Archive for the ‘Open Access’ Category

This week I have assigned students in my Open Movements course the task of self-archiving their final papers in either E-LIS or DList, both disciplinary repositories for the LIS field. So in the spirit of that assignment, I archived a recent article which I wrote for The CyberSkeptic’s Guide to Internet Research in May, 2009. It’s titled 6 Steps to Publishing a Scholarly Online Journal (for free!) and it details how to create your own open access scholarly journal online.

Google has announced that it is making 1 million public domain books from Google Books available for free download in the EPUB format. “EPUB is a free, open standard supported by a growing ecosystem of digital reading devices”, so users will be able to view these books on their mobile devices. According to ReadWriteWeb, Google had previously made this massive EPUB collection available to partners Barnes & Noble and Sony, but never to users before last week’s announcement.

According to the Washington Post, the U.S. Federal Government has debuted a website resource which provides free public access to raw data sets called Data.gov. Users can download the data in several formats to perform research, conduct analysis, or build applications.

via Open Access News

David Weinberger discusses the Pros and cons of the Google book deal in an article for KM World.

“The settlement is not what you would come up with if you began with a blank piece of paper and designed the optimal system for all the interested parties. But it is a big step forward … especially if we can get some changes to address the needs of the class of people we call “readers.”"

Sean P Aune at SitePoint rounds up 30+ Places To Find Creative Commons Media for those seeking audio, video, images, and text files that can be re-used free of charge under a CC license.

Athabasca University Press has published Mobile Learning: Transforming the Delivery of Education and Training and licensed it under a Creative Commons License. The entire e-book is available for download via the AU Press website.

“This collection is for anyone interested in the use of mobile technology for various distance learning applications. Readers will discover how to design learning materials for delivery on mobile technology and become familiar with the best practices of other educators, trainers, and researchers in the field, as well as the most recent initiatives in mobile learning research. Businesses and governments can learn how to deliver timely information to staff using mobile devices. Professors can use this book as a textbook for courses on distance education, mobile learning, and educational technology.”

via Reference Notes

The April/May 2009 issue of the Bulletin of the the American Society for Information Science and Technology has a Special Section titled Institutional Repositories: The Great Debate. The section includes a collection of brief articles in which contributors provide either an affirmative or negative response to four issues related to IRs.

Introduction
Helen R. Tibbo, Rachael Green Clemens and Carolyn Hank

Topic 1: All Universities Should Have an Institutional Repository
Affirmative: Soo Young Rieh | Negative: Kevin Smith

Topic 2: Libraries Should Lead the Institutional Repository Initiative and
Development at Their Institutions
Affirmative: Jim Ottaviani | Negative: Carolyn Hank

Topic 3: Institutional Repositories Should Be Built on Open Source Software
Affirmative: Paul Jones | Negative: Michael Day and Alexander Ball

Topic 4: Institutional Repository Success is Dependent Upon Mandates
Affirmative: Steve Harnad | Negative: Nancy McGovern

via Open Access News

I will be moderating the Open Libraries track at CIL2009 on Tuesday (March 31st) next week along with Steven Cohen. We have a great program planned with some awesome speakers. If you’ll be at the conference, please stop by and say hello! Here’s the lineup for the day:

Track B
B201 – Open Source Software
10:30 AM – 11:15 AM
Eric Lease Morgan, Head, Digital Access and Information Architecture Department, University Libraries of Notre Dame
Open source software (OSS) that is free to reuse, study, modify, and distribute is quickly being adopted by libraries today. From office productivity suites such as OpenOffice to library-specific applications such as ILS programs, next-gen catalogs, and Firefox extensions, the open source movement has a lot to offer libraries. This session looks at the many types of OSS available and how libraries are making use of them.

B202 – Open Source Browsers
11:30 AM – 12:15 PM
Jessamyn West, Community Technology Librarian, Randolph Technical Career Center
The best part of using an open-source browser such as Firefox is having the ability to create add-ons and extensions to handle a myriad of tasks and applications. From library toolbars, OPAC searches, and right-click context menus, innovative libraries can offer patrons added functionality through these simple Firefox extensions. This session focuses on Firefox and other open source browsers and their possibilities for libraries.

B203 – Unconferences
1:30 PM – 2:15 PM
Steve Lawson, Humanities Librarian, Colorado College
Stephen Francoeur, Information Services Librarian, Baruch College
John Blyberg, Head of Technology and Digital Initiatives, Darien Library
Kathryn Greenhill, Emerging Technologies Specialist, Murdoch University Library
The latest trend in conferences is to hold an open “camp” or “un”-conference in which the tone is informal and the program is determined by the attendees. Our panelists have all had experience organizing and hosting such events and talk about the process of coordinating a library “camp,” compare them to traditional conferences, and highlight when these camps are most effective.

B204 – Open Source Library Implementations
2:30 PM – 3:15 PM
Karen Kohn, Collection Development Manager, Arcadia University
Eric McCloy, Executive Director, Library and Information Technology, Arcadia University
The speakers discuss getting ready for a Koha implementation and share their learnings from the evaluation and planning stages. From both the librarian and IT perspective, they discuss why they were comfortable moving to open source software for their catalog, the steps mapped out on the road to migration, and how money was freed up for migration by staggering the process and provide good resources for more information.

B205 – Open Access: Green and Gold
4:00 PM – 5:00 PM
Shane Beers, Digital Repository Services Librarian, George Mason University
Amy Buckland, Liaison Librarian, Howard Ross Library of Management, McGill University Library Library Student Journal
The two main strategies of the Open Access (OA) movement, which strives to make scholarly literature and other resources freely available online to all readers, consist of green OA, involving the self-archiving of materials in digital repositories, and gold OA, which includes open access journal publishing. Salo discusses OA from the green side, including both institutional and disciplinary repositories. Buckland tackles OA from the gold side and looks at Public Knowledge Project’s Open Journal Systems and how academic libraries can support OA scholarly publishing at their universities.

Peter Tittenberger, Director of the University of Manitoba’s Learning Technologies Centre and Associate Director George Siemens have published an Open Access Handbook of Emerging Technologies for Learning. The online manual discusses many social software tools in detail as well as provides examples of educational implementations. The handbook has been published using wiki software and allows those interested in contributing to the resource to apply for accounts.

via Wired Campus

A new online portal called Academic Earth has aggregated the video lectures available from universities such as MIT, Yale, Princeton, Harvard, Stanford, and Berkeley. According to The Bivings Report they plan to roll out many social features for users over the next couple of months. Another good place to look for open courseware and lecture materials is the Open Courseware Consortium where you can browse or Google across the collections of the 200 international universities who provide OCW.

Library Journal’s Andrew Albanese compiles a list of the Top 10 Academic Library Stories of 2008. Published in two parts, the top 3 can be found here and stories 4-10 here. It’s interesting to note that the majority of last year’s biggest stories had to do with Open Access issues. Here’s a brief rundown of his list, be sure to check out the articles for more.

1. Georgia State University Sued by Publishers over E-Reserves
2. Harvard’s OA Mandate
3. The Google Book Search Settlement
4. The Launch of the HathiTrust
5. NIH Public Access Policy Enacted, Challenged
6. The Move Toward Open Source
7. The Section 108 Report
8. The EPA Libraries Reopen
9. South Caroline Slashes PASCAL
10. The Sad Story of Orphan Works

via Open Access News

The folks at Information Today were nice enough to allow me to archive the article I wrote for the September issue of The CyberSkeptic’s Guide to Internet Research titled Drupal and Libraries. You can find it in the open access repository for the library science field E-LIS.

As a culmination to the Open and Libraries course I’m teaching at SJSU this semester, the students helped build and publish an Open Access Journal using an open source software program called Open Journal Systems in which they have submitted, peer-reviewed, and published their final papers. This first issue of the Open and Libraries Class Journal is now live.

Today I’ll be giving a half-day workshop at METRO, the Metropolitan Library Council here in NYC, these are my presentations for anyone who is interested in “open” topics. The main topics I’ll be covering include Open Source Software, Open Access, and Open Education and how they are relevant to libraries. I’ll also be discussing open licenses, open conferences and camps, open textbooks, and new open Web initiatives.

I will be giving a talk on libraries and the mobile Web at the NEASIS&T Mobile Mania event in Boston next week, and just in time the ALA has been kind enough to let me self-archive the pre-print of my Library Technology Report: On the Move with the Mobile Web: Libraries and Mobile Technologies. I’ve deposited it in E-LIS, a disciplinary repository for the LIS field, so anyone who may be interested in this topic can access it without restrictions there.