By Dr. Teresa Dobson for the Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE) Team

Vancouver, BC Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE) is a large-scale collaborative research project in the digital humanities directed by Dr. Ray Siemens, Department of English, University of Victoria, and funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). This research team is examining the complex processes of human engagement with information that is available digitally. Specifically, the team is interested in identifying and understanding the ways in which social sciences and humanities readers engage with forms such as the electronic scholarly edition, the academic monograph, scholarly journal and essay collections, and electronic literature.

You are invited to complete a short survey about how you experience and use digital resources in the context of your research. The findings of this survey will be used to improve existing digital tools and to derive requirements for prospective tools and resources that we hope will be of benefit to you and other researchers.

The questionnaire should take approximately twenty minutes to complete. If you are willing to participate, you will find it online at http://infopoll.net/live/surveys/s34325.htm. Your identity will be kept confidential.  All documents and participants will be identified only by code number. Digital data records will be kept on password-protected hard drives and on disks stored in locked filing cabinets. Only the principal investigator and the co-investigators will have access to the data. If you have any concerns about your treatment or rights as a research participant, you may contact the Research Subject Information Line in the UBC Office of Research Services at 604-822-8598. Your participation in this study is entirely voluntary and you may refuse to participate or withdraw from the study at any time. Your completion and submission of the survey will indicate your consent to participate.

In consideration of your time, you may enter a draw for a $150.00 gift certificate from an online bookstore upon completion of the questionnaire.

We look forward to the prospect of your participation in this study. Please feel free to contact the INKE Graduate Research Assistant, Karen Taylor, at any time if you have questions about this research: 604-737-2873 (British Columbia, Canada) or katay164@interchange.ubc.ca.

Ithaca, NY A portion of the world’s digital knowledge is represented in the “Ranking Web of World Repositories” (http://repositories.webometrics.info/top400_rep.asp), an initiative of the Cybermetrics Lab that provides an online ranking of the top 400 repositories in the world. Cybermetrics Lab is a research group belonging to the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC), a public research body in Spain. In 2006 of CSIC consisted of 126 centers and institutes distributed throughout Spain.

38 DSpace repositories are ranked among the top 100 spots, with DSpace@MIT at number 10 on the overall list, and 6 on the “institutional” list. The “Ranking Web of World Repositories” web site highlights institutional repositories with an additional IR-only ranking, and includes large subject respositories such as CiteseerX, Arxiv, and RepEc. National repositories, consisting of records coming from multiple institutions (HAL) are also in top positions.

The Cybermetrics Lab compiles the rankings in an effort to support Open Access to the world’s research using a methodology developed by the research group (http://repositories.webometrics.info/methodology_rep.html). The web site contains addtional information about best practices and other Cybermetrics Lab research projects.

Ithaca, NY In the mood for a soulful tune by Odetta, at talk by Norman Cousins on Citizen Diplomacy, or perhaps a look into the life and times of artist Man Ray as illustrated by Man Ray, artist William Wegman’s dog. There is a wealth of fascinating media to be explored at Open Vault, the WGBH Media Library & Archives (http://openvault.wgbh.org/) as WGBH makes a public digital library interface available on top of Fedora (+Blacklight).

By Jennifer McLennan, Director of Programs & Operations, SPARC

Washington, DC Three new student films on information sharing have been voted the best by a panel of new media experts, students, and librarians in the third annual Sparky Awards. Organized by SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) and adopted by campuses everywhere, the Sparky Awards contest calls on entrants to creatively illustrate in a short video the value of openly sharing ideas.

The winning videos offer another glimpse of the compelling student perspective on how open sharing fosters creativity, innovation, and solves problems. This year’s winners are:

• GRAND PRIZE WINNER: Share what you’ve got (http://www.vimeo.com/8006296). Produced by Kazuyuki Ishii; sound and music by Jesse Cook (Savannah College of Art and Design).

• RUNNER UP: Ideas come together (http://www.vimeo.com/7921707). Produced by Danielle Johnson (Savannah College of Art and Design).

• HONORABLE MENTION: Grow (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mp3JM5JyUkY). Produced by Lyle Hawthorne; music, “Colors all around me” (2009) by Hillary Chase. (Goucher College).

The Grand Prize winner will receive a cash prize of $1,000 along with a Sparky Award statuette, a copy of Apple Final Cut Studio, and an iPod Nano (courtesy of Campus MovieFest). The Runner Up will receive $500 plus a personalized award certificate. These award-winning videos will be screened in conjunction with the Campus MovieFest 2010 Southern Regional Grand Finale.

“Having open access to find and share information is critical for my own inspiration and improvement as a student,” said Grand Prize Winner Kazuyuki Ishii. “We all learn from one another to gain knowledge, and a lot of amazing, unpredictable, and productive outcomes are born as a result of people sharing information. Sharing information openly is the key to surfacing new ideas, enhancing personal progress, and enriching all of our lives in the ways that we should in this day and age.”

“The entries to this year’s contest bear out once again that students have a unique commitment to open sharing, but also that their commitment and understanding are evolving with each year,” commented Jennifer McLennan, Director of Programs and Operations for SPARC. “This year, we saw a distinct and deliberate effort to blend new and existing content together to deliver compelling video statements within the framework of copyright law. And, as ever, reviewing the students’ entries was a simple pleasure. We hope the community will take advantage of the chance to explore them.”

The organizers now invite students, faculty, librarians, and others on campus to weigh in for their favorite in the first installment of the Sparky People’s Choice Award. The People’s Choice Award highlights all of the 2009 entries, including dozens from campus-based contest hosts at Penn State, Brigham Young, the University of Pennsylvania, Southern Illinois University Carbondale, and others. The winner will receive $500 plus a personalized award certificate. To vote, visit http://www.sparkyawards.org. The deadline to vote for the People’s Choice Award is March 7, 2010.

The Sparky Awards are organized by SPARC and co-sponsored by: the Association of College and Research Libraries, the Association of Research Libraries, Campus MovieFest, the Center for Social Media, the New Media Consortium (NMC), the Open Video Alliance, Penn Libraries, Students for Free Culture, the Student PIRGs, and SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition).

For full details, visit the Sparky Awards Web site at http://www.sparkyawards.org.

Ithaca, NY  With the theme, “Open Access Repositories now and in the future–from the global and Asia-Pacific points of view” the Digital Repository Federation International Conference (DRFIC) was held on December 3-4, 2009 in Tokyo and focused on topics relevant to digital repository and open access. DRFIC 2009 provided a place in the Asia Pacific Region to discuss academic communication and Open Access, and also to share information about changes in academic publishing and what its future might be with interested stakeholders. Calling for good practices, international harmonization and making repository success stories known, Syun Tituya, Chiba University (http://mitizane.ll.chiba-u.jp/curator/index_e.html) offered opening remarks and reviewed repository growth in Japan. He stated that almost all research university libraries in Japan now manage repositories, with 110 known installations in higher education and some in research-focused institutions.

Reminding the audience that Open Access is primarily a means, and not a goal of scientific research, Tituya began the proceedings by suggesting that the rapid expansion of repositories in the last ten years, “Is just the first stepping stone for repostitories.”

Organizations that use DSpace to implement repositories were featured in several sessions. You may download all presentations here: http://drf.lib.hokudai.ac.jp/drf/index.php?DRFIC2009. Presentations from DSpace users included:

Kanazawa University, Hideki Uchijima session2_uchijima.pdf
University of Tsukuba Sho Sato, session3_sato.pdf
Otaru University, Masako Suzuki session3_suzuki.pdf
University of Hong Kong, David Palmer session3_davidpalmar.pdf
Academia Sinica, Simon C. Lin, Ya-Ning Chen, session2_simonlin.pdf
Cranfield University, Simon Bevan session3_simonbevan.pdf
National Institute of Informatics, Jun Adachi ClosingKeynote_adachi.pdf

Ithaca, NY The IslandLives (http://islandlives.ca/) collection offers weekend browsers a rare glimpse into the lives, environment, culture and history of a small community perched far to the north in the Canadian Maritime Provinces. The IslandLives project  is an example of a Virtual Research Environment being developed with Islandora (http://islandora.ca/), an open source project underway at the Robertson Library at the University of Prince Edward Island that combines the Drupal and Fedora Repository software applications. From the IslandLives web site:

“IslandLives will digitize approximately 300 published Prince Edward Island community histories, making them freely available for use via the World Wide Web. IslandLives is actively seeking and securing the permission of copyright holders to display this material online. The IslandLives project furthers the Robertson Library’s mission of preserving and sharing unique material relating to Prince Edward Island with students, educators, researchers, and others interested in Island culture and heritage.”

Ithaca, NY If you take the DEV8D symbol “8D” and turn it 90 degrees counter-clockwise you get a laughing face, which is suitable for an unconference structured around a program especially designed to make developers happy. How do the organizers know this phenomena is real? At the 2009 event attendees collaborated on the development of a “Happyness-o-meter” to find out exactly how happy the event made attendees. (Organizers used a service created by Sam Easterby-Smith on day two of the conference to collect metrics via twitter and provide feedback to participants.)

To find out more about DEV8D 2010 visit the wiki: http://wiki.2010.dev8d.org/w/Main_Page. If you are planning on attending DEV8D from February 24-27 in London here are the suggested ways to prepare:

• Sign up for Twitter we’ll be using it for lotsa stuff.
• Register on this wiki (or sign in with your twitter account on the login page)
• Start work on cool tools for the event.
• List any things (old tech, text books) you’d like to find a home for on the Freecycle page.
• Pick a good book or two you don’t mind giving away on our Book Crossing shelf.

Boston, MA In March of 2009 the faculty at MIT voted on a policy that would make their scholarly articles openly available on the Web. It states, “The Faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is committed to disseminating the fruits of its research and scholarship as widely as possible.”  The DSpace repository at MIT (http://dspace.mit.edu/) is being used to house those articles and to make them openly available to the world.  In order to ensure that efficient workflows were in place to receive the articles, the MIT Libraries undertook to customize their ingest workflows, leveraging functionality recently made available to the DSpace community, as well as, looking at efforts by others in the broader repository community.

MIT Libraries’ staff focused their efforts on two distinct challenges: first, how to streamline the manual upload process for their researchers and outreach librarians; and, second, how to lower the barriers to contribution by members of the publishing community supportive of MIT’s policy.  To address the first challenge, MIT looked to leverage the flexibility of Manakin and functionality available through DSpace configurable submission.  For the second, the MIT Libraries began to investigate how SWORD and SWAP could facilitate external contributions by publishers.

Scholarly deposit systems should be simple as shown here in a screenshot from the “MIT Open Access Articles Collection.” Entering long and complex information about articles is avoided with the MIT Libraries’ customized submission interface.  Only two pieces of metadata are required for already published papers: the name of the authorizing MIT author and a DOI or URL. If the paper is unpublished, four fields are requested.

The use of SWORD and SWAP with the DSpace repository at MIT is part of a larger strategy to improve collaboration with publishers, facilitating a “push” of large amounts of content into a repository without necessitating a platform-specific solution. Ultimately this “publisher template” could be used with other repository platforms such as Fedora and EPrints. Richard Rodgers, Head of Software Development at MIT Libraries, says, “If we do this right there will be no code to share. SWORD and SWAP are already open and accessible. We have localized their use to accommodate MIT-specific metadata.”

The SWAP (Scholarly Works Application Profile) was adopted by MIT to more accurately describe the contributed articles.  Since SWAP was already integrated with SWORD (Simple Web service Offering Repository Deposit), a lightweight protocol based on Atom, implementing a workflow for publishers to be able to support the MIT Faculty Open Access Policy with remote deposits of scholarly articles into the DSpace repository seemed like an effort that would benefit all parties.  Initial tests have been successful and MIT hopes to be able to implement a production SWORD deposit workflow with partner publishers in early 2010.

With thanks to Sean Thomas, DSpace@MIT Product Manager, for his assistance in preparing this article.

Ithaca, NY Subject repositories house and make accessible a large quantity of specialized information and research that drives innovation in all areas of human endeavor around the world. What are the differences between subject repositories focused on a particular discipline and institutional repositories that house assets from multiple subject areas? As deposits and data in subject repositories grow to contain ever larger tracts of specialized knowledge the issue of how to sustain and preserve the cultural and scientific value contained in these digital repositories is becoming more significant.

Simeon Warner, who has managed arXiv (http://arxiv.org/) since 2006, the largest subject repository in the world with over 580,000 articles says, “Subject repositories such as arXiv are developed to meets the needs of a disciplinary community. As such, they often operate in somewhat idiosyncratic ways in order to serve the particular community’s needs. The technical architectures need not differ from institutional repository architectures, but in most cases they operate at a rather larger scale.”

Warner suggests that the architecture of SRs should be split: background operations designed using open standards and protocols with user interfaces built to meet individual subject community’s needs. This strategy ensures that subject repositories can share resources with institutional repositories and other subject repositories, while effectively serving discipline-specific audiences.

Examples of other large subject repositories include:

SSRN, Social Sciences Research Network (http://www.ssrn.com/), is devoted to the rapid worldwide dissemination of social science research and is composed of a number of specialized research networks in each of the social sciences.

RePEc, Research Papers in Economics (http://repec.org/), is a collaborative effort of volunteers in 70 countries to enhance the dissemination of research in economics through a decentralized database of working papers, journal articles and software components.

Economists Online (http://www.economistsonline.org/) combines content with RePEc archives to provide a new information service for economists.

PMC, PubMed Central (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/), is the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) free digital archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature.

CiteSeer (http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/) is a scientific literature digital library and search engine that focuses primarily on the literature in computer and information science. harvesting articles from academics’ homepages  and other sources.

ADS, the NASA Astrophysical Data System (http://adswww.harvard.edu/), has almost complete  information on publications in astronomy and astrophysics with three bibliographic databases containing more than 8.1 million records.

SPIRES, High Energy Physics Literature Database (http://www.slac.stanford.edu/spires/) currently includes bibliographic information in some areas of physics, especially high-energy physics (HEP) and astrophysics and astronomy (ASTRO).

PhilPapers, Online Research in Philosophy (http://philpapers.org/), is a repository of articles and bibliographic records in philosphy.

Cornell University Library Model for Sustaining arXiv

In a move to expand support for sustaining arXiv (http://arxiv.org/), an e-print service in the fields of physics, mathematics, non-linear science, computer science, quantitative biology and statistics, Cornell University Library is broadening the funding base for the online scientific repository. Nearly 600,000 e-prints — research articles published online in physics, mathematics, statistics, computer science and related disciplines — now reside in arXiv, which is an open information source for hundreds of thousands of scientific researchers.

arXiv will remain free for readers and submitters, but the Library has established a voluntary, collaborative business model to engage institutions that benefit most from arXiv.

“Keeping an open-access resource like arXiv sustainable means not only covering its costs, but also continuing to enhance its value, and that kind of financial commitment is beyond a single institution’s resources,” said Oya Rieger, Associate University Librarian for Information Technologies. “If a case can be made for any repository being community-supported, arXiv has to be at the top of the list.”

The 200 institutions that use arXiv most heavily account for more than 75 percent of institutional downloads. Cornell is asking these institutions for financial support in the form of annual contributions, and most of the top 25 have already committed to helping arXiv.

Institutions that have pledged support include:

• California Institute of Technology
• University of California, Berkeley
• University of Cambridge (UK)
• CERN – European Organization for Nuclear Research (Switzerland)
• CNRS – Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (France)
• Columbia University
• DESY – Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (Germany)
• Durham University (UK)
• ETH Zurich – Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich (Switzerland)
• Fermilab
• Harvard University
• University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
• Imperial College London (UK)
• Los Alamos National Laboratory
• Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• Max Planck Society (Germany)
• University of Michigan
• University of Oxford (UK)
• University of Pennsylvania
• Princeton University
• SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory
• Texas A&M University

“We are delighted that so many others have already stepped forward to share the cost of arXiv, and that even more are considering it,” said Anne R. Kenney, Carl A. Kroch University Librarian at Cornell. “It is heartening to see other institutions show their commitment to sustaining this eminent resource, which is used by scientists around the world.”

“arXiv is a vital resource for scholarly communication on a global scale for researchers and students across numerous disciplines. It is essential that the institutions whose users contribute to the database and consume its content provide an appropriate level of financial support,” said James G. Neal, Vice President for Information Services and University Librarian at Columbia University.

The proposed funding model is viewed as a short-term strategy, and the Library is actively seeking input on a long-term solution. Currently, Cornell University Library supports the operating costs of arXiv, which are comparable to the costs of the university’s collection budget for physics and astronomy. As one of the most influential innovations in scholarly communications since the advent of the Internet, arXiv’s original dissemination model represented the first significant means to provide expedited access to scientific research well ahead of formal publication.

Researchers upload their own articles to arXiv, and they are usually made available to the public the next day. arXiv, founded by physics professor Paul Ginsparg, has about 400,000 users and serves more than 2.5 million article downloads per month. Its 101,000 registered submitters live in nearly 200 countries.

arXiv is interconnected with many other scholarly information resources. These include the
INSPIRE system being developed by supporting high-energy physics laboratories CERN, DESY, Fermilab and SLAC, as well as the Astrophysics Data System at Harvard University, another supporting institution.

For details about the operating principles of the new structure, visit the FAQ at http://arxiv.org/help/support/faq. For questions about supporting arXiv, contact consortia representatives or the arXiv office at Cornell University Library at support@arxiv.org.

About Cornell University Library

Cornell University is an Ivy League institution and New York’s land-grant university. Among the top ten academic research libraries in the country, Cornell University Library reflects the university’s distinctive mix of eminent scholarship and democratic ideals. The Library offers cutting-edge programs and facilities, a full spectrum of services, extensive collections that represent the depth and breadth of the university, and a deep network of digital resources. Its impact reaches beyond campus boundaries with initiatives that extend the land grant mission to a global focus. To learn more, visit http://library.cornell.edu.

Madison, WI The long-term goal of migrating their digital collection, currently in production at University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries, to an all-Fedora enabled repository system, mapped onto production workflows with many moving parts and pieces inspired the development of prototype site. Fedora’s scalability was tested by ingesting about 30,000 digital objects from representative collections:

http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/UWDCNew/

Of particular interest is the digital collection constructed for the UW Zoology Museum (http://www.zoology.wisc.edu/uwzm/) which contains images used by Zoology class labs last semester:

http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/UWDCNew/view/uwdc:CollectionZooMuse

UW Libraries will migrate over two million digital objects from their digital collections to a Fedora-based infrastructure over the next few years. Scott Prater, Library, Instructional, and Research Applications (LIRA) Division of Information Technology (DoIT), University of Wisconsin - Madison reports that recent work aimed at boosting performance with a Memcached distributed caching server has proven to be easy to set up as a memory-based object store. Each time an image or METS file is requested, the web service queries the cache before going back to Fedora.

Fedora content models are being used in the prototype in the following ways:

http://www.fedora-commons.org/confluence/display/DEV/University+of+Wisconsin+Digital+Collections+Center+-+Complex+Content+models

For more information please contact Scott Prater.