We haven't been keeping score but from the news
releases and more importantly the law suits, we reckon Google is still the
digitization czar by a long shot. We were going to bring you news of the
legal imbroglios Google finds itself it, but there are so many we decided
instead to tell you that Microsoft and the British Library will be
digitizing millions of pages. How many? Here has the
answer.
Bill and Melinda award boat libraries in
Bangladesh
When your country is a vast river delta and life
giving floods happen every year, cars aren't much use. Neither are your
feet if the nearest library is five rivers and two lakes away. That's why
in Bangladesh some enterprising folks set up a mobile library with a
difference. It floats on water and travels the waterways. Bill and Melinda
were so impressed they gave their Access to Learning Award to the boat
people. Float here for the full
story.
Portland thrives where others get gobbled up
What's it like to be a small but important publisher
in these days of mergers and strategic alliances (i.e., purchase and
sometimes annihilation)? Portland Press, the publishing arm of the
Biochemistry Society is surviving and prospering. And it's non-profit,
supports Open Access and has its own platform. Portland's MD, Rhonda
Oliver values her independence. Find out why here
.
Google (again) and LC take on the
world
There's just no stopping them. Google with the
Library of Congress will begin building a World Digital Library for use by
you, me, us and others around the globe. Working with private enterprise
LC will digitize significant primary materials across the globe. If this
makes you want to run to the stacks with a feather duster to find those
historic and unique leather bound tomes, read this article. All is
revealed here
.
What doesn't NLB do?
Judging from the latest announcements, you'd think
that staff at Singapore's NLB must be insomniacs or have found the secret
to everlasting energy production. The new National Library has announced
research fellowships, a coffee table book of the library's history, the
addition of new reference collections, a huge library of ebooks and
ejournals free for all citizens to use, and... Turn here for the lowdown.
Is all good in the world of Open Access
journals?
It's true that some publishers have been scared by
Open Access and its evangelists. But not many studies have been done on
the effects of OA on scholarly journals, until now that is. ALPSP, AAAS
and the HighWire Press commissioned a study to find out. You think Open
Access journals don't carry out peer review? Here sets the record straight.
Chinese books coming to a store near
you
Elsevier and China's Science Press have established a
joint translation center to promote books and journals in the Chinese and
international markets. Soon to be released are translations of top
Elsevier books and Science Press books. A selection of STM journals
produced in print by Science Press will be published jointly in print and
ScienceDirect versions. Want to subscribe? More here.
A group for business
librarians
Japanese, American and Australian librarians have
groups for every persuasion: technicians, reference, medical, G&L,
sinological... We in Asia usually make do with the national library
association. But if you're a business librarian, there's somewhere new for
you to roost which gathers like minded souls from the distant corners of
Asia and the Pacific. It's quite a mouthful: APBSLG. Chris Flegg
unravels the acronym here.
View full text journal articles via NIH
Medline
We're sure you wouldn't be reading this if the Open
Access folks didn't exist. Fifty seven leading American publishers are
allowing the NIH to provide online access to articles on their journal
websites using the existing system that links from abstracts that are
indexed in on NIH's Medline. That means one million articles.
Impressed? Here has
the story.
2,000 papers downloaded 10,000
times in October
2005
One year ago
ACCESS attended what was probably the first conference in
Asia dedicated to Institutional Repositories. It was hosted by the
Hong Kong University of Science & Technology and included the
best speakers in the field from the United States and Europe. But
the paper that caught our eye was that from HKUST. It was a perfect
case study on getting an IR up and running in the Asian context and
we reported on it in ACCESS #51, December 2004. The IR was
and still is managed by Diana Chan, Head of the HKUST Reference
Department. ACCESS
recently spoke to Diana in
Bangkok where she was managing a workshop and presenting papers at
the Online Information & Education Conference.
Why did the Hong Kong
University of Science & Technology establish its own
institutional repository?
The most
important reason was to provide a platform for the
intellectual output of the university, our intellectual
property. Our IR is also our response to the Open Access
movement as well as a response to preserve our own scholarly
output and make it widely available on the Web. In doing so,
we increased the visibility of the research output of HKUST
which of course is also of service to the
Faculties.
Which software solutions did
you choose?
We started with
DSpace version 1.0.1 and now we're using version 1.2.1. Our
Systems Librarian has made a lot of enhancements to DSpace
enabling us to have several unique
features.
Does using DSpace bring you
any privileges?
It's open
source so if you want any customisation you have to use your
Systems Librarian's time. In that sense there's no support
from DSpace. But the good thing is that they listen to users
and incorporate our suggestions into new releases. Also good
for us is that as the number of DSpace users increases, we're
able to communicate through listservs and discussion groups,
and that results in its own kind of support group. The
enhancements that we've made at HKUST quickly become known in
the DSpace community who ask us how we did A, B or C. In reply
we open up the enhancements to
them.
Can all IRs using DSpace be
searched simultaneously regardless of their location?
No, but we
participate in OAIster and cooperate with them to harvest data
from our IR. OAIster is a project at the University of
Michigan with one searchable interface for some 500 academic
institutions with over 6 million full text documents. And
users can go to Google. As Google indexes us all, you could
say that we are searched simultaneously, together with a lot
of other
websites.
What resources do you have to
manage the IR?
It's an added
task for the existing staff. Managing the IR has been
integrated into our responsibilities. The workload is spread
among the systems staff who handle technical matters; the
reference and subject librarians do the faculty liaison tasks;
the collection development manager sends letters to publishers
to clear up copyright matters; and our support staff do the
data input. If we can get additional funding for staff it
would help us all because managing an IR is time
consuming.
When we spoke last year,
getting your IR populated with research papers was a major
task. Is that still the case?
It's a never
ending job with which we struggle! But we are making progress.
Before the summer we made presentations to different schools
explaining to them about Open Access and the role of IRs. We
also contacted the Research Office of our university, the OCGA
[Office of Contract & Grant Administration]. OCGA requires
faculty to report their scholarly papers annually. We asked
OCGA to include on their form a check-box for each publication
so that faculty can choose to have some or all of their papers
preserved on our IR. OCGA agreed and the result was we
received 600 emails from faculty agreeing to deposit their
papers. We ask for an electronic copy of the pre-published
version. Some faculty members struggle because they only have
the publisher's version which cannot be archived as they are
copyrighted by the publisher. Efforts like this are needed
year after year to sustain the life and purpose of an IR. At
this point in December 2005 we have more than 2,000
items.
Can faculty deposit a variety
of papers, not just journal articles?
Yes. The
documents in our collection include journal articles, working
papers, pre-prints, technical reports, conference
presentations, conference papers and book chapters if they own
the copyright. Theses too but so far only Ph.D.
theses.
Diana Chan, Head, HKUST Reference
Department
Are there ownership issues
for theses?
When the thesis
is completed and approved, the student signs an agreement
giving the library a non-exclusive distribution license which
includes putting it on the Web. For past alumni who have not
signed an agreement, we ask them to give us the permission to
make their theses freely accessible and 129 have done so. Our
IR is home to nearly 400 Ph.D. theses completed at
HKUST.
Once a document is deposited
in your IR, can it be changed?
When we receive
a paper, library staff enhances the metadata and we do
authority control on author's names. Once deposited, if we
find typing errors we will correct them. We generally expect
authors to submit their revised papers separately but do allow
papers to be withdrawn upon the advice of the faculty. Working
papers and reports which haven't been submitted for peer
review can be replaced with the refereed
copy.
What influence has your IR
had in Hong Kong's academic circles?
It takes a lot
of time to get an IR going, especially collecting a critical
mass of papers. When faculty visits the IR they see their
paper ready for downloading by the whole world. In October
2005, the 2,000 papers in our IR were downloaded a total of
10,000 times and 64,000 times since October 2004. The top
ranking paper was downloaded 291 times in October alone. The
faculty of course is very pleased with such high visibility.
In the future we'd like to adopt the e-scholarship approach.
For example, at the California Digital Library e-Scholarship
Project, an administrator is trained in each department to
collect documents and submit them to the IR on behalf of the
department. Before we can go to that level, we need to create
a critical mass because departments won't assign an
administrator until they see a functioning and well used IR.
Nevertheless, I hope this is the future for our IR. As for the
impact in Hong Kong, the IR conference at the end of 2004
generated much interest locally and a few institutions have
begun the evaluation and planning
process.
How will your IR develop in
the year ahead?
It's very
important to get the user involved, in our case the scholars.
Speaking from HKUST, if I get endorsement from the library
management, I would visit departments, talk to staff and see
whether or not they have collections for us to capture such as
data sets, seminar series, video or other research materials,
that we haven't been concerned with up to now. The second
point as mentioned earlier, is to encourage them to nominate a
support staff in their department to work with them and the
library to collect and upload
papers.
Why did the Hong Kong
University of Science & Technology establish its own
institutional repository?
