Open Access: Five Principles for Negotiations with Publishers

http://libereurope.eu/blog/2017/09/07/open-access-five-principles-negotiations-publishers/ 

New Open Toolkit for Teaching File and Data Management

The ETD+ Toolkit (https://educopia.org/publications/etdplustoolkit) is an approach to improving student and faculty research output management. Focusing on the Electronic Thesis and Dissertation (ETD) as a mile-marker in a student’s research trajectory, it provides in-time advice to students and faculty about avoiding common digital loss scenarios for the ETD and all of its affiliated files.

The ETD+ Toolkit provides free introductory training resources on crucial data curation and digital longevity techniques. It has been designed as a training series to help students and faculty identify and offset risks and threats to their digital research footprints.

About the Toolkit

The ETD+ Toolkit is the result of a project (https://educopia.org/research/grants/etdplus) generously funded by the Institute of Library and Museum Services. Educopia Institute led the creation of the Toolkit in partnership with the NDLTD, ProQuest, bepress, and 12 U.S. research libraries.

What it is: 
An open set of six modules and evaluation instruments that prepare students to create, store, and maintain their research outputs on durable devices and in durable formats. Each is designed to stand alone; they may also be used as a series. 

What each module includes: 
Each module includes Learning Objectives, a one-page Handout, a Guidance Brief, a Slideshow with full presenter notes, and an evaluation Survey. Each module is released under a CC-BY license and all elements are openly editable to make reuse as easy as possible.

Who it is for: 
Anyone may freely adopt and adapt this toolkit. We especially recommend its use by administrators, faculty, and librarians teaching students and by students seeking practical advice about digital content management.   

Give us feedback (Please)
Like the modules? Hate them? Think they’re unique? Redundant? These materials have been produced under a grant-funded project, and we are requesting feedback that we can share with our funder and that we can use to improve the Toolkit. Please help us to refine the workshops and report back to our funder about how and where they are being used. Contact katherine@educopia.org and sam@educopia.org.

Launch of the BitCurator Consortium (BCC) website

We are excited to announce the launch of the BitCurator Consortium (BCC) website at http://bitcuratorconsortium.org/. The website contains numerous information resources about the BitCurator Consortium, digital forensics, and more, including:

• How the Consortium works, including its organizational mission and governance structure
• How to join, membership costs, and benefits
• Information on applying digital forensics tools and methods in cultural heritage institutions
• Case studies, publications, and presentations
• Updates on current BitCurator R&D (e.g. BitCurator Access project)
• How to use BitCurator (documentation and video tutorials provided)
• How people are using BitCurator, including manuals and workflows

The BCC is an independent, community-led membership association that supports the curation of born-digital materials by libraries, archives, and museums. Members of the BitCurator user community founded BCC in 2014 to enhance, promote, and explore this growing area of professional activity. Member benefits include:

• Voting rights
• Eligibility to serve on the BCC Executive Council and Committees
• Professional development and training opportunities
• Subscription to a dedicated BCC member mailing list
• Special registration rates for BCC events

About BitCurator

The BitCurator environment is an Ubuntu-based Linux distribution that includes open source and public domain digital forensics tools, as well as unique reporting mechanisms and user interfaces, designed to assist libraries, archives, and museums with the curation of born-digital materials. Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the BitCurator project has developed, packaged, and documented open-source forensics and data analysis tools to create forensic disk images, analyze files and file systems, extract file system metadata, identify and redact sensitive information, and identify and remove duplicate files.

The BCC operates as an affiliated community of the Educopia Institute, a nonprofit organization that advances cultural, scientific, and scholarly institutions by catalyzing networks and collaborative communities to facilitate collective impact. Learn more about BCC and its growing network of libraries, archives, and museums athttp://bitcuratorconsortium.org/.

Linked Data for Libraries Project

"Welcome to the Linked Data for Libraries (LD4L) project. The project is a collaboration of the Cornell University Library, the Harvard Library Innovation Lab, and the Stanford University Libraries, and is funded by a nearly $1 million two-year grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
The goal of the project is to create a Scholarly Resource Semantic Information Store (SRSIS) model that works both within individual institutions and through a coordinated, extensible network of Linked Open Data to capture the intellectual value that librarians and other domain experts and scholars add to information resources when they describe, annotate, organize, select, and use those resources, together with the social value evident from patterns of usage."
Aims to connect entities in descriptive metadata: People, Organisations, Places, Subjects, Events, Works, and Datasets.

The Linked Data for Libraries (LD4L) Project: a Progress Report: http://www.cni.org/pbs/the-linked-data-for-libraries-ld4l-project-a-progress-report/

Authority files: Breaking out of the library silo to become signposts for research information

Knowledge Exchange is exploring the rich field of research information in order to help our partners effectively achieve their objectives. To this end a group of experts collected examples of Authority Files, to demonstrate their working and immense value for information discovery and knowledge creation in the research process.

Authority Files or Controlled Vocabularies are lists of entities (publications, journals, data collections, organisations, etc.). The lists are uniquely identified by a number (identifiers such as ORCID for researchers, DOI for publications, ISBN for books, etc.) and contain information to characterise and qualify the entities (e.g. if a journal is Open Access, which researcher contributed to a specific project, etc.)
The lists are authoritative (maintained by an expert organisation, registry office, etcetera; or authoritative in itself being widely recognised and used by significant audiences, etc.) In this publication experts explain the beneficial value of Authority Files with regards to discovery, trust and reliability, accountability, transactional efficiency, for knowledge creation.

Download the publication: http://www.knowledge-exchange.info/Default.aspx?ID=708 

The UK Medical Heritage Library: uniting digitised collections

The Wellcome Library and Jisc are delighted to announce our nine UK research library partners to the UK Medical Heritage Library project. These libraries will be making their historic collections available for digitisation alongside the Wellcome Library’s own 19th century works. They make up the bulk of the 15 million page goal made possible by funding from the Higher Education and Funding Council for England and Jisc.

The nine partners include:

6 university libraries:

       UCL (University College London)
       University of Leeds
       University of Glasgow
       London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine
       King’s College London
       University of Bristol

3 Royal College libraries:
       Royal College of Physicians of London
       Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh
       Royal College of Surgeons of England

Relevant works will be selected by the partner libraries from their historic book and pamphlet collections, representing a broad selection of works from across medicine, health, and related subjects. The Internet Archive will carry out all the digitisation work in a brand new scanning centre here at the Wellcome Library that will accommodate well over 2,000 items per month at peak times.

From October, these will start to become available online as part of the Medical Heritage Library  collection on the Internet Archive website and via the Wellcome Library catalogue.

More details on the project and the library partners can be found here:
http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/News/Media-office/Press-releases/2014/WTP056966.htm

What do librarians want from data management workshops?

As always Sam Searle has interesting things to say...

http://www.samsearle.net/2014/05/what-do-librarians-want-from-data.html