Archive for the ‘Information Archives’ Category

Less than two weeks ago we saw the Library of Congress partner with the photo-sharing website Flickr in a pilot project called The Commons to display some 3,100 historical photos, (Read our earlier coverage here). Within days of the project launch, the LOC received an overwhelming response. According to their blog, here’s a summary of what happened within the first two days:

• 392,000 views on the photostream
• 650,000 views of photos
• Adding in set and collection page views, there were about 1.1 million total views on our account
• All 3,100+ photos have been viewed
• 420 of the photos have comments
• 1,200 of the photos have been favorited

And just look at all of those tags!

In accordance with a new spending bill signed by President Bush last week, all future published research that is funded by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), will be made freely available online. Any NIH research which has been published in a scientific journal, according to this law, must be published and made free to the public online within 12 months. It seems that PubMed may provide access to much of this new research.

“The Director of the National Institutes of Health shall require that all investigators funded by the NIH submit or have submitted for them to the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed Central an electronic version of their final, peer-reviewed manuscripts upon acceptance for publication to be made publicly available no later than 12 months after the official date of publication: Provided, That the NIH shall implement the public access policy in a manner consistent with copyright law.”

For more on this story, check out these posts:

NIH: $29b in Health Science Set to Go Online for Free

More on the NIH victory

Thank you President Bush

Web 2.0 is on everyone’s lips. It isn’t really necessary anymore to explain it, there are a lot of more or less compact definitions.

This development redefines the position of libraries in the information society. Libraries are no longer just mediators of information literacy but also of media literacy. As a result they have to deal with technical innovations and their influences on the daily librarian affairs and they have to rise to the new challenges.

This is just why Infobib team used the World Book and Copyright Day as an opportunity to start an experiment - LibWorld.

The idea was to call bloggers from all over the world to give a review about the biblioblogosphere in their country and to post these guest articles in regular intervals at Infobib.

Libworld is a series of postings in which guest authors introduce the library and library related blogs of their particular country. It started on the World Book and Copyright Day on 23rd of April, 2007.

If you don’t see your home country in the list why not consider writing an article about your country’s biblioblogosphere.

“The Journal of Library Metadata is a peer-reviewed journal publishing articles on all aspects of metadata applications in libraries. The journal is published quarterly by The Haworth Press, Inc.

Previously titled the Journal of Internet Cataloging, after a change in title and editorship, JLM will now focus on metadata, an exciting, timely subject of importance to all libraries. The journal will publish three categories of articles: standard, peer-reviewed articles; shorter, scholarly, non-peer reviewed articles; and short viewpoint articles”

[From: Peter Scott’s Library Blog]

A fascinating article by Michael Jensen from Chronicle Review, the Chronicle of Higher education, The New Metrics of Scholarly Authority ( June 15, 2007), discusses scholarly communication now in the abundance of Web 2.0 information, and in a Web 3.0 era. Engaged participation online challenges the authority frameworks of print publishing processes, and opens the doors to authority mechanisms in Web 3.0 based on heavily computed reputation-and-authority metrics, using many of the kinds of elements now used, as well as on elements that can be computed only in an information-rich, user-engaged environment.

For universities, the challenge will be ensuring that scholars who are making more and more of their material available online will be fairly judged in hiring and promotion decisions. It will mean being open to the widening context in which scholarship is published, and it will mean that faculty members will have to take the time to learn about — and give credit for — the new authority metrics, instead of relying on scholarly publishers to establish the importance of material for them.

[From: Michael Habib]

The National Library of Australia is ready to begin a major undertaking of newspaper digitization. Within the next five years, Australian newspapers printed before 1954 will be available online for free. According to NLA director-general Jan Fullerton, “Within this project, we are planning to digitise one newspaper from each of the capital cities and the territories from the beginning of their time until 1954 which is the copyright cut off.” [From The Age]