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NEWS FROM THE FIELD
C&RL News, December 2006
Vol. 67, No. 11
by Stephanie Orphan
Cornell and Penn State release DPubS
Cornell University Library and Penn State University Libraries and Press, have released a new electronic publishing software, DPubS (Digital Publishing System). DPubS supports change in scholarly publishing by giving academic libraries and their partners the means to organize and disseminate scholarly communication electronically. Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, DPubS was developed by the academic library community for libraries and not-for-profit publishers. The software is based on an open-services architecture and lends itself well to enhancements and extensions. It is written in Perl, runs on Solaris and Linux, and uses commonly available open-source software.
Examples of DPubS-supported publications include Cornell’s Project Euclid; Indonesia, published by Cornell’s Southeast Asia Program; and Pennsylvania History, published by Penn State.
DPubS may be downloaded for free at dpubs.org .
CrossRef extends Web services
CrossRef, the reference linking network for scholarly publishing, has released an OAI-PMH (Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting) interface to its Web Services metadata distribution program. CrossRef Web Services (CWS) is a suite of tools to enable authorized partners to collect metadata on a widespread, cross-publisher basis, potentially covering up to 23 million metadata records. CWS was developed earlier this year to standardize how published content is crawled, indexed, and linked to on the Web. Participation by CrossRef member publishers is optional.
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I can't live without
Mocoloco.com is a totally fun Web site on contemporary design, where art, ecology, and architecture students find novel paper topics plus blogs and podcasts. Need to look up an object or a studio? Search on “jelly tiles” or “o4i” or just browse by two dozen categories, including appliances, jewelry, and shows. Wandering through societal, my patron linked from a photo of jaunty platform shoes to the Aphrodite Project and bingo—a paper topic on social justice. How about stackable, soft seating made of paper for your office furniture? With 10K visitors a day and dazzling visuals, it’s a site to check out.—Rebecca Martin, Northern Illinois University
. . . Mocoloco.com
Modern Contemporary Design
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Canadian partnership announces open access peer reviewed library journal
In November 2006, “The Partnership: the Provincial and Territorial Library Associations of Canada” launched a new open access peer reviewed journal, Partnership: the Canadian Journal of Library and Information Practice and Research. The journal is an outlet for sharing innovations in the workplace and one of a very few peer reviewed Canadian venues for research in the field of librarianship. Run solely by volunteers, the journal also provides a chance for librarians and library workers to gain experience as editors, reviewers, and writing coaches.
The philosophy behind the journal is to provide rigorous peer review and high standards in both theoretical and practical aspects of the profession and to provide it freely and immediately to everyone. Partnership is employing Open Journal Software (OJS) developed at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia and is hosted at the University of Guelph in Ontario. The first issue is available online at www.partnershipjournal.ca.
ALA seeking Spectrum Scholar applicants
ALA’s Spectrum Scholarship Program will be celebrating its 10th anniversary in 2007. More than 60 scholarships, funded in part by the Institute of Museum and Library Services, will be awarded in 2007-08. With the mission of improving service at the local level through the development of a representative workforce that reflects the communities served by all libraries in the 21st Century, the ALA Spectrum Scholarship provides a one-year $5,000 scholarship and over $1,500 in professional development opportunities to eligible students planning to attend an ALA-accredited graduate program in library and information studies or an ALA-recognized NCATE School Library Media program.
The deadline for applications is March 1, 2007. For more information and application materials, visit www.ala.org/spectrum.
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Get involved! ACRL is seeking committee volunteers
ACRL is proud to announce the launch of its online committee volunteer form. To volunteer for division or section committees, please visit http://www.acrl.org/volunteer.
You will be directed to log in using your ALA ID and the password you created.
Division committee volunteer forms must be submitted by December 1, 2006. Section committee volunteer forms are due by March 31, 2007.
If you have any questions concerning division-level committees, please contact ACRL Program Officer David Connolly at dconnolly@ala.org or (312) 280-2519. For section-level committees, please contact ACRL Program Coordinator Adam Burling at aburling@ala.org or (312) 280-2521.
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University of Southampton and MIT launch Web research collaboration
The University of Southampton and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology launched a long-term research collaboration in November that aims to produce the fundamental scientific advances necessary to guide the future design and use of the World Wide Web. The Web Science Research Initiative (WSRI) will generate a research agenda for understanding the scientific, technical, and social challenges underlying the growth of the Web. Of particular interest is the volume of information on the Web that documents more and more aspects of human activity and knowledge. The joint MIT-Southampton initiative will provide a global forum for scientists and scholars to collaborate on the first multidisciplinary scientific research effort specifically designed to study the Web at all scales of size and complexity.
SwetsWise Online Content includes ten new publishers
Swets has signed ten new publishers to SwetsWise Online Content, its e-journal gateway. Content from American Society of Clinical Oncology, AlphaMed Press, Idea Group Inc., Mohr Siebeck, Pion Ltd., Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Royal College of Nursing, Society for General Microbiology, Thomas Telford, and TransTech is now available. With this added content, SwetsWise contains more than 10,000 distinct titles and more than 22 searchable references and links to full-text articles.
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Ashford Sheet Music Collection at the University of Washington
The sheet music “Hello Seattle, I Am Coming Back to You” featured on this month’s cover is part of the Ashford Sheet Music Collection at the University of Washington Music Library. The core collection was donated by Paul Ashford in 1959, and much has been added to the collection since. About a third of the 1,000 or so items in the current collection pertain to Washington State and the Pacific Northwest. There are songs written for specific events in the state, such as the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific (AYP) Exposition of 1909 and the World’s Fair of 1962.
The collection includes titles such as “A. Y. P. March,” written for piano for the 1909 Exposition, with a subtitle, “A Tone Romance of a Gold Seeker.” There are many songs about the 1962 World’s Fair; they include “A Salute to the ‘Space Needle’ at the Seattle’s World’s Fair” and “See You in Seattle (at the Big World’s Fair).” These are just two of many songs that featured the futuristic Space Needle and the monorail that links the world’s fair site to downtown Seattle; both structures are still in use. Even the Pulitzer-prize winning American composer Morton Gould wrote the song “World of Tomorrow!” to celebrate the World’s Fair, featuring the monorail and the Space Needle on its cover. Other Pacific Northwest themes include state and university songs, songs about the specific cities in the state, such as “Olympia, I Am Glad I Found You,” and invariably songs about the state’s native (human and natural) beauties, “Hello, Miss Spokane” and “On the Shores of Puget Sound.”
Beyond the Pacific Northwest, the collection includes songs covering topics such as presidential elections and other campaign songs, songs on wars (the two World Wars, Mexican War, and the Spanish-American War), Temperance Movement and Prohibition, automobiles and railroads, and the omnipresent “novelty” songs where ethnic minorities are represented according to the white imagination. Composers of these songs are from the nationally famous (Stephen Foster, Irving Berlin) to the locally famous (Harold Weeks). The earliest sheet music dates from 1840, with the majority from the turn of the twentieth century to mid-twentieth century, during the period when sheet music and pianos were present in most middle-class American homes.
The music that is about or published in the Pacific Northwest and that is out of copyright has been digitized and is available online (http://content.lib.washington.edu/smweb/); about 50 compositions have recorded performances by University of Washington School of Music students. The entire collection is indexed and accessible via the URL http://db.lib.washington.edu/sheetmusic/. Please feel free to explore.—Judy Tsou, University of Washington Music Library, jstsou@u.washington.edu
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Endeavor Open URL Linking provides pre-resolved links from Scopus
Endeavor Information Systems’ full-text OpenURL linking solution, Discovery: Resolver, now supports image-based linking from Scopus. Scopus is one of Elsevier’s primary science, technology, medicine, and social science research information services. When applying Endeavor’s link resolver in combination with Scopus to locate a particular article, users can identify whether they have permission to view the full text of that resource. Before citation is accessed in Scopus, the resolver examines a library’s holdings to see if the institution provides access to the article. Endeavor is a wholly owned subsidiary of Elsevier.
Taylor & Francis launches new electronic publishing platform
Scholarly publishers Taylor & Francis Group has launched a beta version of its new electronic publishing platform, informaworld. The platform will deliver enhanced search capabilities for its current collection of more than 550,000 electronic journal articles, databases, 13,000 e-books, and more than 3,000 volumes from its online archives. informaworld will provide librarians, researchers, and students access to journals from Taylor & Francis, Routledge, and Psychology Press, as well as more than 180 Informa Healthcare journals, selected encyclopedias, and other content. It will run in parallel with Taylor and Francis’ existing platforms while customers try out the beta site and provide feedback.
Getty vocabularies to be available in OCLC Terminologies Service
OCLC Online Computer Library Center, Inc. and the Getty Research Institute have announced that the Getty Vocabularies—the Art & Architecture Thesaurus, Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names, and Union List of Artist Names—will be available through the OCLC Terminologies Service. The OCLC Terminologies Service is a Web service that was recently launched to provide libraries, museums, and archives access to a variety of thesauri through a single interface. It may be used as a standalone tool or may be used with different metadata editors, such as OCLC Connexion, CONTENTdm, or local systems. The Getty Vocabularies are the premier references for categorizing works of art, architecture, material culture, and the names of artists, architects and others. Editors in the Getty Vocabulary Program, an operating program of the Getty Research Institute, continually monitor developments in the cultural heritage field to maintain thesauri with terms, names and other information about people, places, things and concepts relating to art, architecture, and material culture. To learn more about Getty Vocabularies, visit www.getty.edu/research/conducting_research/vocabularies/.
Higher ed and library leaders voice support for free access at forum
Leaders of major higher education and library organizations attended the October forum, “Improving Access to Publicly Funded Research,” to voice their support for recent measures to expand public access to federally funded research. The forum was cosponsored by Association of American Universities, Association of Research Libraries, Coalition for Networked Information, National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges, and SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition). Measures supported include the Cornyn/Lieberman Federal Research Public Access Act and the National Institutes of Health Public Access Policy. Papers and slides from speakers at the forum are available online at www.arl.org/forum06 .
PASCAL partners with Xrefer for online reference
The Partnership Among South Carolina Academic Libraries (PASCAL) has signed an agreement with Xrefer to make Xrefer Plus available to students at all schools in the South Carolina Technical College System (SCTCS). Xreferplus, which will be the main component of the SCTCS’ new virtual reference service, features full-text, cross-searchable content from more than 200 titles and 50 publishers. Content is enriched with images, sound files, maps, and customizable data tables.
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Register for ACRL’s online seminar
“Designing Web Sites for Academic Libraries, Part 2”
ACRL’s online seminar, “Designing Web Sites for Academic Libraries, Part 2,” is being offered January 8–February 3, 2007. Registration is open.
This four-week course builds from the work completed in part 1. Participants will learn about advanced CSS design, accessible menus, and re-Javascript and will review multimedia (FLASH, Quicktime etc.), Web-accessible database applications (PHP, MYSQL, ASP etc.), and content management software options.
Prerequisite
Completion of Part 1 or the consent of the instructor is a prerequisite. Consent of the instructor will require proof of a completed XHTML standard CSS external page which CSS and XHTML validated icons on it that work.
Registration
For more information and a link to the online registration form, visit www.ala.org/ala/acrl/acrlproftools/webdesign2.htm.
Payment may be made by credit card or purchase order only. Class size is limited to 60 participants.
Future e-Learning from ACRL
Additional e-Learning courses and Webcasts will be offered in 2007.
Mark your calendar!
• Creating a Comprehensive Plan for Information Literacy: February 19 to March 10, 2007
• Teaching Portfolios for LibrariansNew Course April 9 to April 28, 2007
• All Users Are Local: Bringing the Library Next Door to the Campus Worldwide: May 21–June 10, 2007
Webcasts (dates to be determined):
• The Role of the Librarian in Combating Student Plagiarism
• Technology Trends for Academic Libraries
• Leading the Academic Library
• Screencasting: Uses for the Academic LibraryNew Webcast
Visit www.acrl.org/e-learning for complete information.
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