Weave: the Journal of Library User Experience: http://weaveux.org/
Contact Weave UX: hello@weaveux.org, or follow @WeaveUX on Twitter.