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Great Solution - Intellectual Property at the Expense of Evolution

How To Save The Newspapers, Vol. XII: Outlaw Linking

Brilliant. Who said great legal minds needed to understand the world around them to make decisions. Ban linking without permission? Why not just lock us all in our homes, cut the phone/internet lines and send food to the back door? That would surely prevent any use of IP without permission. Brilliant.

Scraped from TechCrunch

UPEI Robertson Library Wins CAUBO Award for VRE

The announcement was made this week about the Robertson Library winning the Atlantic Regional CAUBO award for our Virtual Research Environment, or VRE. The text from the award:

The Virtual Research Environment (VRE) is an innovative software system for stewarding research data regardless of the type of data or discipline. The VRE combines a best-practice web-based content management system (Drupal) with a state-of-the-art data repository system (Fedora) via an open source application suite (Islandora) developed at UPEI. Together, these components help solve one of the most important and challenging aspects of any research-intensive institution: the reliable stewardship of research data throughout the life-cycle of a research program and beyond.

The VRE provides a wealth of social software tools and techniques to provide a highly-functional environment that encourages collaboration. It allows users to create workflows that can transform data into more usable formats and ensure that accessible versions of research assets are available to collaborators and/or the broader public. Over 50 research groups currently use the VRE system, representing all disciplines and research approaches, including interdisciplinary projects with international communities of interest. Examples include the Mollusc Health Lab, Marine Natural Products Lab, Marxism and Psychology Research Group, Advancing Interdisciplinary Research in Singing, and the L.M. Montgomery Institute. The VRE software is also the basis of the library’s digital collections, including newspapers, magazines, books, audio and video.

The flexible architecture of the VRE system means that any digital file can be stored, described and accessed in a variety of ways, accommodating the requirements of individual researchers, while building a generalized framework which adapts to more uses. By bringing the core philosophies of the open source community to the research effort, the VRE also provides a transformative landscape on which to build UPEI’s research excellence and outreach. By distributing the open source software behind the VRE to the larger community, these same benefits will be available to the larger Canadian and international research communities. Emerging partnerships with other institutions (e.g., University of New Brunswick) and vendors (Sun Microsystems Inc.) point to the success of the VRE and related development efforts at UPEI’s Robertson Library.

The other winners are available from the CAUBO site. You can get more information on the VRE and the software that sits behind it at our VRE and Islandora sites.

Transforming Library Workflow at UPEI

Melissa Belvadi presented at APLA on some of the transformative workflow changes taking place at UPEI.

The first section talked about how we are using Evergreen, CUFTS and GODOT to manage our serials workflow. Since only 400 of our 35,000 serials are print, we moved to managing all of these in our eJournal database - CUFTS. Some customization by the good folks at SFU allowed us to do this easily and, we think, elegantly. The end result is a user-focused presentation of journals to our users and a simple interface for staff. James Murphy, who works in Circulation and Acquisitions, presented at NASIG with SFU on this process.

The next section talked about how we are using a set of Excel sheets for our Acquisitions workflow since Evergreen (which we switched to a year ago) doesn't have one. The key piece here is that the staff love the new process and do not miss the behemoth Sirsi ILS at all.

Part 3 was a brief mention of how we are using the GODOT system to provide our own ILL form instead of using the default RELAIS form which is sad at best. This has resulted in a cleaner patron form and fewer requests for stuff we don't have.

Part 4 described how we are using Redmine to manage the cataloguing workflow for our special collections material. This project management software was a perfect and flexible tool for automating the workflow and passing pieces back and forth. The lesson from this is using the tools that fit, rather than fitting yourself to cumbersome and expensive tools that don't.

The last piece talked about how we are doing Reserves, using a combination of Evergreen bookbags and Drupal pages. This one is a moving target so is hard to describe in great detail, other than to say that the team at UPEI has a great deal of flexibility to do this in any number of ways. We will also look at the new Reserve module coming in the next version of Evergreen and decide if it is a better way to go.

Clients dictated think-tank research: Former employee

Recording Industry Sullies Multiple Reputations

I've been following this piece on the Copyright report from the Conference Board of Canada ever since it broke and these latest developments make it a must follow. Amazing what good reporting and perseverance on the part of people like Michael Geist can do. We all know that groups like the Canadian Recording Industry and their American counterparts play hard (and now it would seem dirty) in their quest to lock up IP and maintain the old models of doing business, but this kind of desperate act is just sad. Why not just play by the rules, instead of ruining their reputation and that of a supposedly unbiased research group along with them? Who will ever again trust the output of the Conference Board of Canada, "the foremost independent, not-for-profit applied research organization in Canada?" Of for that fact, the funders of the report: U.S. and Canadian chambers of commerce, the Canadian Anti-Counterfeiting Network, the Copyright Collective of Canada and the Ontario Ministry of Research and Innovation? What other reports have been doctored to meet the demands of those footing the bill?

Is it possible to donate an eBook to the library?

More Changes in the Library Landscape

An interesting post from Sue Polanka highlights some of the issues with a bread & butter library process - book donations. [On the other hand I suspect some Collections librarians will be happy to think of a day when they don't have to consider moldy boxes of past bestsellers.] Many libraries rely on the annual spring cleaning ritual for new material, so Sue's thoughts on what happens when they are all digital is an interesting one. As she points out, the challenges with donating eBooks far outweigh the advantages, at least in the current DRM-focused landscape. What struck me with this one was how quickly another long-standing tradition, not to mention way of building a Friends network, suddenly disappears. The other sad thought was how much this highlights the death knell of public lending in the digital age - at least in a way we can fathom. Contrast this with my coming post on ways for public libraries to make use of eBook readers.

Scraped from No Shelf Required