Home News from the Field

News from the Field

C&RL News, July/August 2005
Vol. 66, No. 7

by Stephanie Orphan

NYPL offers digital audio books through Web site
The New York Public Library (NYPL) has launched a digital audio book collection, licensed through OverDrive, Inc., which allows cardholders to download audio books from the Internet, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. A selection of 700 titles in fiction, narrative nonfiction, business, biography, self-help, and language instruction is available. Users may listen to digital audio books via computer or laptop, burn to a CD for playing in the car or on a stereo, or transfer to a portable device, such as an MP3 player. Digital audio books circulate for 21 days and downloading is free. The launch of digital audio book circulation follows the library’s introduction last year of e-book titles for circulation on laptops and PDAs. Additional information on NYPL’s e-books is available at ebooks.nypl.org.

CQ Press offers sampling of content free of charge
CQ Press has introduced a free Web site, CQ Press in Context, featuring selections from the CQ Press Electronic Library, which has a goal of providing readers with objective, accessible, high-quality information on government and politics. The site focuses on a single topic, which will be updated frequently, offering a sampling of CQ Press content that is usually available only on a subscription basis. The first topic covered was the future of the Supreme Court. CQ Press in Context is available online at www.cqpress.com/incontext.

SPARC and Univ. of Michigan launch Publisher Assistance Program
SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) and the University of Michigan Library’s Scholarly Publishing Office have joined forces to launch the Publisher Assistance Program to provide business planning and digital publishing services to facilitate open-access publishing in the social sciences and humanities. The program provides a business planning process to ensure the sustainability of a journal under an open-access or cost-recover model, including the transition from a print, subscription-based model to an online open-access model. The Publisher Assistance Program will also offer a package of options for journal development, production, hosting, and maintenance. Nonprofit publishers that would like more information on the program should contact Raym Crow, SPARC business development consultant, at raym@arl.org.

New art image database debuts on WilsonWeb
H.W. Wilson has released Art Museum Image Gallery (AMIG), a new art image database that replaces the AMICO Library, which ceased publication in July. AMIG includes art images and related multimedia gathered from the collections of distinguished museums around the world. All images are rights-cleared for educational use, so that students can download them for paper, and teachers can include them in class lectures. The new database can be searched seamlessly with other Wilson art resources. AMIG features more than 94,000 high-quality, high-resolution images from 3000 BC to the present. Free 30-day trial subscriptions are available to librarians beginning July 1. Information is available at www.hwwilson.com.

Journal of Digital Information makes new home at Texas A&M
The Journal of Digital Information (JoDI) has found a new home at Texas A&M University Libraries. JoDI is an international peer-reviewed digital journal that began publishing articles in 1997 in the areas of management, presentation, and uses of information in digital environments. Topics include virtual museums, medieval texts, digital libraries, content management, and learning resources. JoDI currently has more than 6,100 registered users who receive the journal quarterly through e-mail alerts. JoDI was conceived as an electronic alternative to print journals, many of which have become prohibitively expensive. Visitors can browse the JoDI Web site at jodi.tamu.edu.

Project Muse full text searchable through Google
Project MUSE, an online collection of scholarly journals in the arts, humanities, and social sciences, is collaborating with Google Inc. to enable researchers to use the Google Web site and the Google Scholar interface to search the Project MUSE Web site. Individuals at Muse-subscribing institutions will be able to search the full-text content from any of the more than 270 scholarly journals hosted by Project MUSE and access the articles in HTML or PDF format. Those unaffiliated with a MUSE-subscribing library will be able to view abstracts or excerpts of articles found through a Google search of MUSE journal content. Currently, MUSE subscribers can search and browse the collection’s journals through the subscribing library’s catalog and traditional abstracting and indexing databases.

Univ. of Minnesota library installation memorializes  holocaust survivors
Three floors of the archival repository at the University of Minnesota’s Elmer L. Andersen Library have been visually transformed into a photographic memorial celebrating cultural survival and heritage in the face of persecution. A 35-foot-high interactive, public art project, “Archiving Memory,” is based on photographs and interviews with Austrian holocaust survivors and Nazi resistors. The installation was created by Minneapolis photographer and visual anthropologist Nancy Ann Coyne in collaboration with the library’s curator of special collections and rare books and faculty.

“Archiving Memory” incorporates the library’s windows to frame images of 12 Austrian Jewish and Christian people persecuted by the Nazis. As natural light shines through the windows, the survivors’ life-size images are projected onto walls and corridors. Oral history texts accompanying each image recall the individual’s life history during the year his or her photograph was taken. The installation, which is free and open to the public, will be on display through September 30.

_{Twelve photographs, framed in windows,
are projected onto the walls and corridors
of the University of Minnesota’s Elmer L.
Andersen Library as part of the 
“Archiving Memory“  installation.}

Mississippi State instructional media center recognized as leader
The Instructional Media Center in Mississippi State University’s Mitchell Memorial Library has been recognized as a world leader in its innovative approaches to the use of technology by the New Media Consortium (NMC). The center was invited to membership in NMC following a competitive selection process in which all applications were ranked in a criteria-based system of peer review. Other NMC members include the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Princeton University, Harvard University, University of Tennessee, Tulane University, and others.

ebrary Reader optimizes PDF use
ebrary has launched a new version of its ebrary Reader, a free software application designed to optimize how PDF documents are viewed and used online. The ebrary Reader is a key component of the company’s Dynamic Content Platform, which combines patent-pending technology with more than 60,000 full-text books and other authoritative documents from leading publishers. Among other benefits, the ebrary Reader enables PDF documents to be delivered to a user’s desktop one page at a time. It also gives PDF documents word level interaction through InfoTools, which allows users to select a word or phrase from which to link to additional resources in ebrary’s repository, the library, or on the Web. The new reader supports both Firefox and Mozilla Web browsers.

Rutgers hosts Fedora conference
Rutgers University Libraries hosted a first-time conference for users of Flexible Extensible Digital Object Repository Architecture (Fedora), May 13–14. Fedora is the open sources software that the libraries are using to build an institutional repository for the university. More than 100 individuals from peer institutions across the country attended the event. The conference allowed participants to gain a greater appreciation of the broader horizons for use of Fedora. Presentations covered Fedora software plans, using Fedora for digital video, long-term sustainability, and using Fedora as a framework for digital preservation.

Readex preparing digital broadsides and ephemera
Readex, a provider of digital access to American historical documents, has announced that the digital edition of American Broadsides and Ephemera will be available in fall 2005. Based on the American Antiquarian Society’s extensive collections, the digital edition will offer fully searchable facsimile images of approximately 15,000 broadsides printed between 1820 and 1876 and 15,000 pieces of ephemera printed between 1760 and 1876. Most broadsides and ephemera from the period were not preserved, as they were created in response to popular topics and issued locally. Those that survive provide a valuable perspective on many aspects of American culture. The digital edition of American Broadsides and Ephemera enables the collections’ 30,000 items to be cross-searched with Readex’s Web-based Archive of Americana. The launch of the digital edition will mark 50 years of collaboration between Readex and the American Antiquarian society.

Biblio.com announces availability of 20 million titles
Biblio.com, a supplier of used, rare, and out-of-print books, has announced that it now lists more than 20 million titles through its online service. This represents steady growth since the summer of 2004, when the company was listing more than 9 million titles. Biblio.com provides an online service connecting book buyers and collectors with thousands of independent booksellers worldwide.

EBSCO expands psychology resources
EBSCO Publishing is now offering the PEP Archive through its EBSCOhost product. The database provides the full text of 13 premier psychoanalytic journals, many dating back to 1920, and the full text of more than 20 classic psychoanalytic books. Psychoanalytic Electronic Publishing (PEP) publishes this archive, updating it annually. There is a three-year embargo on all journal content. The PEP Archive complements other behavioral science databases offered through EBSCOHost, such as Psychology and Behavioral Sciences Collection, SocINDEX, PsycARTICLES, and Mental Measurements Yearbook.

DLF welcomes Bibliotheca Alexandrina
The Board of Trustees of the Digital Library Federation (DLF) have announced that the Bibliotheca Alexandrina (BA) has joined  DLF as its first strategic partner from outside the United States and Europe. Egypt’s BA was inaugurated in 2002 to recapture the spirit of the ancient Library of Alexandria, a center of world learning from 300 BC to 400 AD. The new library and its affiliated research centers are devoted to using the newest technology to preserve the past and promote access to the products of the human intellect.

DLF is a partnership organization of academic libraries and related organizations that are pioneering the use of electronic-information technologies to extend their collections and services. BA is already working closely with DLF member institutions, as a contributing member of the Million Books Library led by Carnegie Mellon and through a collaboration with Yale to digitize early 20th-century journals.

American Indian in graduate studies available online
The third edition of The American Indian in graduate studies: A bibliography of theses and dissertations is now available online through New Mexico State University at education.nmsu.edu/aigs. The bibliography provides comprehensive Web-based electronic access to the single-largest source of scholarship and primary information about American Indians, with nearly 15,000 theses and dissertations included. The new edition adds value to existing citations by upgrading them to a standard, machine-readable bibliographic description and providing full author abstracts where available. It is comprehensive through 2002 and includes all graduate degree-granting institutions in the United States and Canada, as well as four large Mexican universities.

This edition is built on the pioneering work of Frederick and Alice Dockstader, who compiled the first edition in 1957. The second edition was published in 1974 as volume 25, parts 1 and 2 of the “Contributions from the Museum of the American Indian, Heye Foundation.” Charles Townley developed and edited the third edition.

New Illinois academic library consortium formed
Three Illinois academic consortia, the Illinois Cooperative Collection Management Program, the Illinois Digital Academic Library, and the Illinois Library Computer Systems Organization, have consolidated to form a new consortium to serve the higher education community in Illinois. The new Consortium of Academic and Research Libraries in Illinois (CARLI) was formed to improve the efficiency and cost effectiveness of services, increase the effectiveness of consortial and member library staff efforts, and create opportunities to pursue new programs and services that the three constituent corsortia would not have been able to provide on their own. The University of Illinois serves as the fiscal and contractual agent for the consortium under a memorandum of agreement. CARLI began operations on July 1.