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New Islandora Release for Q1 2011

2011-05-02T16:48:52-03:00

The Islandora project announces an RC1 candidate for our Q1 2011 release

The Islandora team has been working hard on the 2011 roadmap, and the new RC1 is just the start. We are actually up to release 11.1.1, which is a bug release for the 1st 2011 release. We will be following suit with a new VM in the next few days, so stay tuned.

via islandora.ca

Back to Blogging Once Again

2011-05-02T16:38:16-03:00

It has been a few months since my last blog posting...

While it sounds like a confession it feels much better. I had taken a bit of a hiatus from blogging, tweeting and various other social'ings, with lots of travel and way too much stuff going on, but it feels like it is time to get back to it.

One of the big new things for me is the creation of a UPEI spin-off company called DiscoveryGarden Inc., or DGI (pronounced "diji") as we like to call it. DGI is an open source service company centered around Islandora and we are having a great time helping to build a vibrant open source ecosystem. More on DGI coming up.

I am also still University Librarian at UPEI, so my usual focus on all things open source, research data stewardship, copyright and more will continue.

US NSF Data Dissemination and Sharing

2010-10-24T17:02:40-03:00

The NSF policy framework for sharing/disseminating research data is worth a look, of only as a best-practice approach for any research program. Some quotes from the site:

Investigators are expected to share with other researchers, at no more than incremental cost and within a reasonable time, the primary data, samples, physical collections and other supporting materials created or gathered in the course of work under NSF grants. Grantees are expected to encourage and facilitate such sharing.

Beginning January 18, 2011, proposals submitted to NSF must include a supplementary document of no more than two pages labeled “Data Management Plan”. This supplementary document should describe how the proposal will conform to NSF policy on the dissemination and sharing of research results.

via www.nsf.gov

New DuraCloud Beta Released

2010-09-13T08:52:51-03:00

Thinking about moving your ILS to the cloud? Wondering how you are going to manage all that research data over the next few decades? You may want to keep your options open and work with an open system like DuraCloud from the good folks at DuraSpace. DuraCloud is open source and yet works with common commercial cloud systems (currently Amazon, AWS and Rackspace) and provides a number of useful features for building an enhanced repository infrastructure.

The Islandora team will be piloting DuraCloud for a number of use cases, including running the entire stack in the cloud, so stay tuned for new developments on that front.

Access 2010 Conference - Don't Miss It!

2010-09-11T14:42:55-03:00

A quick promo for the upcoming Access 2010 Conference, which is looking to be a typical stimulating Access conference, with lots of time to spend with your Library colleagues.

Conference Site

Retooling Libraries for the Data Challenge

2010-09-06T18:07:44-03:00

A good piece from Dorothea Salo on the opportunities and challenges facing libraries in providing effective research data stewardship. From the Conclusion:

None of the challenges presented herein should discourage librarians from engaging with the research data challenge. Our unique expertise in metadata, digital preservation, public service, and technology translation will serve researchers well, as will our sturdy common sense and the domain expertise of our subject librarians.

However, unless we proceed with clear understanding of researchers and their data, as well as our own systems and habits, we will simply trip over ourselves. Research data are too important, and our role in curating them at present too insecure, to allow that to happen.

As we are discovering at UPEI, Fedora has proven to be a very effective tool in meeting this opportunity.

Fedora Repository 3.4 Released

2010-08-23T21:24:47-03:00

Fedora Repository 3.4 Documentation - Fedora Repository 3.4 Documentation - DuraSpace Wiki

The latest release of Fedora is now available. Some of the new features:

DC, RELS-EXT, RELS-INT as Managed Content: The Dublin Core and Relationships datastreams can now be stored as Managed Content, improving performance particularly when these datastreams are large. A migration tool is included to migrate existing inline XML datastreams to managed content datastreams
REST API relationships methods: New methods in the REST API for adding and manipulating relationships in RELS-EXT and RELS-INT
Enhanced Content Models: Including the ability to validate objects against their content models, and support for optional datastreams
Optimistic Locking: The REST API now provides support for optimistic locking to ensure no one else has made a change to an object since you started editing it
FeSL Authentication: FeSL Authentication can now be used independently of FeSL's experimental authorization mechanism, and is now the default authentication mechanism (although the old mechanism can be specified during installation). FeSL Authorization is still disabled by default.
FeSL policies as Fedora Objects: XACML policies are now managed in FeSL directly through the Fedora API by manipulating Fedora objects containing a FESLPOLICY datastream
Logging reconfiguration without restart: Using the new SLF4J and Logback logging framework, logging configuration changes now become effective without having to restart the server
Akubra low-level storage: Akubra is now considered production-ready and is the default low-level storage module
REST API improvements and bug fixes: further stabilizing the REST API
Deprecation of "LITE" APIs: As of this release, the API-A-LITE and API-M-LITE APIs are deprecated, and will be removed in a future release. You are encouraged to migrate any code using these APIs to use the new REST API.

UPEI, Web of Science and Knowledge for All

2010-08-14T17:03:30-03:00

There has been a great deal of interest in the last few days in an article that appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education this week. Since it is about open access to knowledge, it seemed unfortunate to me that the article is behind a fee wall, so I have copied the text below, based on the assumption that the Chronicle is actually interested in facilitating a discussion around this issue. (I had to get a colleague to send me the article since I do not subscribe.) Might I suggest to the Publisher that they move the article outside the fee wall as a nod to the importance of access to knowledge.

The Knowledge for All Proposal (about which I will write more in the coming weeks) is available on the Robertson Library Website : http://library.upei.ca/k4all.

Hot Type: Canadian University Hopes to Lead Fight Against High Subscription Prices U. of Prince Edward Island

By Jennifer Howard

Famous for mussels, serenity, and as the setting for Anne of Green Gables, Prince Edward Island, the smallest of Canada's provinces, seems an unlikely hotbed of revolution. But at the University of Prince Edward Island, the province's only university, a bit of scholarly-communication revolt is stirring.

On June 15, the university librarian, Mark Leggott, released a campus letter to let the faculty know the institution would not be renewing its subscription to the Web of Science database. Mr. Leggott's letter cited several reasons for the decision: "a challenging fiscal climate," a required three-year contract with price increases every year, a weaker Canadian dollar that would make those increases even harder to bear.

But here are the real fighting words: "Any subscription increase in these challenging times is difficult, but an increase of 120 percent is simply not acceptable," Mr. Leggott wrote. "Accommodating this level of increase lends credence to the vendors' business practices, and we felt it important to make a stand against these practices." Tellingly, the letter cites the recent standoff between the University of California system and the Nature Publishing Group over journal prices.

Published by Thomson Reuters, Web of Science is a citation index that covers more than 10,000 scholarly journals across a variety of disciplines. It allows users to track what's been cited and how often. Its multiple databases include conference proceedings and open-access journals, too. In the eyes of Mr. Leggott, it's also an overpriced product of a scholarly publishing system that no longer works. That's what he told me when I asked why the university wasn't going to renew.

"We just said enough is enough," he said. "These citation indexes are just not special any more, and we're in a period where financial challenges plus lack of innovation in the [publishing] industry are causing people to say, This just doesn't make sense anymore."

He called it "absolutely critical" that research institutions be franker about their dealings with publishers and their pricing models. That applies to small universities like his as well as to enormous systems like California's.

"We have a tendency to keep our negotiations confidential and quiet, and I think it's the most egregious process we can follow," Mr. Leggott told me. "We have been silent for way too long in letting it be known that this kind of scholarly publishing process is not sustainable."

Awareness and Elbow Grease

So a small Canadian university decides to give a citation index the heave-ho. So what? For one thing, observers nowhere near Prince Edward Island took note of the decision. For instance, the Law Librarian Blog saluted UPEI along with the California system for using their run-ins with publishers to make faculty members aware of how the traditional publishing ecosystem really works—and what it costs. "Most people outside of the librarians and deans do not really 'get' the price thing as it relates to scholarship," the blog observed. "Now they do, at least at UC and UPEI."

As the Law Librarian Blog pointed out, UPEI has done more than just cancel one subscription, and that makes its decision worth keeping tabs on. Mr. Leggott and the library staff took another practical and immediate step: They put together a guide of databases that provide the kind of citation-reference searching that Web of Science does. (The university will acquire a pay-as-you-go license to Web of Science for faculty members who really can't find a good alternative.)

Another gambit is far more ambitious. Mr. Leggott sees the Web of Science decision as an opportunity "to raise awareness around all these issues and see if there's any interest in building a different kind of approach." What he has in mind is "a Wikipedia-type index to scholarly literature" called Knowledge for All. Open source and freely available, the index would be built and maintained by libraries—not just UPEI's but as many as are willing to pitch in.

Mr. Leggott envisions Knowledge for All as an index built "using the elbow grease of the institution rather than the increasingly dwindling resources we have," he told me. "The goal here would be to index all of what can be identified as scholarly, whether it's peer reviewed or not peer reviewed."

Mr. Leggott is circulating the proposal to library consortia in Canada and abroad, hoping to get 10 to 20 institutions to sign on as founding members to hire a project manager and get the project in gear. It could mean only a modest outlay of money and staff time for participating institutions. The librarian estimates that there are some 40,000 science journals published every year; if 3,000 libraries pitched in, he calculates, "then each of them would have to index 15 journal titles." Instead of paying money to commercial publishers for products such as Web of Science, libraries could put their resources to work indexing the scholarly literature themselves.

Mr. Leggott says his job now is to convince other librarians that the idea has legs. His message: "Rather than paying into a dysfunctional scholarly-publishing environment, the library community should take the lead and make sure that knowledge that's created largely by scholarly communities is not locked behind a pay wall."

Whatever happens with the Knowledge for All project, it will be interesting to see whether UPEI's decision to ditch one of its standard databases will embolden librarians elsewhere to take similar measures. We're still waiting for one side or the other to blink in the California-Nature standoff, and what happens there will surely have a ripple effect. A big system like California's, with its combined research heft, has a decent chance of getting publishers to pay attention. Will publishers and other libraries sit up and take notice when a small university like UPEI says it's had enough?

Content providers may not care that much—if the action is limited to one small customer. Mr. Leggott says he has heard very little from Web of Science, and no details on how it will make sure that UPEI has access to Web of Science materials it has already paid for. "There seems to be little time or concern for a little institution like UPEI," Mr. Leggott told me.

But if UPEI can get enough other institutions to make Knowledge for All a serious experiment—or if it helps inspire other colleges and universities to take their own stands with publishers—its influence could exceed its size.

"A small university can have a big impact when there's a little bit of vision there," Mr. Leggott said.

Local Open Data Gold

2010-08-14T16:44:11-03:00

Building a Local Data Infrastructure for Tomorrow

via www.epsiplatform.eu

A nice summary of local (ie. municipal) open data efforts in Canada.

EXCESS COPYRIGHT: Access Copyright’s excessive $45 per university student proposed tariff - August 11, 2010 deadline

2010-08-14T16:22:21-03:00

This is the first in more to come about the proposed $45 per university student tariff - a more than 1,300 % increase over the current basic charge. Access Copyright (“AC”),the proponent, is probably Canada’s fastest growing and least understood collectives. It started out as a reprography collective right after the 1988 reform package was proclaimed. Its initial cash flow came conveniently from a lucrative multimillion dollar contact with the Federal Government. It has since managed, with little effective resistance, to convince Canadian provincial governments, school boards, colleges and universities to pay well over $30 million a year into its coffers. The only actual Copyright Board challenge to date that has gone to fruition resulted in a big loss for the K-12 school boards and the provinces ultimately behind them under the umbrella of the Council of Ministers of Education, Canada (“CMEC”). This loss was recently confirmed by the Federal Court of Appeal. More about this and whether this case will go to the Supreme Court of Canada below.

via excesscopyright.blogspot.com

A good piece on the summer effort by Access Copyright to levy a tax on learning. Maybe seeing this for what it is, a new tax, will cause the current government to say no?