The CLOCKSS Archive has announced a partnership with the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP), an international association for scholarly and professional publishers. Under the deal, CLOCKSS will preserve the Association's ejournals and ebooks in CLOCKSS's geographically and geopolitically distributed network of redundant archive nodes, located at 12 major research libraries around the world.
This action provides for content to be freely available to everyone after a 'trigger event' and ensures an author's work will be maximally accessible and useful over time. By archiving with CLOCKSS, ALPSP seeks to ensure that the scholarship in their publications will continue to remain widely available to the academic community in the future.
ALPSP has a broad and diverse membership of over 300 organisations in 37 countries who collectively publish over half of the world's total active journals as well as books, databases and other products. ALPSP's mission is to connect, train and inform the scholarly and professional publishing community and to play an active part in shaping the future of academic and scholarly communication.
The National Library of Medicine (NLM), a component of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), has launched a Web content collecting initiative. The Library is selecting Web content as part of its mission to collect, preserve, and make accessible the scholarly biomedical literature as well as resources that illustrate a diversity of philosophical and cultural perspectives not found in the technical literature.
New forms of publication on the Web, such as blogs authored by doctors and patients, illuminate healthcare thought and practice in the 21st century. In launching this initiative, the Library is capturing and providing a unique resource for future scholarship.
The Library's inaugural collection of Web content is 'Health and Medicine Blogs,' presenting the perspectives of physicians, nurses, hospital administrators and other individuals in healthcare fields. The collection also includes patients chronicling their experiences with conditions such as cancer, diabetes and arthritis. The site currently contains 12 blogs, including KevinMD.com, "social media's leading physician voice"; Not Running a Hospital, a blog by a former CEO of a large Boston hospital; e-patient Dave, a cancer survivor and leader in the participatory medicine movement; and Wheelchair Kamikaze, who writes about his personal experience living with multiple sclerosis (MS). The collection can be accessed from http://www.nlm.nih.gov/webcollecting.
Guided by the NLM Collection Development Manual and other strategic collecting efforts, NLM will continue to expand its capacity to collect Web content. With this initiative NLM has taken a major new step in its mission to collect pertinent healthcare information of today for the benefit of research in the future. Increasingly, that information is found on the Web, which is a rapidly changing environment where valuable and interesting materials can surface and then quickly disappear. The Library is working to ensure it can effectively collect new material in a Web environment, and guarantee the material's permanence and availability to current and future patrons.
In launching this initiative, NLM joins many other national, state and public libraries and archives that have acknowledged the importance of preserving Web content for future generations. In addition to the Internet Archive, which has been broadly archiving the Web since 1996, dozens of libraries and cultural heritage institutions have been engaged in thematic or event-based collecting. This community has contributed to the development and use of common tools, techniques, and standards that enable the creation of Web archives. NLM has benefitted from this work and from local partners such as the Library of Congress, which is actively engaged in collecting and preserving Web content.
The NLM has already been archiving portions of its own Web domain considered to be of enduring value. With this new effort, the Library is now collecting Web content that others have created.
Information resources and technologies provider ProQuest, US, has participated in a project that is expected to vastly accelerate research of 15th through 17th Century cultural history. The company will provide access to page images from the veritable Early English Books Online and newcomer Early European Books to the Early Modern OCR Project (eMOP) at Texas A&M. eMOP will use the content to create a database of typefaces used in the early modern era, train OCR software to read them and then apply crowd-sourcing for editing. The project will turn the corpus of works from this historical period into fully searchable digital documents.
ProQuest is stated to have played a key worldwide role in preservation and access to early modern history, ensuring the survival of printed works from as early as 1450. In the 1930s, the company reportedly became a pioneer of microfiche, when it filmed the contents of the vast archives of the British Library and other major libraries across England - virtually every English language book printed in the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries. The microfilm collection, ProQuest's flagship Early English Books, opened these works to global study and created an avenue for preservation. It has since become the quintessential collection for study of the early modern era, according to the company.
In the 1990s, ProQuest began a massive effort to capture the collection digitally. Early English Books Online seeks to enable scholars to manage, share and collaborate on their research virtually. The company even created a social network that allows the scholars who use the collection as a base for their research to connect with each other.
Then, early in the 21st century, ProQuest expanded the programme to include major European libraries, launching Early European Books with the Danish Royal Library in Copenhagen and the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze in Italy. Digitisation projects are also underway with the UK's scientific and medical library - The Wellcome - and the National Library of the Netherlands.
eMop is led by Texas A&M Professors Laura Mandell, Director of the Initiative for Digital Humanities, Media, and Culture (IDHMC), Ricardo Gutierrez-Osuna of Computer Science, and Richard Furuta, Director of the Center for the Study of Digital Libraries (CSDL), along with Anton DuPlessis and Todd Samuelson, book historians from Cushing Rare Books Library. The scholars earned a two-year, $734,000 development grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support the work. ProQuest is one of a variety of participating publishers and software organisations that are collaborating on the project.
Cambridge University Press and the Society of Antiquaries of London (SAL) have announced the completion of the online archives of Archaeologia, Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of London and the Antiquaries Journal. Collectively they comprise the journal archives of SAL and span 242 years, encompassing key research in the study of material culture and antiquity. The publication history of Archaeologia dates back from 1770 and represents the oldest journal archive hosted on Cambridge Journals Online. Cambridge Journals is the online journals publishing service of Cambridge University Press.
The SAL journals are seen to reflect the multi-disciplinary nature of the study of material culture, publishing a balanced mix of papers from all periods, from prehistory to the recent past. They address research questions from a variety of perspectives, combining, for example, historical, art historical, architectural, linguistic, archaeological and scientific data.
As part of the on-going project to digitise the back content of all Cambridge journals, the SAL journals were subject to scanning and extensive checking by a dedicated archive team to ensure all pages met the high standards required. The Archaeologia archive alone contains 46,500 pages across 222 volumes, and each of these pages required detailed checking.
The age of the articles themselves presented problems and necessitated a careful hand during the scanning process as well as a careful eye to decipher the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century letter-forms. In addition, key metadata and references within each article needed to be coded in XML (and then to HTML) to ensure they could be easily discoverable and accessible.
The SAL journal archives are available to purchase by institutions as part of an archive collection.
Digital preservation solutions provider Tessella, UK, has announced that it has won the tender process with the National Library of Australia for the Digital Library Infrastructure Redevelopment project.
The National Library of Australia has a contract to purchase the Tessella Safety Deposit Box (SDB) as a preservation management and digital library core system.
As part of its Digital Library Infrastructure Redevelopment project, the National Library of Australia is to redevelop its digital infrastructure to enable it to collect, generate, manage, preserve and provide ongoing access to the rapidly escalating volume of digital information resources that fall within its collecting mandate. The Library will be undertaking a pilot of Tessella's SDB. An update detailing the outcomes of this pilot will be provided before the end of the year.
