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NEWS FROM THE FIELDC&RL News, February 2008Vol. 69, No. 2 by David Free New ACRL publications ACRL Publications is pleased to announce two new titles. Library 2.0 Initiatives in Academic Libraries, edited by Laura B. Cohen, is ACRL’s first hybrid publication. The title combines a print volume of 12 case studies with a wiki (www.acrl.ala.org/L2Initiatives), where the cases will be updated over the next two years. Authors describe the use of such tools as blogs, wikis, podcasts, IM, RSS, XML, Web services, mashups, and social networking to illustrate their efforts to forge new models of scholarly communication in academic environments. Information Literacy Programs in the Digital Age: Educating College and University Students Online, edited by Alice Daugherty and Michael F. Russo, presents significant and innovative online instruction programs, describing the development, implementation, and assessment of each of these. This book is a resource for institutions currently teaching information literacy online, and a guide to those considering doing so. Both titles are available for purchase from the ALA Online Store at www.alastore.ala.org. NCSU chooses architect for new library North Carolina State University (NCSU) has selected the firm Snøhetta as the lead architect that will design the new James B. Hunt Jr. Library on its Centennial Campus. With a total project cost of $114 million, the James B. Hunt Jr. Library will serve as the intellectual and social nexus for the rapidly growing population on NCSU’s Centennial Campus, a community of academic, corporate, and government partners located on a 1,334-acre site adjacent to NCSU’s main campus. The 264,000 gross-square-foot facility, of which 200,000 gsf will constitute the companion library to the main D. H. Hill Library, will primarily house collections supporting the multidisciplinary research and teaching activities on Centennial Campus in areas such as information and communications technologies, bioscience and biotechnology, advanced materials, and education. Based in New York and Oslo, Norway, Snøhetta has gained international acclaim for projects ranging from the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Egypt and the Norwegian Embassy in Berlin to the national opera house in Oslo and the Cultural Center at Ground Zero in Manhattan. Academic buildings in the firm’s portfolio include arts centers at Bowling Green State University in Ohio and Queen’s University in Canada. Vice Provost and Director of Libraries Susan K. Nutter said, “Structured as a collective, Snøhetta is well-regarded for its architects’ devotion to teamwork and experience with projects that involve extensive public consultations. We are confident that this up-and-coming firm brings both relevant expertise and the creative mind to design a 21-century library for NC State.” The construction of the Hunt Library constitutes the second phase of the NCSU Libraries’ Master Plan for facilities. The first phase involved the renovation of the East Wing of the main D. H. Hill Library. Completed in March 2007, that project created a new Special Collections Research Center with a reading room, exhibit gallery and conservatory, as well as a Learning Commons embraced by NCSU students for catering to their needs for collaborative work spaces, the latest technologies, and expert research assistance. The second and third phases the Master Plan will address the renovation of the D. H. Hill Library’s West Wing and the expansion of the Hunt Library. Nature archive to 1869 goes live Many of the historic moments in modern science can now be explored online. The archive of the first 80 years (1869–1949) of the journal Nature went online in December 2007 at www.nature.com/nature/archive. Every article published in Nature, back to volume 1, issue 1 will now be available online. Nature’s archive reveals a wealth of treasures, including the first observation of x-rays (Wilhelm Röntgen, 1896) the discovery of the electron (J.J. Thomson, 1897), the first fossil evidence that humans originated in Africa (Raymond Dart, 1925), and the discovery of the neutron (James Chadwick, 1932). Containing more than 4,000 issues and an estimated 180,000 articles, the 1869-1949 archive completes the digitization of Nature. The project has taken more than five years to complete, beginning with the launch of the 1987–1996 archive in 2003. A special Web feature, The History of the Journal Nature (www.nature.com/nature/history/), featuring timelines, video interviews, and profiles of editors has been developed to celebrate the launch of the 1869–1949 archive. The Nature archive 1869–1949 is an integrated part of the nature.com platform. The articles are available as PDFs of the original journal articles, but HTML abstracts are available. Access is by site license for institutions, or articles can be purchased individually. Institutions wishing to purchase a site license will pay a one-time fee, and post-cancellation rights will apply. Selected content is free for a limited time at www.nature.com/nature/history/century.html.
Civil War letters online The Rare Books and Manuscripts section of the Special Collections department at the St. Albert Hall Library of Saint Mary’s College has completed scanning and preserving a series of letters from the Civil War era donated to the library by Professor Carl Guarneri. Twenty-three of the letters were written by 19-year-old Forrest Little, a private in the 5th Vermont Volunteer Regiment, Company F, between September 1861 and July 1862. The scanned letters, their transcriptions, an essay written by Guarneri, as well as background notes, and other images from the Library of Congress and Harper’s Weekly, are now available on a Web site entitled “The Civil War Letters of Forrest Little.” The collection is available at library.stmarys-ca.edu/research/history/usa/little/. The letters speak clearly and simply of the hopes of a young man about to go into war. Once he fought in battle, his fears and determination were expressed as he doggedly proceeded with his duty during the Peninsula Campaign of General George McClellan. In July 1862, Little died of disease, as did so many other soldiers of that time. His letters survive, now online, for all to see. Portico archive exceeds 3.6 million articles Portico, a not-for-profit organization whose mission is to preserve scholarly literature published in electronic form and to ensure that these materials remain accessible to future generations, recently announced that its archive of scholarly e-journals now contains more than 3.6 million articles. Portico was launched in 2005 with support from JSTOR, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Ithaka, and the Library of Congress in response to the now urgent need to develop robust means to preserve scholarly e-journals and to ensure their future access. “Portico takes an aggressive approach to meeting the goals of the Open Archive Information System (OAIS) reference model for long-term preservation and has developed an extensive automated system for ensuring journal articles will be usable in the future,” said Evan Owens, Portico’s chief technology officer. “We recently completed a significant expansion of our preservation infrastructure to improve our ability to ingest, generate preservation metadata, and archive journal articles. To exceed 3.6 million articles ingested within our first two years of operation is a very significant milestone for us.” Portico is currently preserving more than 7,200 journal titles from 46 publishers. A list of participating publishers is available at www.portico.org/about/part_publishers.html.
Automated retrieval at the University of Utah Students at the University of Utah’s J. Willard Marriott Library can now get their books with a simple “click” through the library’s new Automated Retrieval Center (ARC)—the largest library robotic storage and retrieval system in North America. Containing 19,181 storage bins that now hold roughly 1 million items (one-third of the library’s 3-million volume print collection), the Marriott Library’s ARC has a long-term storage capacity of approximately 2 million items. Four robotic retrieval machines locate and deliver bins to library staff, who then distribute items to patrons. The process takes less than five minutes, and students and faculty can order books from home or office ahead of time. ARC spans a total of 3.5 stories (1.5 stories underground and two above ground) with a footprint of 14,000 square feet and a volume of 704,000 cubic feet. ARC was purposely planned to house the less frequently circulated materials, leaving the more popular collections for patrons to browse in the stacks by subject matter. Thus far, requests have totaled about 100 per day. In the four months that ARC has been in operation, about 50 percent of the requests have come from other colleges and universities throughout Utah and the United States via the interlibrary loan system. Additionally, ARC has freed-up approximately 80,000 square feet of stacks space, allowing the library to build new high-tech classrooms, an expansive knowledge commons, and other student-centered areas. ARC is part of the library’s comprehensive renovation, which broke ground in June 2005 and is scheduled for completion in the fall of 2008. For additional information, including images, visit www.lib.utah.edu/libraryinfo/news/press/. ARL educational fair use white paper The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) has released a white paper, “Educational Fair Use Today,” by Jonathan Band, JD. Band discusses three recent appellate decisions concerning fair use that should give educators and librarians greater confidence and guidance for asserting this important privilege. In all three decisions discussed in the paper, the courts permitted extensive copying and display in the commercial context because the uses involved repurposing and recontextualization. The reasoning of these opinions could have far-reaching implications in the educational environment. Band summarizes the three cases—Blanch v. Koons, Perfect 10 v. Amazon.com, and Bill Graham Archives v. Dorling Kindersley—and analyzes the significance of the appellate decisions in the educational context. The paper is freely available for download from the ARL Web site at www.arl.org/bm~doc/educationalfairusetoday.pdf.
EBSCOhost introduces customized Visual Search EBSCO recently announced that new Visual Search options have been added to the EBSCOhost interface. The new Visual Search options provide visual learners with graphical approaches to information discovery. Two new visual search options are now available. The first style uses colorful blocks, each representing a record or article. Sorting and filtering options by date and relevance allow users to focus and manage their search results. The blocks are part of a map of results that enables users to see what they are searching and where the next step may lead. The second user interface style features rows or columns of results in which each item represents a subject or an article. This interface enables users to conduct a search and see resulting rectangles, or articles, neatly formed in columns. Users will be able to select subject clusters to narrow a search and display a new column of results. In this design, a bright “breadcrumb” trail will appear when a user clicks on a subject, while maintaining the previous set of results. The trail helps users visualize the path taken to reach their end results, and easily backtrack to take a new path. In both interfaces, results will be “stacked” by publication or subject, sorted by relevance or date, or filtered using a date range slider bar. Articles can be saved for e-mail, RSS, folder options, and printing with a drag and drop feature. For more information go to www.ebscohost.com/visualsearch.
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