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

Introducing The Source

Hidden costs in cheaper books

From the Australian Policy Online (APO) website

Not so long ago, the Productivity Commission released its final report* on a very vexed question, which was: should the provisions of the Copyright Act, which currently prevent overseas editions of Australian-published works from being imported into Australia, be repealed? These provisions, known as parallel import restrictions, give a degree of assistance to Australian publishers, authors and printers, which they would not have without them.
Factors other than market efficiency need to be considered when we contemplate change, writes Jenny Stewart in the Canberra Times.

*see also Restrictions on the Parallel Importation of Books - Supplement to Research Report (Note: PDF)


Collecting cultural material: principles for best practice (Note: PDF)

From the Department of the Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts (Australia) website

These guidelines assist Australia's collecting institutions to acquire their collections in a manner that meets the highest standards of legal, ethical and professional practice. The booklet has been developed by the Heads of Collecting Institutions (HOCI), which is a forum of the Chief Executives of the National Collecting Institutions within Australia.
Australia's collecting institutions vary but they share common objectives of collecting, researching, preserving, and exhibiting cultural material from Australia and around the world.
They also share a concern that their collections are acquired in a manner that meets the highest standards of legal, ethical and professional practice. These guidelines are intended to assist cultural institutions within established legal and ethical frameworks.


Analysing selection for digitisation: Current practices and common incentives

From the D-Lib Magazine website

Over the past few decades, the explosion of digital and digitised documents, and the addition of a purely digital facet to the documentary life-cycle, have been forcing memory institutions from all sectors to address the same questions that the growth in analogue production necessitated in the early 20th century: Can/should all documents that pass the initial test of appraisal also remain stored indefinitely? What are the requirements for long-term preservation? At what point (if ever) do digital collections become too large to handle? And how can we decide what gets deleted?
Individual institutions and collaborative research efforts alike have adopted a wide range of practices in their attempt to tackle these questions. We would expect the current phase of trial-and-error to move slowly towards a set of somewhat more uniformly adopted governing concepts and practices.


National Library of Wales unveils new reading room

From the National Library of Wales website

The National Library of Wales has unveiled its newly refurbished reading room, which first opened in 1916. The face-lift cost the library in Aberystwyth more than £750,000, and now includes a place for people to meet and discuss their work.


Understanding Users of Social Networks

From the Harvard Business School website

Many business leaders are mystified about how to reach potential customers on social networks such as Facebook. Professor Mikolaj Jan Piskorski provides a fresh look into the interpersonal dynamics of these sites and offers guidance for approaching these tantalising markets.
Key concepts include:
* Online social networks are most useful when they address failures in the real world
* Pictures are the killer app of social networks
* Women and men use these sites differently
* Businesses shouldn't consider SNs as just another channel

Finding new ways to browse

A group of rather loosely connected thoughts about browsing and sharing digital images, serendipity and metadata ....


Earlier this month George Oates, the original force behind The Commons on Flickr, gave a presentation in Bristol on her past work on The Commons and her current role at the Open Library.

George noted that her presentation had three themes:

• It's all about increasing access
• Learn to love (and exploit) networks
• Institutional knowledge as substrate

I found one of George's observation about Flickr really interesting. Talking about the metadata that a particular photo entered Flickr with (date taken, type of camera) and the metadata that has been added to it (tags, placement in groups and sets that give it context through association) George noted that

"It's almost as if all this metadata provides some sort of surface tension that prevents the photo from sinking into the depths of obscurity amongst these billions of photos."

I thought again of that comment when reading Nate Solas's post on the Walker's New Media Initiatives blog, about the Art Finder collection browse/search functionality on the ArtsConnectEd site.




Writing about The Big Idea for the interface, Nate said:

What if we could start with everything and narrow it down from there? Offer the user the entire collection and let them whittle away at it until they found what they wanted?

It's all browse. Keyword is just another filter.

I found it interesting how long I spent fiddling round with the filters on the site before I went looking for a box to type search terms into.

This experience - where browse = happy serendipity - leads me to the new Galleries feature on Flickr (and and a rather overdue update about our Commons work on Flickr). The new tool lets you gather together up to 18 photos by other people (none of your own) into a named and annotated set, which is then shared with all site visitors. It's a way of curating what you think is good or interesting work on Flickr, and then presenting that to other people. It's a serendipitous experience for Flickr browsers - and has been exploited for yesterday's dust storm in Sydney - and adds yet another aspect of surface tension to all the metadata options Flickr already makes available.

It seems that the page where you can see which of your photos is included in which galleries is private (like stats) but we've had a nice little start with 13 photos in 11 galleries, including Netweb's Gallipoli gallery, Brenda Anderson's Glaciers on a human scale gallery, and zyrcster's Night photography across The Commons gallery. As the Indicommons crew have pointed out, this make the cross-Commons curating group members were already doing much easier.




I've just noticed that in the FAQ Galleries are described as 'favourites on steroids'. I've been thinking about favourites a bit over the last couple of weeks, since this Election Night photo was used in a post on the Flickr blog.




The coverage added significantly to the image's 'surface tension' (see the jump in visits below) and the photo has been favourited 268 times since.



Watching this happen confused me a little - I don't (personally) really see what people get out of favouriting (I'm not alone in this!). But galleries make more sense to me - favouriting for the intent of sharing. It's also another fantastic example of how Flickr encourages community within the enormous site - people are leaping onto this new feature, even though they can't promote their own work through it. And of course, all this activity adds more and more contextual information - surface tension - to the individual images.

My own first gallery - of photographs of photographers across The Commons - is here.

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

Introducing The Source

Intercultural dialogue through the arts and culture? (Note: PDF)

From the International Federation of Arts Councils and Culture Agencies (IFACCA) website

As part of the preparations for the 4th World Summit on Arts and Culture 2009 in Johannesburg, the International Federation of Arts Councils and Culture Agencies (IFACCA) opened up a discussion with its network members on the claim that intercultural dialogue has become a new priority for arts and cultural policy makers around the world.

To address this question, IFACCA, with support from Summit co-host, the National Arts Council of South Africa, commissioned the ERICarts Institute to design and analyse the results of a survey to map views and collect cases of good practice on the (potential) role of intercultural dialogue in the arts and arts policies. A questionnaire was sent to the member organisations of IFACCA and to experts in its larger international network of researchers, arts practitioners and NGOs. Between April and July 2009, 108 respondents from 51 countries on all continents were collected online.


Europeana - Next Steps (Note: PDF)

From the European Commission website

This document looks ahead to the next phase of development of Europeana, which opened in November 2008 as part of the Commission's digital libraries initiative, aiming to make Europe's cultural and scientific heritage accessible to all on the internet. This document also looks at its future orientation and sets out the main challenges for the coming years in relation to (1) enriching Europeana’s content with both public domain and in copyright material of the highest quality and relevance to users, and (2) a sustainable financing and governance model. The objective is to ensure that Europeana and the underlying policies for digitisation, online accessibility and digital preservation give European culture a lasting visibility on the internet and turn our common and diverse heritage into an integral part of Europe's information infrastructure for the future.


Towards green ICT strategies... (Note: PDF)

From the OECD website

Governments focus on greening ICTs rather than creating smart ICT applications. This OECD report analyses government programmes and business initiatives on ICT and the environment to address environmental challenges, particularly global warming and energy use.


Libraries Connect Communities 3: Public Library Funding & Technology Access Study 2008-2009 (Note: PDF)

From the American Library Association (ALA) website

This new study finds that more than 71% of all libraries (and 79% of rural libraries) report they are the only source of free access to computers and the Internet in their communities. 66% of public libraries rank job-seeking services, including resume writing and Internet job searches, among the most crucial online services they offer – up from 44% two years ago. In a separate survey, 80% of New York libraries indicated they helped someone search for a job in late 2008.

Additional key findings on the state of Internet availability in public libraries include:
* More than 90% of public libraries provide technology training such as online job-seeking and career-related classes, general Internet and computer use instruction
* 76% of public libraries offer free wireless access
* 81% of public libraries report there are not enough public Internet computers to meet patron demand some or all of the time; increasingly, libraries are having trouble replacing outdated computer workstations due to cost


Data sharing: Empty archives

From the Nature website

Most researchers agree that open access to data is the scientific ideal, so what is stopping it happening? Bryn Nelson investigates why many researchers choose not to share.


Open access to journal content as a case study in unlocking IP (Note: PDF)

From the University of Edinburgh School of Law website

This paper assesses the extent to which the theoretical openness of access to refereed papers in open access journals is being exploited in practice. The internet has brought with it both means to disseminate and access content, and an enhanced expectation that content will generally be readily accessible. This has threatened entrenched for-profit activities, which have long prospered on closed, proprietary approaches to publishing, facilitated by anti-consumer provisions in copyright laws. The ePrints and Open Access (OA) movements have been complemented by the emergence of electronic repositories in which authors can deposit copies of their works. The accessibility of refereed papers published in journals represents a litmus test of the extent to which openness is being achieved in the face of the power of corporations whose business model is dependent on the exploitation of intellectual property (IP). A specification of the requirements for “Unlocking IP” in refereed papers is presented and applied, leading to the conclusion that a great deal of progress appears to have been made. The copyright arrangements applied by most publishers enable authors to self-deposit PrePrints of their papers on their own web-sites and in open repositories; and in many cases authors can also self-deposit the PostPrint, i.e. the author's copy of the final version.

A snapshot of the GLAMs sector

Yesterday I filled in for Nat Torkington and Colin Jackson on the 'New Technology' slot with Kathryn Ryan on National Radio.

The segment ended up being almost entirely ad libbed, but here are some notes I prepared, mostly as a reminder to self, some of which got covered and some of which didn't ...

***

The GLAMS sector is gearing up towards the annual National Digital Forum in November, so it's a good time to look at the work they're doing. I've picked topics to do loosely with access, innovation and using social media to reach out to communities and audiences.

NZETC releases e-publications
http://www.nzetc.org/

The New Zealand Electronic Text Centre at Victoria University is a free online archive of digitised New Zealand and Pacific books, manuscripts and journals. They have stuff like Jean Batten's autobiography, Katherine Mansfield's 'The Garden Party', and a big set of 19th century New Zealand novels.

In the last month they've released most of the texts in the archive as ePub eBooks, which means you can now download them to your Sony Reader or iPhone or iPod Touch. I think the interesting thing about this is that while the NZETC site is an amazing research tool, it doesn't feel to me like something you want to settle in front of and read a whole novel. It's really well done, and the search functionality is great, both on the site as well as for grabbing search engines' attention, but that's a little bit like reading a book using the index as your way in. Turning the digitised texts into e-publications restores some of that original bookiness.

Archives New Zealand on Ziln
http://www.ziln.co.nz/channel_detail.php?program_id=6&channel_id=60

Ziln describes itself as "New Zealand's internet television network". People who have video content can work with Ziln to create their own channels. Archives New Zealand have done this; you can watch things like the 1955 open rollerskating champion doing her thing, and a clip of 4 tuatara being sent to zoos in London, New York, Chicago and San Diego. It's a smart example of an organisation saying "why should we try to make people come to our website to see our stuff - if we have video, why not put it in a place where people are going to watch videos?".

Aotearoa People's Network Kaharoa
http://www.aotearoapeoplesnetwork.org/

Based in Christchurch. I think this is one of the most important projects going on in terms of access. The APNK works to put computer equipment, like PCs and scanner and webcams, and broadband internet access and wifi into public libraries throughout the country. They've started with small and rural libraries, and I think they're up to somewhere between 130 and 160 libraries now. They don't just provide the equipment and the access, they also train staff in the libraries and provide ongoing support, so there's someone to call if the wireless goes down or the software is behaving funny.

These new facilities in libraries that couldn't previously support them are bringing new audiences into the buildings - like teenagers and migrant workers. People are going into libraries to skype home, and one of the funniest things people are seeing are all these new Facebook and Bebo accounts getting set up, full of photos of kids standing in front of bookshelves, because they're using the APNK equipment to take the photos and get onto their accounts.

GLAMS on Twitter

GLAMS organisations in New Zealand have taken to Twitter with a vengeance. They're talking to people about their shows, events and collections, and all sorts of random stuff. At the National Library we use Twitter to share strange, moving or funny items from our collections: yesterday I tweeted out a 1912 ad from a nursing journal we recently added to the Papers Past website, advertising cough lollies with ingredients including cocaine, formaldehyde and potash.

One of the nice things about the Twitter accounts is that they're often being run by people who don't normally get to talk to the public (web managers, collection managers, writers) but who are filled with enthusiasm and passion.

National Library http://twitter.com/NLNZ
Te Papa http://twitter.com/TePapaColOnline
City Gallery Wellington http://twitter.com/CityGalleryWgtn
Christchurch Art Gallery http://twitter.com/ChchArtGallery
Te Ara http://twitter.com/te_ara
NZ on Screen http://twitter.com/nzonscreen

Blogging

Blogs are another of the Web 2.0 technologies that the GLAMs have leapt on, and especially the libraries.

Christchurch City Libraries' blog is outstanding - they've even sent people to live-blog the Auckland Readers and Writers festival http://cclblog.wordpress.com/

It's not just the big libraries though. For example, Rodney Libraries blog everyday and it's just two people with piles of enthusiasm driving it. http://www.rodneylibraries.blogspot.com/

Te Papa also has a really active blog, that covers all kinds of topics, from ferns to framing to the giant squid. It's interesting to see how these blogs create a sense of community, even with a huge audience like that of Te Papa. For instance, when the artist Julian Dashper died earlier this year, and one of the Te Papa curators wrote a post about him, people from all over the world left their comments and thoughts on the blog. http://blog.tepapa.govt.nz/

Tell the GLAMs what you want
http://makeit.digitalnz.org/voting

Collecting organisations all over the country are busily digitising their collections so that they can make them easier for people to access. Digital New Zealand has the Make it Digital website where people can suggest and vote for and comment on things that they'd like to see available online. There's all sorts of requests up there - from aerial photography to the Māori Land Courts Minute Books, and it's really interesting to see the discussion around why people want stuff.

One of the unexpected benefits is that people in organisations are watching the site, and when they see people asking for stuff that's already online, they're jumping in to help them find it. The discussion around the Stones directories is fascinating - a company is digitising the directories and using the Make It Digital site to do a bit of customer research.

Openness

There's been a lot of talk in New Zealand lately about open data and open government, centred around Open New Zealand and spinning off into events and products like the open data barcamp and the Open Data Catalogue. GLAMs organisations are all about people getting access to New Zealand's culture and heritage, on site or online. Copyright is a huge headache for these institutions as they try to get their collections online, and even when copyright has expired, there are moral rights, and cultural considerations, and concerns about donors.

More and more organisations in this area are releasing items or information under Creative Commons licences, including NZETC and NZ on Screen. The National Library is The Commons on Flickr, where collecting institutions all over the world are taking a collective deep breath and releasing photographs from their collections under a "No known copyright restrictions" licence, that lets people do whatever they want with them.

And a big move in the last year is organisations in the GLAMS and beyond making their metadata available through an API built by Digital New Zealand. This API means that other developers, not inside institutions, can access this data and make their own mash-ups from it, like Paul Hagon from Australia who's made a mash-ups with Google Maps so you can search for photographs of a place by clicking around a map instead of typing in key words.

Image
Not me, but another New Zealand radio legend, Aunt Daisy.
Maud Ruby Basham, 1959. Reference Number: 1/2-046733-F. Alexander Turnbull Library. Image from the Manuscripts and Pictorial website

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

Introducing The Source

Cultural funding by government, 2007-08

From the Australian Bureau of Statistics website

This publication contains estimates of Australian public funding for arts and cultural activities, facilities and services across the three levels of government for 2007-08. Detailed expenditure by local governments for heritage and arts cultural activities, facilities and services is provided for the first time. For local governments, expenditure for the 2006-07 year has also been included.
Total government funding for cultural activities was $6.3 billion in 2007-08 ($6,311.4m). The Australian Government contributed $2,358.9m (37.4%) to total cultural funding while the state and territory governments contributed $2,952.2m (46.8%) and local governments provided $1,000.3m (15.8%). Libraries received $1,036.4m or 16.4% of total funding, including $653.4m from local government.


The relationship between public libraries and Google: Too much information

From the First Monday website

This article explores the implications of a shift from public to private provision of information through focusing on the relationship between Google and public libraries. This relationship has sparked controversy, with concerns expressed about the integrity of search results, the Google Book project and Google the company. In this paper, these concerns are treated as symptoms of a deeper divide, the fundamentally different conceptions of information that underpin the stated aim of Google and libraries to provide access to information. The paper concludes with some principles necessary for the survival of public libraries and their contribution to a robust democracy in a rapidly expanding Googleverse.


Social Networks and Teen Lives

From the Commonsense Media website

Social networking is now a major force in a teen’s daily social life. Commonsense Media’s recent poll reveals that social networking is moving communication from face to face to cyberspace - and that parents have a lot to learn when it comes to their children’s behaviours online.


Digital Literacy and Citizenship in the 21st century (Note: PDF)

From the Commonsense Media website

The dynamic new world requires new comprehension and communication skills, as well as new codes of conduct, to ensure that today’s powerful media and technologies are used responsibly and ethically. Much of the interaction in this digital world happens at a distance, which can diminish the rules of cause and effect, action and consequence. Additionally, much of digital life takes place under the cloak of anonymity, making it easier to participate in unethical and even illegal behaviours.


Urbanisation and our relationship with the city - presented by Antony Funnell in AUDIO and via TRANSCRIPT

From the Web 2.0 Summit website

The 21st century will see ever increasing levels of urbanisation. In this programme we look at the way we engage with the city. What do we need to take into account to ensure greater harmony between our future needs as individuals and the needs of the metropolis?


From PDF to MP3: Motivations for creating derivatives

From the First Monday website

With increasing frequency, authors are licensing their works in such a way so as to permit others to create derivative works. In some cases, these derivatives extend the impact of a work by providing a translation into another language or modifying the file format to make it more accessible. Seventeen creators of derivatives were surveyed on their motivations for doing so. They indicated that they were willing to create derivatives that extend the original content of a book because they want to help others access the work. Nearly all the people surveyed indicated they were glad they had created derivative works, often feeling like they were part of a community effort to share the work with others. These creators of derivatives believe that as awareness of open licenses increases, others will be encouraged to create derivative works.

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

Introducing The Source

A future for our digital memory: Permanent access to information in the Netherlands - 20 page English-language summary of the report (Note: PDF)

Full report (in Dutch)

From the Netherlands Coalition for Digital Preservation website

In order to underpin its strategy, the NCDD decided build a detailed picture of the current situation in the public sector in the Netherlands. Can institutions or domains be identified which have successfully risen to the challenge of digital preservation and permanent access? What categories of data are in danger of being lost? How can the risks be managed? The so-called National Digital Preservation Survey was funded by the Ministry of Ministry of Education, Culture and Science, and was held in the first six months of 2009.
A team of three researchers conducted some seventy interviews with stakeholders in three distinct sectors: government & archives, the research community, and cultural heritage institutions.


Quantifying the Economic Impact of the Internet

From the Harvard Business School website

Businesses around the advertising-supported Internet have incredible multiplier effects throughout the economy and society. Professor John Quelch starts to put some numbers on the impact. Key concepts include:

• Each Internet job supports approximately 1.54 additional jobs elsewhere in the economy, or roughly 2 percent of employed Americans

• The advertising-supported Internet creates annual value of $444 billion

• About 190 million people in the United States spend, on average, 68 hours a month on the Internet. A conservative valuation of this time is an estimated $680 billion

Changing Roles: The August 2009 issue of Library Connect (Note: PDF)

From the Elsevier website

Articles include:

• Thrive rather than survive: Incorporate assessment into your library planning

• Today’s changing environment brings benefits and challenges to researchers

• From stronghold to threshold: The library’s role in supporting the University of Aberdeen’s quest to join the ranks of the world’s top 100 universities

• Academic research executives and managers (REMs) face increasingly complex and changing challenges

• What is the value of content to the research workflow?

• Partnering further with faculty and university administrators: Academic librarians offer a vision of their future

• Librarians in Argentina sharpen their skills in unleashing the power of digital resources

Museums, Libraries, and 21st Century Skills (Note: PDF)

From the Institute of Museum and Library Services website

The report outlines a vision for the role of libraries and museums in the national dialogue around learning and 21st century skills and includes case studies of innovative audience engagement and 21st century skills practices from across the country.