Humanities and digitisation
David Mattison, in The Digital Humanities Revolution (Searcher; May
2006, vol 14 issue 5, p 25-34), writes on the digitisation of teaching in
the humanities, driven by new media, computer-based educational technology,
digital library collections, open access, digital collaborative scholarship
through the Internet and Web, digital institutional repositories, online
learning, digital preservation, online computer games, and new alliances
between IT specialists, humanities scholars and librarians.
Humanities on the internet
Dennis Dillon, in Internet Reference Sources in the Humanities (The
Reference Librarian, 91/92 2005:161-174), discusses collection development
for humanities’ Internet resources and highlights a few of the major
Internet vendors and resources. Web:
http://www.haworthpressinc.com
Metrics in the arts and humanities
Malcolm Gillies, promoting the Council of Humanities Arts and Social
Sciences’ report Measures of Quality and Impact in a CHASS media
release, asserted that metrics are best used only as part of a case for
excellence in various fields. He says the renewed emphasis upon metrics in
British research assessment is causing great anxiety for many
vice-chancellors in Britain and fears of an erosion of funding in arts,
humanities and social science fields. Web: http://www.chass.org.au
CLOCKSS
The Library of Congress, through the National Digital Information
Infrastructure and Preservation Program, has entered into a three-year
agreement with Stanford University to provide approximately US$700,000 in
support of Stanford’s CLOCKSS (Controlled Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe)
digital archive pilot and related projects. Stanford will match the grant.
CLOCKS takes advantage of open source software developed by Stanford under
the LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe) program, based on the perceived
need for libraries to capture multiple copies of digital information in
online repositories to safeguard against their unexpected disappearance.
CLOCKSS is a development to build “a trusted, large-scale, dark archive”. No
single organisation in the collaborative project controls the archive or has
the power to compromise the content's long-term safety or integrity. Access
to archived content will be granted in response to a trigger event (for
example, when content is orphaned or abandoned by its owner or subject to
long-term business interruption), and reviewed by a group of people working
on behalf of the broader community. Any content that is made accessible
after a trigger event will be made available to all. Web:
http://www.lockss.org/clockss
Digital collaboration
Robin Yeates and Damon Guy, in Collaborative Working for Large
Digitisation Projects (Program, vol 40 no 2, 2006: 137-156), explore the
effectiveness of large-scale consortia for disseminating local heritage in
the UK via the Internet. They say that staff in local government libraries,
archives and museums have, until recently, lacked experience in major web
site publishing and basic digitisation of locally held heritage materials.
Local governments in England have traditionally co-operated within the
library or museum sectors, but not across the whole domain. They report on a
consortium formed to develop a major website and facilitate cross searching
of partner materials. The process has highlighted the importance of shared
values, common objectives, a practical approach to service delivery and the
documentation of operational experiences in situations where operational
staff have multiple responsibilities. Web:
http://www.emeraldinsight.com/prog.htm
Distributed libraries
The Digital Library Federation has published a substantial report,
Contexts and Contributions: Building the Distributed Library by Martha
L. Brogan, comments on major developments in scholarly communication and
digital libraries and evaluates the shifting landscape. The report closes
with a summary of ten imperatives for successful services, an extensive
bibkliography and a comparison of top 20 OAIster and ROAR Archives,
including Picture Australia, the State Library of Victoria OAI Repository
and National Library of Australia Digital Object Repository. Web:
http://purl.org/dlf/pubs/dlf106/
Mass digitisation and information policy
The US National Commission on Libraries and Information Science has
published Mass Digitization: Implications for Information Policy, a
report based on the symposium Scholarship and Libraries in Transition: A
Dialogue about the Impacts of Mass Digitization Projects, held at the
University of Michigan in March 2006. The report concludes that several
areas need development: (1) copyright law needs to be updated; (2) quality
and authentication need to be improved and preserved; (3) libraries need to
cooperate more to focus their projects on unique and rare materials; (4)
libraries have the responsibility to keep collections and preserve them for
the long term, but governments have the responsibility to preserve public
documents in perpetuity; (5) standards for interoperability and
cross-searching of digital repositories are needed to avoid silos that
cannot communicate with each other; (6) value added by publishers and
booksellers needs to be preserved, especially where they are addressing the
needs of targeted audiences; (7) alternatives to the advertiser model, such
as the open access model, need to be explored, especially in regard to
sustainability; (8) students’ and scholars’ information literacy skills need
to be improved; and (9) coordinated ongoing assessment and market research
is needed in order to understand changing user needs and preferences. Web:
http://www.nclis.gov.
Microsoft book-scan project
Candace Lombardi, in UC System Signs on to Microsoft Book-Scan Project (CNET
News.com, 9 June 2006) reports on the decision by the University of
California System and University of Toronto Libraries to allow Microsoft to
digitise out-of-copyright books and other material from their collections.
In contrast to Google Book Search, Windows Live Book Search takes an
"opt-in" approach to digitising works still under copyright through its
Windows Live Books Publisher Program. Google’s scanning of excerpts from
in-copyright books without permission — on the grounds that the program is
justified under fair use provisions — has attracted law suites from authors
and publishers.
Word Digital Library
In December 2006, UNESCO and the Library of Congress launched the World
Digital Library, which is to be developed as “an internet-based repository
of knowledge from all cultures and in all languages”. The December meeting
discussed the first phase of the project — establishing a network of experts
and partners to work on the project, developing a prototype website, and
digitising unique and rare material with the aim of promoting international
and inter-cultural understanding, expanding non-English and non-Western
content on the Internet, and contributing to scholarship. Web://portal.unesco.org
Australian collections
The Collections Council of Australia has embarked on a number of projects to
develop collaborative management of libraries, archives, museums and
galleries in Australia. Its Conservation Survey 2006, a report into human
and financial resources in Australian conservation and preservation,
concluded that there is a shortage of funds for collecting organisations to
achieve a range of reasonable conservation and preservation goals, a
shortage in the availability and suitability of conservation and
preservation workers, and the probability that shortages of skilled
conservation staff will intensify. Faced with competing demands of
deteriorating collections, increased public access, and rapid technological
change, it has recommended the development of integrated education, training
and workforce planning by the four domains, promoting needs to appropriate
stakeholders, and further research. Reports on a proposed Australian digital
collections framework, Australian collection facilities and collections, and
regional hubs are expected in 2007. Web:
http://www.collectionscouncil.com.au
Australian innovation and science
The Australian Productivity Commission has invited comment on its draft
report Public Support for Innovation and Science. Among key findings:
(1) Australia is well served by its public funding support for science and
innovation.— $6 billion in 2002-03; (2) it is not possible, given a host of
measurement and methodological issues, to provide accurate estimates of the
contributions of such R&D to the economy, but indications are that they are
significant and there are also important social and environmental dividends
for Australians; (3) there are no grounds for a radical overhaul in total
public funding or in the allocation of that funding, but incremental
improvement is needed in some areas; (4) the adequacy of existing evaluation
arrangements is mixed, with some notable shortcomings in business programs’
(5) the net payoff from the R&D Tax Concession could be improved by
orienting the program towards its 175 per cent incremental component; (6)
strong public support of Rural R&D Corporations with a public good
orientation is justified, but the level of government subsidies for some
more narrow industry-focused arrangements may crowd out private activity and
produce only weak external benefits outside the supported rural industry;
(7) although, collaboration can generate significant benefits, the CRC
program is only suited to longer-term arrangements; (8) there is a wide
range of perceived obstacles to commercialisation by universities, but only
some of these warrant policy action; (9) there may be a case for providing
universities with some additional funding to demonstrate promising
technologies so they can be more easily transferred to businesses, but there
are several options for supporting such transfer that do not involve a new
dedicated funding stream; (10) the structure of funding for higher education
research has increasingly eroded the share of block grants and further
erosion would risk undermining their important role in enabling meaningful
strategic choices at the institutional level; and (11) while the proposed
Research Quality Framework has some benefits, it also has considerable
costs, and the Commission suggests that a final decision about its
implementation should be delayed pending the exploration of some other
options. Web: http://www.pc.gov.au/
Collaboration across sectors
The Council of Humanities Arts and Social Sciences has published its report,
Collaborating Across the Sectors: the Relationships Between the Humanities,
Arts and Social Sciences (HASS) and Science, Technology, Engineering and
Medicine (STEM) Sectors by Jenni Metcalfe, Michelle Riedlinger, Anne
Pisarski and John Gardner (November 2006). According to the Executive
summary: "Some of the most exciting research and education today has little
regard for traditional disciplinary boundaries. For example, research to
help Australia's ageing population profile brings together medical science,
basic biology, engineering, social science and arts and humanities. The
world is turning to multi-disciplinary collaborations to deal with the big
issues we face, critical problems such as water shortages, global climate
change and threats to national security, human health and economic
sustainability. No single discipline has all the answers: we need to provide
the flexibility to ensure that the research and education community can
pursue investigations across the whole landscape, regardless of discipline
or approach." Web: http://www.chass.org.au
Cooperative model for society publishers
In Publishing Cooperatives: An Alternative for Non-profit Publishers
(First Monday, September 2006), SPARC consultant, Raym Crow, concludes:
“Most society publishers face structural constraints — including
insufficient market leverage, low tolerance for risk, undercapitalization,
and lack of specialized business expertise — that prevent them from
sustaining themselves effectively in an increasingly competitive market for
academic journals. Publishing cooperatives have the potential — with
scalable shared services and supporting multiple discipline–specific
affiliates — to provide a powerful financial and organizational model that
would allow society publishers to serve their dual imperatives of honoring
their missions while remaining financially sustainable.” However,
“publishing cooperatives with relatively homogenous memberships [are] more
likely to succeed than cooperatives with heterogeneous memberships.” Web:
http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue11_9/crow/index.html.
Email
Dan Carnevale, in E-Mail Is for Old People (The Chronicle of Higher
Education, 6 October 2006, A27), asserts that only only old people use
e-mail. Drawing on a 2005 report of the Pew Internet and American Life
Project called Teens and Technology, which found that teenagers preferred
new technology like instant messaging or text messaging for talking to
friends and only use e-mail to communicate with 'old people'. Students
interviewed for the article confirmed that they still depend on e-mail to
communicate with their professors, but prefer to send text messages to
friends. Chat, Facebook, MySpace, podcasts, RSS feeds and vodcasts are also
popular ways to reach the younger crowd. Web:
http://chronicle.com/
Institutional repositories
ARL has published its survey Institutional Repositories as volume number 292
in its SPEC Kit series. The survey reports that 43% of ARL members have an
operational IR, 35% are planning for one by 2007 and 22% have no immediate
plans to develop one. Libraries have been the most active institutional
advocate of the IR and were also found to be the primary unit leading and
supporting the IR effort, sometimes in partnership with the institutional
information technology unit. The most frequently used local IR software was
DSpace, with DigitalCommons (or the software it is based on) being the
system of choice for vendor-hosted systems. Local systems usually either ran
under variants of Linux or Windows on an Intel-based server or under Solaris
on a Sun server. A typical IR holds about 3,800 digital objects, with
electronic theses and dissertations, article preprints and postprints,
conference presentations, technical reports, working papers, conference
proceedings, and multimedia materials being the most common types of
documents. IRs normally support OAI-PMH and, a little over half the time,
OpenURL.
The average IR start-up cost has been around
US$182,500 and the average ongoing operation budget is about US$113,500.
Reallocated funds from the library's budget are a key source of IR support,
as are new funds from grants and the parent institution. Many IRs were
funded without dedicated budgets, using existing personnel and technical
resources. The typical IR is supported by about 28 full-time equivalent
staff from a variety of units within the library and elsewhere, a digital
library/initiatives unit managed it, and that unit reported to a high-level
library administrator, such as an assistant or associate dean/director. The
SPEC Kit includes documentation from respondents in the form of IR home
pages, IR usage statistics, deposit policies, metadata policies,
preservation policies, and IR proposals. The table of contents and executive
summary from this SPEC Kit are available online at
http://www.arl.org/spec/SPEC292web.pdf.
NDIIPP
Abby Smith, in Distributed Preservation in a National Context: NDIIPP at
Mid-point (D-Lib June 2006), summarises progress of the National Digital
Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program after five and a half
years, focusing on its strategic approach, first-round investments,
achievements, lessons learned, plans for second-round investments, and
remaining challenges. The experience has demonstrated that “simple
operations can be hard” and “complex negotiations among partners even
harder”. To compensate for the elusive nature of long-terms goals, “there
must be identifiable, short-term, immediate, and locally felt benefits to
keep organizations in the game.” And "we have very much more to learn about
the dynamics of recruiting organizations into the network and keeping them
there over time. Some rewards may be financial; others will be prestige and
reputation; still others will be survival-driven”. Web:
http://www.dlib.org
Scientific knowledge diffusion
David E. Wojick and others, in The Digital Road to Scientific Knowledge
Diffusion: A Faster, Better Way to Scientific Progress (D-Lib June
2006), explores ways of increasing the return on the US$130 billion annual
investment by the US government on research and development, focusing on
research being conducted by the Office of Scientific and Technical
Information of the US Department of Energy under its strategic initiative,
Innovations in Scientific Knowledge and Advancement. They propose three
strategies: “(1) developing the conceptual framework to understand
scientific knowledge diffusion and clarification of concepts so that the
diffusion of scientific knowledge corollary can be proven; (2) investigating
the body of knowledge that exists, identifying gaps, and defining areas of
research; and (3) promoting the development of tools for global discovery
that should be tested for the impact on the advancement of search and
enabling of global discovery”. Web:
http://www.dlib.org
Sydney eScholarship
The University of Sydney recently launched Sydney eScholarship, an
initiative of the University Library to provide an integrated digital
library, digital repository, publication and associated advisory and
business services, incorporating Sydney Digital Library, Sydney Digital
Theses, SETIS (Sydney Electronic Text and Image Service), Digital project
advisory and consultation services, Sydney University Publishing and Sydney
University Press. Web: http://escholarship.usyd.edu.au/.
Workers
The Institute for Museum and Library Science is conducting a two-year study
on the future of librarians in the workforce. The study will attempt to
identify the nature of anticipated labour shortages, assess the number and
types of jobs that will become available in the field of library and
information science determine the skills required and recommend approaches
for recruiting and retaining workers. More information about the study and
its progress, including white papers, panel findings and presentations, is
available on the study Web site at
http://libraryworkforce.org/tiki-index.php
NSW records management changes
In June 2006, State Records NSW completed a review of the cost and quality
of government recordkeeping in the NSW public sector. Although the findings
were generally positive, some areas for improvement were identified. Of
greatest concern was performance in relation to retention and disposal of
records, and digital recordkeeping and archiving. The review found that (1)
only 36% of NSW Government departments and agencies have comprehensive
coverage of their functional records by a retention and disposal authority;
(2) 15% of agencies have some coverage of their functional records; and 49%
of agencies have little or no coverage of their functional records. Local
councils, universities, and the public health system were not counted in
these figures because of the presence of general retention and disposal
authorities covering their functional records. In relation to digital
recordkeeping and archiving, the review cocluded that more practical
guidance to operationalise a digital framework was needed. The increasing
convergence between digital records management and information management
was also seen as an issue requiring a more integrated approach. The findings
led to a number of decisions regarding strategic priorities for records
management across the NSW public sector and for State Records: (1) all
government departments and agencies will be expected to have comprehensive
retention and disposal authorities that cover all records relating to their
unique functions. (2) State Records and the the Government Chief Information
Office will jointly develop a sector-wide digital records and information
management strategy, aligned with the new State ICT plan, People First. This
will include developing more practical guidance and concrete specifications
for digital records and recordkeeping systems. To enable State Records to
better meet its new strategic priorities, the Government has decided to
transfer State Records from the Arts, where other collecting institutions
reside, to the Commerce portfolio, which includes the Government Chief
Information Office. Web:
http://www.records.nsw.gov.au.
New Zealand draft digitisation standard
Archives New Zealand has released a draft digitisation standard for public
consultation. The 56-page document includes a summary of requirements, a
compliance checklist, questions to assist in assessing viability for
digitisation, digitisation approaches, recommended technical standards,
scanner selection choices, and staff training guidelines. Web:
http://www.archives.govt.nz/continuum/
Queensland records management guidelines
Queensland State Archives has a number of guidelines available from its
website including a brief Compliance Guideline and a Self-Assessment
Checklist, Strategic Recordkeepng Implementation Plan Workbook and Template,
Strategic Recordkeeping Implementation Plan Evaluation Criteria, Operational
Recordkeeping Implemenation Plan Workbook and Template, and Disaster
Preparedness and Recovery Manual. Web:
http://www.archives.qld.gov.au/.
Recordkeeping competencies
Innovation and Business Skills Australia has released draft Business Service
Training Packages on a range of topics, including small business management,
governance, project management and recordkeeping, with the aim of making
last-minute changes before their completion in February 2007. Web:
http://www.ibsa.org.au/
Recordkeeping specifications for business
systems
The National Archives of Australia has released a set of generic
specifications for Australian Government agencies to check that business
information systems software functionality to create, capture and manage
digital records. The specifications can be used to build or purchase new
systems or to review and upgrade existing systems. Web: http:/www.naa.gov.au/recordkeeping/er/bis/specifications.html
Marketing with metadata
Malcolm Moffatt, in his paper Marketing with Metadata: How Metadata Can
Increase Exposure and Visibility of Online Content (8 March 2006)
explains metadata, the various ways in which its can be exposed to increase
traffic to website, and makes the case for exposing metadata via harvesting,
distributed searching and syndication. Web: (http://www.icbl.hw.ac.uk/perx/advocacy/exposingmetadata.htm)
Metadata management
Lois Mai Chan and Marcia Lei Zeng, in Metadata Interoperability and
Standardization - A Study of Methodology (D-Lib June 2006), look at a
broad range of metadata schemas based on user communities, intended users,
types of materials, subject domains, project needs, and other requirements.
They touch on the problems that arise when building large digital libraries
or repositories with metadata records that were prepared according to
diverse schemas, and the methods that have been used to achieve or improve
interoperability among metadata schemas and applications in order to
facilitate conversion and exchange of metadata and to enable cross-domain
metadata harvesting and federated searches. Part I explains possible
situations in which metadata schemas may be created or implemented, whether
in individual projects or in integrated repositories. Part II discusses
metadata interoperability efforts at the record and repository levels. Web
http://www.dlib.org
This issue of Cross Currents compiled by Paul
Bentley.
The
Wolanski Foundation would be grateful for feedback
on the scope, format and content of this bulletin..
