The Source: news about digital libraries and library innovations from around the web

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Digital Lives >> Legal & Ethical Issues (Note: PDF)

From the British Library website

This discussion paper aims to provide an overview of the main legal and ethical issues that pertain to the collection and preservation of, and access to, personal digital archives (hereafter PDArcs), by repositories, including the legal deposit libraries, and other non-deposit organisations. It does so by initially examining the new social and technological environment in which the creation of PDArcs is taking place. It notes that mapping existing repository practices with regard to ‘high profile’ personal collections, whether analogue or analogue/digital, to the wider accession of both ‘high profile’ and ‘digital public’ PDArcs, often stored across a variety of systems, is going to be problematic. The huge increase in ‘user-created content’ (UCC) is discussed, along with the legal issues and innovations, such as the Creative Commons, that have emerged as a direct result. The influence of the internet, and particularly Web 2.0 technologies, such as Facebook, Flickr and YouTube, is examined, and the role of commercial intermediaries and the possible strategic alliance of repositories with such commercial intermediaries to obtain mediated access to PDArcs/PDArc content is considered - as is the future role of repositories in a UCC-dominated Web 2.0 environment.


Archives for the 21st Century

From the National Archives website

This policy sets out the strategic vision for the sustainable development of a vigorous, publicly funded archive sector across England and Wales. The policy replaces the government policy on archives that was issued in 1999 and builds on both the positive achievements around public access to information and technological developments. It focuses on actions for publicly funded archives while acknowledging that private archives remain vital to the archival health of the nation. The challenges facing the archives sector and the actions to address them are outlined in the five sections of this strategy:


The cultural economy moment

From the Cultural Sciences website

This paper explores the rise of cultural economy as a key organising concept over the 2000s. While it has intellectual precursors in political economy, sociology and postmodernism, it has been work undertaken in the fields of cultural economic geography, creative industries, the culture of service industries and cultural policy where it has come to the forefront, particularly around whether we are now in a ‘creative economy’. While work undertaken in cultural studies has contributed to these developments, the development of neo-liberalism as a meta-concept in critical theory constitutes a substantive barrier to more sustained engagement between cultural studies and economics, as it rests upon a caricature of economic discourse.
The paper draws upon Michel Foucault’s lectures on neo-liberalism to indicate that there are significant problems with the neo-Marxist account hat became hegemonic over the 2000s. The paper concludes by identifying areas such as the value of information, the value of networks, motivations for participation in online social networks, and the impact of business cycles on cultural sectors as areas of potentially fruitful inter-disciplinary engagement around the nature of cultural economy.


Why Are Users So Useful?: User Engagement and the Experience of the JISC Digitisation Programme

From the Ariadne website

Paola Marchionni discusses the importance of user engagement in the creation of digitised scholarly resources with case studies from the JISC Digitisation Programme.


UK Institutional Repository Search: Innovation and Discovery

From the Ariadne website

The authors describe an innovative tool to showcase UK research output through advanced discovery and retrieval facilities.


Share. Collaborate. Innovate. Building an Organisational Approach to Web 2.0

From the Ariadne website

Paul Bevan outlines the National Library of Wales’ development of a strategic approach to meeting user needs in a post-Web 2.0 world.


OpenAIRE: archive access anytime, anywhere

From the International Science Grid website

Formally embracing the open access ethic, the European Commission has decided to require that results from research it funds in some fields - such as health, energy, environment, information and communication technologies, research infrastructures, social sciences and humanities - become freely available. Authors will deposit a copy of their articles in a “digital repository,” a kind of electronic library accessible through the Web.
While many institutions or subjects have their own, pre-existing repositories for published documents, these are not comprehensively linked and searchable. And some institutions hosting EC-funded researchers are without digital libraries for keeping research papers. Stepping in to provide this open access e-infrastructure is the OpenAIRE project, which launched on 1 December 2009. The project will run for three years in its first phase. OpenAIRE’s proposal, with a budget of about €5 million, was approved in September after the EC put out a call for a project that would create the e-Infrastructure to disseminate scientific results to anyone, anywhere, at anytime.


How to Be a Person: Tips and Tricks For Virtual Reference

From the Association of College & Research Libraries website

When a patron is unable or unwilling to trek all the way out to their nearest library, virtual reference gives them a means to contact a reference librarian without leaving his or her chair. Some libraries provide online chat services for their patrons, where they may converse with a reference librarian in real time. Recently, many libraries have also begun to experiment with three-dimensional virtual environments, such as Second Life or Yoville. These virtual worlds can help to restore the nonverbal cues that are often “lost in translation” by simulating a physical component to the reference interview. Online avatars can wave, smile, or even point to objects in the virtual world. Younger patrons might even respond more positively to a librarian avatar than to a real person, since these patrons are more used to interacting with others on multiplayer video games.