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Access Day 1 - Afternoon Sessions #1

Dan Chudnov, Donald Moses, Paul Pound and Stevan Harnad do the early afternoon at Access 2009

I unfortunately missed a lot of Dan's talk getting another speaker setup. I came in when Dan was talking about the LOCs new linked data initiative with LC Subject Headings, which are accessible in a smart and flexible framework. The library community should be eating this up - LC Subject Headings available as linked data, and free. LC is also making their newspaper data available as linked data, which is very exciting for us at UPEI with the work we are doing on newspapers. Very exciting stuff - thanks for going to Library of Congress Dan!

Donald and Paul gave an overview of the IslandLives project at UPEI, including a summary of the the new Islandora software and the basic architecture. IslandLives is UPEIs project to digitize the Island's local histories and provide a reach discovery and collaborative layer around these resources. Some of the innovative features of the project include the use of Islandora (a Drupal-Fedora collaborative repository system), automated workflows, Drupal-based TEI editor and more.

Access Day 1 - 2nd Session Set

Mark Jordan and Brian Owen from Simon Fraser University

Mark provided an update on the COPPUL (Council of Pacfiic and Prairie University Libraries) effort to create a LOCKSS server, which went from Pilot to production 2 weeks ago.

Brian Owen gave an update on the various SFU open source projects, especially the reSearcher and the PKP suites. CUFTS has a lot of development effort behind it and as the community grows. The SFU team will be working in the next 6-12 months on to clean-up the existing CUFTS product, provide better admin interface, etc. OJS is also a mature project, with well over 3,000 journal titles published with it. The PKP team will be providing a stable 2.2.3 release (the stable release) and the 2.3 line, which will be the developer version. They are also re-writing all the code for OJS to consolidate and modularize it - the PKP Web Application Library. The Open Monograph Press will be the first new feature to use it and will be doing a major interface upgrade. These guys are doing amazing work - support them with code, money and praise!

Access Day 1 - 1st Sessions

Cory Doctorow and Richard Akerman Kick Off Access 2009

We got off to a good start with Access today with a keynote from Cory Doctorow. As expected Cory gave a packed session on the latest issues with copyright and the fight for information freedom around the world. I was especially inspired with his rallying cry for libraries and librarians as a critical group that needs to carry the message forward and ensure a balanced approach to copyright. As he said, saying anything bad about a library or a librarian (Margaret Atwood notwithstanding) makes you look like a jerk. So, the key message for me from Cory's piece is to leverage our stereotype an get radical about standing up for informations rights and freedoms - if we don't, then the Cory's and Michael Geist's will be the only voices in a diminishing crowd. And we don't want that. Do we?

Richard Akerman was up next with the Binkley Lecture. Richard's Science Library Pad is a must read blog for academic librarians and scientists in particular. Richard talked about the latest developments in the creation, release and access to data. He had some key points about the move in some jurisdictions to open up government information (e.g. Power of Information Task Force in the UK). His view on data via the 4 categories of Research, Government, Library and Personal data was an effective way to describe the current data landscape and why we need to pay attention. He also provided a number of links to exemplars who are providing access to data. These links will be available in Richard's preso. One of Richard's last points was to contrast making data available via APIs vs Raw Data. Basically, API-accessible data provides you more control over the data, while Raw Data provides greater flexibility re what can be done with the data in a context of a loss of control. To me there is no "2 ways" to provide access to data - Raw Data makes sure that those who can, will find something completely new and innovative in a data landscape which has no walls and chains.

BTW - all Access session are being recorded (video, audio and slide deck feed) and will be made available on the Web as soon as we can get them up there.

If You Still Have Print... :: What to Withdraw: Print Collections Management in the Wake of Digitization

What to Withdraw: Print Collections Management in the Wake of Digitization

Just kidding on the "If you still have" part... I just finished 2 days of business meetings with CAUL colleagues (a very productive 2 days indeed) and one topic of discussion was the ongoing preoccupation with the print, sometimes to the detriment of digital stewardship. I haven't had a chance to read this new Ithaka report, but it is very timely and likely worth a read, as we are all dealing with the same issue.

Great OCLC Policy Analysis Post

Coyle's InFormation: OCLC Policy - What is the Question?

Karen provides her usual insightful and complete analysis of the latest in the OCLC record policy saga - a must read if we are to move beyond the old school and into the future with our Library records. A quick look at this Guardian piece on how the Open Library project is planning to embrace open and the future is a startling contrast with OCLC FUD approach. One web page for every book ever published (in the same vein as the EOC solution to E.O. Wilson's "one web page for every species dream") - why would we settle for anything less? Why would we settle for something controlled/determined by OCLC? UPEI will be embracing the Open Library plan and approach and do whatever we can to help make their vision come to fruition. I challenge all libraries to do the same and participate in a project that truly has OCLC members' interests front and centre - not to mention everybody else in the world. It's all about transformation, not transfusion: time to remove the WorldCat life support and let the creative spirit flow...

Scraped from Coyle's InFormation

New Islandora Release Available

The development team at UPEI has been hard at work on a new release of the Islandora system, which integrates Drupal and Fedora into an extensible repository system. The latest release works with Drupal 6 and Fedora 3 and also has much improved documentation. The latest release includes:

• Customizable Collection View - Attach an XSLT stylesheet to a collection object and you can display a collection as anything from a simple HTML table-based grid to a dynamic JavaScript picture gallery.
• API for accessing and manipulating Fedora objects - Ingest new items, add datastreams, add relationships, do batch ingests all with an object-oriented PHP API designed to make accessing Fedora objects easy. No need to remember SOAP call syntax. Most API operations can be done with 2 or 3 lines of code.
• Collection Policies - Create collections and control what types of data users can add to the collection. Works with Fedora 3's content models for fine control over what datastreams new objects have. Users can easily fill out media-rich objects with consistently named and formatted datastreams.
• Plugin functionality - Dropping in a PHP class with custom ingest functions lets you automate actions to trigger on object ingest or adding a datastream. We've used this feature to automatically generate thumbnails, call out to document conversion software to generate PDFs from MS Word documents, perform Optical Character Recognition on scanned images or anything else you can access using Drupal, PHP and web services.
• XACML security policies - Islandora integrates with Drupal's users and roles so you can define which users and groups can view, ingest and manage repository items, with this security information being propagated via XACML into the repository objects themselves.
• Image manipulation API - Fedora uses Drupal's Image API to automatically scale large images before downloading them from the server. URL parameters inside IMG tags like "img src="fedora/iamgeapi/imgs:1/Image.jpg?op=scale&width=100" make accessing this functionality easy for site designers.

New developments include: additional content models distributed as Drupal modules (including samples from library and research environments); integration of the Djatoka JPEG2000 server; integrated Drupal TEI editor with side-by-side XML/image view; tighter integration with Drupal nodes.

New Trend Towards Print on Demand for Digital Books

Bookstore | Cornell University Library Digital Collections

I find the new trend towards print-on-demand for out-of-print books a compelling one. The Cornell model uses Amazon to sell copies of books they have digitized via the now defunct Microsoft project as well as their Google partnership. Given the prices on their site it appears there is not huge markup, which would be my main concern. If operations like this can make a enough money to cover the costs of digitizing more, and the digital copies remain accessible to all at no cost (not a given unfortunately), then I think we have a nice model for the future. McMaster's recently announced partnership with Lulu had similar promise, the big problem with this one is that the digital books are not accessible to all. I wasn't able to confirm any of this as I could only access the original press release on the Mac Library site and the digital collections server and blog seemed to be down, so I stand to be corrected on this one. If right, I just can't reconcile myself to the concept of digitizing public domain material and placing them behind a wall - why would libraries go against centuries of stewardship of the public commons and lock up the world's knowledge?

OLA Presentation Online

Disrupting the Library Transporter Beam

I have loaded a copy of my OLA talk on my blog (32 MB). I ranted and ruffled a few feathers using the Star Trek transporter (a malfunctioning one at that) and the Transmogrifier from Calvin and Hobbes as the key to commenting on: vendor vs Open Source ILSs; dysfunctional Big Deals for journals; cyberinfrastructure and virtual research environments; community-based digitization; and a global open library system. After some examples from the UPEI labs, I summed it up by using another recent scientific discovery, the cloak of invisibility: We can don our cloak of invisibility and fade into the background, or we can, like the murder of librarians who faced down Donald Rumsfeld over the Patriot Act, wear the cloak so we can become more radical and activist to protect the information commons. Given all that has happened of late with rapacious journal publishers like Sage trying to gouge educational institutions and OCLCs boneheaded move to own the world's bib records, I was feeling a bit punchy, like libraries were losing their identity and forgetting why we are here. Maybe I'll record the next rant :-)

First legal shot across the Semantic Web's bow

What a sTrANGLED Web IP Weaves

An interesting post on the impact of the Thomson legal action against Zotero - this one highlighting the negative impact on the emerging Semantic Web when one hides data behind proprietary walls. Surely the ability of Thomson's products to "reverse engineer" remote databases and suck their information into a proprietary system is itself a transgression similar to what Thomson alleges Zotero is doing to them? Careful what you wish for Thomson...

Some Interesting User-Centric Feedback

BiblioCommons and Queens

I thought there were some interesting gems in this piece from Martha Whitehead and Steve Toubon on user-genrated content in the library catalogue. Some examples:

Non-librarians do not limit (i.e., use facets) very much. Librarians want to help; users want to be independent. For recently-returned books, user can say how useful it was and for which course (from list). Provide brief survey of what user used in the book (whole thing, just a chapter and which one), etc. "How is this related to other texts"?

This brings to mind some of the discussion we are having here at UPEI with respect to the OPAC and the new things we can do with our open source framework. Finding a way for students to add value to the kernel which is a bib record is key to that innovation. For example, finding an easy way for students to submit their bibliographies from papers (ideally in something like RefWorks which can then be linked to specific items) I think would be an incredibly powerful addition to a bib entity. Combined with an "exit interview" re value of the item as this piece discusses would be very powerful indeed. Now, we just need to work out HOW...

Scraped from