Spotlight – May 2010

News relating to digital scholarship, access and preservation at Berkeley and around the world. To contribute, email Rick Jaffe

On Campus

Raymond Yee, Eric Kansa present on opening federal budget data
iSchool News, posted Tuesday, May 18, 2010
http://www.ischool.berkeley.edu/newsandevents/news/20100518transparencyconference

On May 20, iSchool faculty members Eric Kansa and Raymond Yee presented recommendations for making federal budget data “intelligible and available for public review and debate” to the Federal Spending Transparency Conference in Washington, DC. Drawing upon lessons from the Recovery.gov web site, the authors called for budget information to be made available via web services, and archived and curated in a manner that maintains the public’s access to the data and trust in its validity. The text of their presentation can be found here (pdf).

The Conservator’s Art: Preserving Egypt’s Past
Exhibit, May 12, 2010 – May 11, 2011
http://events.berkeley.edu/?event_ID=31257&date=2010-05-22&tab=exhibits

From the event listing: “Explore techniques and see results of extensive conservation carried out on pieces including crocodile mummies, statuary, mummy portraits, amulets, and stela collected through the patronage of Phoebe A. Hearst ca. 1900. We hope you will celebrate with us as we work to preserve cultural information for the benefit of future generations. Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology.

It’s Not Just Black and White: Photographing the Built Environment
Exhibit, May 4 – August 16, 2010
http://events.berkeley.edu/index.php/calendar/sn/library.html?event_ID=30804&date=2010-05-28&filter=Secondary%20Event%20Type&filtersel=

From the event listing: “Drawing on the collections of the Environmental Design Archives, the Environmental Design Library, the CED Visual Resources Center, and private collections, the exhibit stimulates thinking about photographic representation of the built environment and how this representation influences our design, writing, and research activity.” Curated by Jason Miller. 210 Wurster Hall.

Around the World

JISC releases “Keeping Research Data Safe 2″ report
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/reports/2010/keepingresearchdatasafe2.aspx#downloads

The UK’s Joint Information Systems Committee, a body that provides leadership and funding for higher education and research, has just released the final report of a major study on the costs of preservation of research data. From the report: “One of the key findings on the long-term costs of digital preservation for research data was that the cost of archiving activities (archival storage and preservation planning and actions) is consistently a very small proportion of the overall costs and significantly lower than the costs of acquisition/ingest or access activities for all the case studies in KRDS2.”

Spotlight – April 2010

News relating to digital scholarship, access and preservation at Berkeley and around the world. To contribute, email Rick Jaffe

On Campus
The Digitization of Science and the Degradation of the Scientific Method
iSchool: Wednesday, May 5, 2010, 4:00 – 5:30pm
http://www.ischool.berkeley.edu/newsandevents/events/20100505deanslec

Upcoming lecture by Victoria Stodden, postdoctoral associate in law and Kauffman fellow in law and innovation at the Information Society Project at Yale Law School. Dr. Stodden writes: “In this talk I argue that the scientific method be restored to (1) a focus on error control as central to scientific communication and (2) complete communication of the underlying methodology producing the results, ie. reproducibility.” 202 South Hall.

ECAI project joins the iSchool
iSchool News, posted Tuesday, April 27, 2010
http://www.ischool.berkeley.edu/newsandevents/news/20100427ecai

The Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative (ECAI), founded in 1997, will make its home at the School of Information beginning this month. Formerly part of International and Area Studies, ECAI is working toward the creation of “a distributed virtual library of cultural information with a time and place interface,” according to co-director Michael Buckland, professor emeritus in the School of Information.

Water Resources Center Archive looking for a new academic home
On Water (blog), posted Thursday, April 15, 2010
http://blogs.lib.berkeley.edu/wrca.php/2010/04/15/update-on-the-status-of-wrca-april-2010

Water Resources Center Archive Director Linda Vida has posted an update about the status of the WRCA to the On Water blog, in which she explains that, after 52 years, the Division of Agricultural and Natural Resources of the UC Office of the President has “determined that WRCA was no longer an appropriate fit for the Division, due to budget cuts and the adoption of a new strategic vision.” A Request For Application has been distributed to departments at four UC campuses: Berkeley, Davis, Riverside and Merced. ANR hopes to find a new home for the archive by June 30, 2010.

Campus AVC-CIO Shel Waggener on Cloud computing – The future and challenges of IT shared services
UC Berkeley iNews, article posted Friday, April 30, 2010
http://inews.berkeley.edu/articles/Apr-May2010/cloud-computing-EQ

In the first of four articles, the campus’s Chief Information Officer Shel Waggener discusses the changes that IT organizations must accomplish to take advantage of new forms of delivery that promise financial savings.

See also:
OCIO Presents: Brad Wheeler, VP & CIO of Indiana University, speaking to campus on “Thriving in the Era of Rabid Collaboration” (webcast)
Presentation given April 14, 2010
http://webcast.berkeley.edu/event_details.php?seriesid=108a0738-ce20-4610-9345-6121adc70fea&p=1&ipp=15&category=

Around the World

Two announcements from the Internet Archive: 2 millionth digitized text, millions of documents from the US Federal Courts now freely available
Internet Archive Forums, posted by Brewster Kahle, March 31, 2010 and April 6, 2010, respectively
http://www.archive.org/iathreads/post-view.php?id=300273
http://www.archive.org/iathreads/post-view.php?id=301068

The Internet Archive passed a milestone recently when it digitized the 1,000 year old Homiliary on Gospels from Easter to first Sunday of Advent: it was the 2,000,000th digitized text made available to “researchers, historians, scholars, people with disabilities, and the general public for free on archive.org since 2005.” Also, the archive announced
a partnership with Princeton University’s Center for Information Technology Policy and numerous volunteers that creates access, through technological and social means, to millions of US Federal Court documents that are currently available to the public – but difficult to obtain – through a program called PACER (Public Access to Court Electronic Records). At present, the archive says, it is adding a document each minute to its holdings of these records.

Wired Campus – Archive Watch: Civil Rights Over There
Chronicle of Higher Education, article by Jennifer Howard (UCB authentication or subscription required)
Posted March 2, 2010
http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Archive-Watch-Civil-Rights/22256/?sid=pm&utm_source=pm&utm_medium=en

From the article: “Two historians—Maria Höhn, an associate professor at Vassar College, and Martin Klimke, of Heidelberg University and the German Historical Institute in Washington— … have established The Civil Rights Struggle, African-American GI’s, and Germany, an online archive dedicated to gathering and digitizing primary-source material from the (post-war) period.”

News and reaction: US Federal Court denies FCC power to regulate cable internet providers
By Edward Wyatt, New York Times (April 6, 2010) and
Susan Crawford, New York Times (April 10, 2010), respectively
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/07/technology/07net.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/11/opinion/11crawford.html?scp=3&sq=FCC%20court%20ruling%20net&st=cse

In a decision handed down on April 6, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled that “regulators had limited power over Web traffic under current law.” The decision dealt a setback to the FCC’s efforts to impose “net neutrality,” and to its National Broadband Plan to provide internet access to rural areas. The news article continues, “more broadly, the ruling could raise obstacles to the Obama administration’s effort to increase Americans’ access to high-speed Internet networks.”

In response, Susan Crawford, a professor at the University of Michigan Law School and former special advisor to President Obama, argues that the FCC needn’t change its strategy; it only has to “relabel Internet access services as ‘telecommunications services,’ rather than as ‘information services’,” as they’d been considered until August 2005.

DrupalCon SF 2010 session: Enterprise Content Management with Drupal, Alfresco and CMIS
Presentation by Chris Fuller, Optaros, Wednesday, April 21, 2010 (web video)
http://sf2010.drupal.org/conference/sessions/enterprise-content-management-drupal-alfresco-and-cmis

One of the last sessions of the recent Drupal conference in San Francisco provided a look at the new CMIS standard (for interoperability among content management systems) in action. Using CMIS, Drupal developers might be able to extend the Alfresco-based Media Hub to fit the needs of their unit.

Spotlight – March 2010

News relating to digital scholarship, access and preservation at Berkeley and around the world. To contribute, email Rick Jaffe

On Campus
Portugese Republic Turns 100
Bancroft Library: March 5 – May 21 (library hours)
Townsend Humanities Lab: on-line, ongoing
http://townsendlab.berkeley.edu/thl-administration/lab-blog/portuguese-republic-turns-100-thl

Exhibit at the Bancroft Library (March 5-May 21), with a “digital mirror” online at the Townsend Humanities Lab. Bancroft Library Corridor.

Big Ideas at CITRIS Poster and Judging Session
Thursday, April 22, 2010: 3pm – 5pm
http://www.citris-uc.org/events/bigideasposter2010

The top 10 finalists in this year’s Big Ideas competition will present posters, and the winners will be announced. Kvamme Atrium, 3rd floor, Sutardja Dai Hall.

CalDay 2010
Saturday, April 17, 2010, 9am-4pm

Annual campus open house – take in all that Berkeley has to offer. See the Cal Day web page for activities and schedules. Many locations across the UC Berkeley campus.

Around the World

Draft specification for media annotation announced
Posted by Brian Sletten, InfoQ
http://www.infoq.com/news/2010/03/ontology-media-resource

The W3C Media Annotations Working Group has recently posted drafts of its Ontology for Media Resource 1.0 and API for Media Resource 1.0 efforts. They have also updated the Use Cases document to reflect some of the intentions of these projects.

The proposed standard aims to, among other goals:
• make it easier for people to access media resources across the collections of different cultural heritage institutions (libraries, museums, archives, etc.) on the Web.
• allow descriptors of media resources to apply to versions of the same media in various formats
• enable developers to handle user-created annotations – comments, tags, rankings, even viewing history – created in various applications, allowing applications to make recommendations to its users and viewers to add or link to the annotations of other users.

Effort to Widen U.S. Internet Access Sets Up Battle
By Brian Stelter and Jenna Wortham, New York Times (March 12, 2010)
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/13/business/media/13fcc.html

Lead: “The Federal Communications Commission is proposing an ambitious 10-year plan that will reimagine the nation’s media and technology priorities by establishing high-speed Internet as the country’s dominant communication network.”

DrupalCon SF
April 19-21, 2010
http://sf2010.drupal.org/

A gathering of Drupal-ers from around the world, right in our backyard. Keynote speakers include Dries Buytaert, Drupal Project Lead; Tim O’Reilly, O’Reilly Media; and David H. Cole, Executive Office of the President (The White House). Individual sessions are aimed at audiences ranging from developers, designers and system administrators to Drupal beginners and businesses using (or wishing to use) Drupal in their web effort. Events on the two days prior to the start of the conference include a core developer summit, Drupal trainings, an unconference and a pre-conference sprint.

Spotlight – February 2010

News relating to digital scholarship, access and preservation at Berkeley and around the world. To contribute, email Rick Jaffe

On Campus
Information Visualization for Knowledge Discovery
Wednesday, March 3, 2010 12-1 pm
http://www.citris-uc.org/events/RE-Mar03

Ben Shneiderman, Founding Director (1983-2000) of the Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory at the University of Maryland, speaks at CITRIS about successful new interactive information visualization tools and current research progress in the field. “By combining powerful data mining methods with user-controlled interfaces, users are beginning to benefit from these potent telescopes for high-dimensional data.” Banatao Auditorium, Sutardja Dai Hall.

One-day InfoCamp 2010 Berkeley
Saturday, March 6, 2010 9am-5pm
http://www.ischool.berkeley.edu/newsandevents/events/infocamp2010

An “uncamp” for people interested in “user experience, information architecture, interaction design, information management, information design, librarianship, online search, informatics, and related fields.” South Hall.

Emerging Law & Policy Issues In Cloud Computing
Friday, March 12, 2010 8:30am-5:30pm http://www.ischool.berkeley.edu/newsandevents/events/cloudcomputingconference

A one-day conference sponsored by the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology, the Berkeley School of Law, and the School of Information. Even as third-party services and storage offer new, affordable opportunities for scholars (and all of us!) to manage digital materials, many of the legal issues surrounding activity on the cloud remain unresolved. UC Berkeley International House.

Around the World
Avoiding a Digital Dark Age: Data longevity depends on both the storage medium and the ability to decipher the information
Kurt D. Bollacker
http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/pub/2010/3/avoiding-a-digital-dark-age
American Scientist (subscription required)

A nice introduction to the problems and techniques of archiving and data preservation

TechCrunch: Memeo Connect Launches, Brings Desktop Sync to Google Apps
Jason Kincaid
http://techcrunch.com/2010/01/19/memeo-google-docs-sync/

Tech blog discusses a new Google-based option for managing documents and syncing your desktop

Spotlight – January 2010

News relating to digital scholarship, access and preservation at Berkeley and around the world. To contribute, email Rick Jaffe

On Campus
Opencast Matterhorn webinar to feature ETS staff
Monday, February 1, 2010 10:00 am (PST)
http://net.educause.edu/eliweb102

The upcoming EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) Web seminar on the Opencast Matterhorn project will feature:

• Mara Hancock, Director for Educational Technologies, UC Berkeley
• Adam Hochman, Opencast Matterhorn Project Manager (ETS)
• Ben Hubbard, Manager of webcast.berkeley
• Olaf A. Schulte, Opencast Matterhorn Product Manager (ETH Zurich)

Project Bamboo joins Mellon’s Scholarly Communications Program
http://projectbamboo.org/news/bamboo-and-changes-mellon-foundation

Project Bamboo has been accepted into the portfolio of the Scholarly Communications Program of the Andrew Mellon Foundation in the aftermath of the recent closure of the Foundation’s Research in Information Technology (RIT) program. (See Spotlight article in “Around the World,” below.) RIT funded the Project Bamboo planning project, which is led by UC Berkeley and the University of Chicago.

E-Learning Librarian: In 2009, social Web advanced data visualization
http://www.ischool.berkeley.edu/newsandevents/news/presscoverage/20100107booth (excerpt)
http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6713635.html (full post)
http://blogs.lib.berkeley.edu/whats-new.php/2010/01/15/visualizing-information (Library notice)

Char Booth, UC Berkeley E-Learning Librarian, notes in her blog:

The rising popularity of visualization affects how people engage with our stock and trade: information. When data becomes prettier to look at, not only does it become more comprehensible, it also becomes more interesting.

Around the World
The Wired Campus: In Potential Blow to Open-Source Software, Mellon Foundation Closes Grant Program
Chronicle of Higher Education, article by Marc Parry (UCB authentication or subscription required)
http://chronicle.com/blogPost/In-Potential-Blow-to/19519/

The Andrew Mellon Foundation has announced that it is closing its Research in Information Technology (RIT) program and merging that effort into its Scholarly Communications program. Established in 2000, RIT “helped bankroll a catalog of freely available software” that includes Sakai (known as bSpace at UC Berkeley), Kuali and Zotero.

Uncovering California’s environmental collections
http://www.cdlib.org/news/pdf/clir_announcement_final.pdf

From the press release: “The University of California’s California Digital Library (CDL), in partnership with nine California institutions, has been awarded a competitive grant to catalog thirty-three collections of documents, photographs, and other rich archival materials related to California’s environmental history. “

___

Spotlight – December 2009

Each month, we highlight news relating to digital scholarship, access and preservation at Berkeley and around the world. To contribute, email Rick Jaffe

On Campus
iSchool Showcase: Information Organization Lab
Thursday, December 10, 2009, 3:00 pm – 5:00 pm
110 South Hall
http://www.ischool.berkeley.edu/newsandevents/events/iolab20091210

Information Organization Lab is a new course taught this semester at the School of Information for students to experiment with fundamental concepts of information organization and retrieval.  Come enjoy the results of the students’ efforts – over 30 experimental projects – on display.

IST reduces storage service rates
http://inews.berkeley.edu/articles/Jan-Feb2010/Storage

Costs for the top three tiers of storage offered by the campus data center have been reduced, effective December 1.

Around the World
The Wired Campus: Universities Add Their Own Search of Google Books
Chronicle of Higher Education, article by Jeff Young (UCB authentication or subscription required)
http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Universities-Add-Their-Own/8901/

The HathiTrust Digital Library, a group of colleges working with Google on the company’s book-scanning effort, has unveiled a search tool to comb the full text of some 500,000 volumes.  Unlike Google’s, the HathiTrust search lists every page that contains a user’s search term.  It implements the Pairtree storage micro-service developed by the University of California Curation Center (formerly the CDL Digital Preservation Repository). Soon-to-come features include “tools that can be used in computational research.”

A Monk Saves Threatened Manuscripts Using Ultramodern Means
Chronicle of Higher Education, article byJennifer Howard (UCB authentication or subscription required)
http://chronicle.com/article/A-Monk-Saves-Threatened/49283/

The Rev. Columba Stewart of the Hill Museum and Manuscript Library in Minnesota directs a project to digitize early Christian manuscripts before they are lost. Working with monastic communities in 14 different countries, the program hires and trains local people to scan hundreds of these manuscripts a year.  Its social and political aspects are as fascinating as the technological ones.

DPC Technology Watch Report: File Formats for Preservation released
Malcolm Todd, The National Archives
http://www.dpconline.org/docs/reports/dpctw09-02.pdf

“Preserving intellectual content requires a firm grasp of the file formats used to create, store and disseminate it, and ensuring that they remain fit for purpose,” begins author Malcolm Todd of the National Archives in this technical assessment published by the Digital Preservation Coalition.  The report “aims to provide a guide and critique to the current literature,” and argues that a new set of file criteria (among others, extent of adoption, disclosure and transparency of the file’s specification and its contents, reusability/interoperability and complications arising from intellectual property/digital rights protection) should be considered when devising strategies for preservation.

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NOTE: This issue of Spotlight represents the first post-Lizzy edition. The gal has gone off to other things. Lizzy, we miss you already and wish you the greatest adventures!

MVP Spotlight- July 2009

Each month, we highlight news relating to digital scholarship, access and preservation at Berkeley and around the world. To contribute, email Lizzy.

On Campus
Visual Resources Collection History of Art, UC Berkeley
Image news and tech tips from the Visual Resources Collection
http://havrc.blogspot.com/
The History of Art Visual Resource Center (HAVRC), a partner of the MVP, recently launched a blog in June. “This blog [was] created to keep our primary users informed about image news, as well as to provide an archive of technology tips relevant to teaching with digital images.”

CollectionSpace 0.1 Release
http://www.collectionspace.org/current_release
CollectionSpace 0.1 was released earlier this month. Those interested in this project are encouraged to download and tinker with the 0.1 release, as well as send feedback to the team. “This first release is very limited in its functionality.  The goal of this first release was to demonstrate that all the layers of this complex system will actually work together as an integrated whole.” Users will be able to “create a new object record, view and edit existing records, and save any changes. The 0.1 release interface only allows for text entry; dates, controlled vocabularies, and pattern numbers (e.g. accession numbers) will be functional at a later date.” CollectionSpace 1.0 is expected to be completed at the end of May 2010.

Around the World
Terabytes Missing From The National Archives: Would the Cloud Be Safer?
By Steve Walling of Read Write Web
http://www.nytimes.com/external/readwriteweb/2009/07/06/06readwriteweb-terabytes-missing-from-the-national-archive-63543.html
According to the New York Times, an external hard drive containing 2 Terabytes of data from the National Archives had gone missing in May.  This prompted an investigation that has now “revealed that thousands of electronic storage devices have been lost or stolen. From external hard drives to entire servers, exactly how many devices and how much data has been compromised is unknown.” Steve Walling suggests that data might be better if placed in a cloud rather than a traditional data center. Even though the cloud has its own vulnerabilities as well, content will not be onsite, allowing people to walk off with an external drive or server. “It’s hard to steal the server holding someone’s social security number when you have no real idea where it is.”

Edinburgh Repository Fringe 2009: Beyond the Repository Fringe
Edinburgh, Scotland; Thursday July 30 & Friday 31st, 2009
http://wiki.repositoryfringe.org/index.php/Main_Page
The second Edinburgh Repository Fringe “un”conference will be held at the end of July. Repository developers, managers, researchers, administrators and onlookers are invited to  “see what’s been developed, and still developing in the Repository Landscape” as well as to participate in this year’s Repository Fringe challenge, which is “Design a REPOSITORY FOCUSED/ENHANCEMENT service to a researcher/academic/teacher that they would feel is intuitively useful TO THEM PERSONALLY.” Ben O’Steen and Sally Rumsey from the Oxford University Library Services will give the opening keynote and Clifford Lynch, of Coalition for Networked Information, will give the closing keynote.

World Library and Information Congress: 75th IFLA General Conference and Assembly
“Libraries create futures: Building on cultural heritage”
23-27 August 2009, Milan, Italy
http://www.ifla.org/annual-conference/ifla75/
Sponsered by OCLC, The International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) will be hosting its 75th conference in August. The theme of this year’s conference is “Libraries create futures: Building on cultural heritage.” This international conference will focus on a variety of issues from around the world, including open access, repositories, digital librarianship, etc, and its role in different countries and cities.  According to its website, IFLA is the leading international body representing the interests of library and information services and their users. With approximately 1650 members in 145 countries, it is the global voice of the library and information profession.”

Digital Preservation Management Workshops and Tutorial
Next workshop: October 11-16, 2009
http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/dpm/index.html
First developed at Cornell University, the digital training and preservation program will now be hosted by Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), at the University of Michigan. The website currently has tutorials, and the next workshop will be in October. “The workshop series is intended for managers who are or will be responsible for digital preservation programs in libraries, archives, and other cultural institutions. The goals of the workshop are to foster critical thinking in a technological realm and provide the means for exercising practical and responsible stewardship of digital assets in an age of technological uncertainty.”

MVP Spotlight- June 2009

Each month, we highlight news relating to digital scholarship, access and preservation at Berkeley and around the world. To contribute, email Lizzy.

On Campus
Barclay Ogden Receives Preservation Award
http://blogs.lib.berkeley.edu/cunews.php/2009/05/11/barclay-ogden-receives-preservation-awar
Sponsored by Preservations Technologies, this year’s Paul Banks and Carolyn Harris Preservation Award was given to Barclay Ogden, head of the Preservation Department at UC Berkeley. This award “recognizes the contribution of a professional preservation specialist who has been active in the field of preservation and/or conservation for library and/or archival materials.” Ogden has spent the past decades focused on library preservation issues– “from library binding to digitization, from disaster preparedness to collection assessment and identifying preservation priorities.”

The Sixth International Conference on Preservation of Digital Objects
October 5-6, 2009
Mission Bay Conference Center, San Francisco, CA
http://www.cdlib.org/iPres/
The California Digital Library (CDL) will be hosting the sixth International Conference on Preservation of Digital Objects (iPres). This conference will be held in San Franciso on October 5-6, 2009. This conference will “bring together researchers and practitioners from around the world to explore the latest trends, innovations, and practices in preserving our scientific and cultural digital heritage,” as well as “continue the discussion of creating our digital future.”

Next Generation Melvyl Pilot
http://berkeley.worldcat.org/
Launched in May, this six-month pilot allows users, both on and off campus, to be able to search for resources at all 10 of the UC campus libraries, as well as at other libraries around the world. Users are also able to bookmark and share their searches to their favorite web 2.0 website (e.g Facebook), as well as tag and save searches- creating a list for future reference. This is a joint project between the UC libraries and OCLC. Not all content has been digitized and placed in the pilot yet. “This is a project to create a replacement for the current Melvyl Catalog.”

Around the World
Workshop On Integrating Digital Library Content with Computational Tools and Services
June 19, 2009 in Austin, Texas, USA
See http://www.music-ir.org/sgdl-workshop/sgdl-cfp.pdf for a more complete CFP.
This conference will focus on the creation, development, and future deployment of the “second generation digital libraries” (SGDL). 10 years ago, the development of first generation digital libraries lead to “the browsing, searching and then retrieving of digital materials.” However, with the improvement of technology and services, “exciting new opportunities are arising to create SGDL by extending the standard DL use paradigm to include the analysis of the retrieved materials in a tightly integrated manner.

MVP Spotlight- May 2009

Each month, we highlight news relating to digital scholarship, access and preservation at Berkeley and around the world. To contribute, email Lizzy.

On Campus

I-School’s Master’s 2009 Final Project Showcase
Thursday, May 14, 2009, 4:00pm – 8:00pm at South Hall
http://www.ischool.berkeley.edu/newsandevents/events/20090514finalprojects
The I-School’s class of 2009 will presenting their final project. “Final projects are the culmination of the students’ two years of work in the School of Information’s Master’s program.” The final projects will touch on one of three themes: Organizational Issues; Social Networking and Collaboration; and Communication and Memory.

Around the World

DSpace Foundation and Fedora Commons Join Together to Create DuraSpace Organization
http://www.dspace.org/index.php?/News/DSpace-Foundation-and-Fedora-Commons-Join-Together-to-Create-DuraSpace-Organization.html
Earlier this month, DSpace Foundation and Fedora Commons announced their new partnership. Together, DSpace and Fedora Commons will be forming “DuraSpace,” which will
continue to focus on Dspace’s and Fedora’s repository platforms as well as “offer new technologies and services that respond to the dynamic environment of the Web and to new requirements from existing and future users.”

Zentity
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/zentity/
Zenity, a Research Output Repository Platform, developed by Microsoft Research is available now. This platform “provides a built-in ScholarlyWorks data model with pre-defined entities” as well as allows users to customize the platform to meet their own individual needs. Zenity supports RSS, OAI-PMH, OAI-ORE, AtomPub and Sword.

New MA programme in Digital Asset Management
http://www.stoa.org/?p=882
A new Master program in Digital Asset Management is being launched at King’s College London. This is a collaboration between the Center for Computing in the Humanities (CCH) and the Center for e-Research, which are both at King’s College. This program is an addition to MA Digital Humanities, MA Digital Culture and Technology, PhD (Digital Humanities), which are currently being offered there.

Workshop On Integrating Digital Library Content with Computational Tools and Services
June 19, 2009 in Austin, Texas, USA
See http://www.music-ir.org/sgdl-workshop/sgdl-cfp.pdf for a more complete CFP.
This conference will focus on the creation, development, and future deployment of the “second generation digital libraries” (SGDL).  10 years ago, the development of first generation digital libraries lead to “the browsing, searching and then retrieving of digital materials.” However, with the improvement of technology and services, “exciting new opportunities are arising to create SGDL by extending the standard DL use paradigm to include the analysis of the retrieved materials in a tightly integrated manner.

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP)
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/05-02-09.htm
http://oad.simmons.edu/oadwiki/OA_tracking_project
According to the SPARC Open Access Newsletter, the Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) was launched at the end of April. This is a social tagging project meant to keep track of new [Open Access] projects. “The idea is to tag new OA developments and recruit others to do the same.  On the many-eyeballs principle, we’ll notice many more new developments together than any of us could notice on our own.  A group feed will broadcast the results of what we notice to everyone who wants to follow along.”