techMETRO

Thomson-Reuters Takes Aim at Zotero

In a move that will surely engender goodwill and happy unicorns among librarians worldwide, Thomson-Reuters has fired a $10 million warning shot across the bow of -- get this -- academics at George Mason University. Dan Cohen and his crew in the Center for History and New Media at GMU recently released a new version of Zotero, the popular open source bibliographic software tool that allows academics to cite, share, and tag resources they find online. The response, in addition to a growing community of scholarly users worldwide, was a lawsuit from Thomeson-Reuters suggesting that GMU has reverse-engineered EndNote, T-R's proprietary bibliographic software. The crux of the injunction seems to be that Zotero infringes upon Thomson-Reuters EndNote product by allowing users to convert EndNotes proprietary .ens files to Zotero's freely distributable .csl files -- claiming that GMU reverse-engineered EndNote to create Zotero. 

via GMU Sued for Zotero

Outsourcing Digitization

Planning digitization projects is a tremendous undertaking. Decisions have to be made about the scope of the project, metadata standards to adopt, workflow processes, online delivery, and more -- oh, and money. And this doesn't even begin to scratch the surface of digital conversion issues  -- of which there are plenty. It makes sense that a lot of smaller libraries would consider using a trusted vendor with solid referrals to manage the digital conversion component of a digitization project. It's not a solution that's right for every project, but outsourcing digitization might make all the difference in ensuring that a first digitization project won't end up being the library's last.

OCLC Manager of Digital and Preservation Programs, Gayle Palmer, will be hosting a free one-hour webinar on taking advantage of outsourcing. OCLC provides their own digital conversion services, so I would expect a bit of a pitch squeezed in here, but I'm sure there will be plenty of take-aways from this webinar. The webinar is October 7 from 3-4. Registration is available here.

Fourth Installment of Code4Lib Journal

The new issue of the Code4Lib Journal has just been published online. It's at the top of my reading list for this afternoon (or whenever I can find some free time). This journal is a must-read not only for coders and developers in libraries, but also those of us who are interested in looking under the hood of what makes so much of the technology that we take for granted run. You won't understand everything, but if we only read about things we know, how would we learn anything? Here's the table of contents for the new issue. Dive in!

Code4Lib Editorial Introduction — Issue 4
Ken Varnum

Auto-Populating an ILL form with the Serial Solutions Link Resolver API
Daniel Talsky

Mining Data from ISI Web of Science® Reports
Alfred Kraemer

Unveiling Jangle: Untangling Library Resources and Exposing them through the Atom Publishing Protocol
Ross Singer and James Farrugia

LibraryH3lp: A New Flexible Chat Reference System
Pam Sessoms and Eric Sessoms

OpenBook WordPress Plugin: Open Source Access to Bibliographic Data
John Miedema

The Library Search Engine: A Smart Solution for Integrating Resources Beyond Library Holdings
Karin Herm and Sibylle Volz

BOOK REVIEW: Two Books about FRBR, Compared
Christine Schwartz

Free Webcast on Free Speech in Cyberspace Today

Today, Educause Live! will feature Robert M. O'Neil, former President of the University of Virginia and Founding Director of the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression conducting a talk from 1-2pm Eastern. The talk, "Constitution Day 2008: Free Speech in Cyberspace," will cover: 

... a brief overview of several novel and emerging dimensions of free expression in digital communications: how the Supreme Court has dealt with Internet speech under the First Amendment, problems posed by the content of web pages on university servers, the emerging challenge of "invasive" sites like Juicycampus.com, the largely fruitless quest for legal relief by victims of cyberattacks (including the challenge of "unmasking" anonymous critics), and the status of "sexually explicit" material on college and university servers.

The event is free, but you will need to register here.

Opening Up.

MIT Press, with support from The Carnegie Endowment for the Advancement of Teaching, has just released a book that looks to be a must-read for librarians involved in or interested in open access issues. Opening Up Education: The Collective Advancement of Education through Open Technology, Open Content, and Open Knowledge is available for purchase or free online as an iPaper or a PDF -- all under a Creative Commons license. Editors Toru Iiyoshi and M. S. Vijay Kumar have assembled an impressive group of thinkers to discuss the wide-ranging issues that occur at the intersections of openness, new technologies, scholarship, and education. It sounds like a 30k-foot approach, but the Foreword from John Seely Brown touches on how we might ground our analyses, "In the spirit of sharing and participation, how might we start to instrument our learningscapes and to start collecting massive amounts of data about what is working and what is not and why. Consider OCW. There may well be millions of students using this material, but we need to ask what we’re learning from them." Indeed, this work comes at a time where openness movements have reached a point of maturity where we can begin to ask and direct how they will further develop.

Old Wine. New Models. Google and ProQuest.

A recent press release from ProQuest announced that they have embarked on a project with Google to digitize hundreds of millions of newspaper pages. Amazing, right? The project is one of the first of its kind and certainly the first with this sort of scope. As such, they will likely be developing models from which we can learn a lot about how to fund a project like this and manage the copyright issues. Regarding the former, ProQuest senior vice-president of publishing Rod Gauvin said:

The demand for digitized newspaper archives is clearly there.  The problem is it that, until now, finding a workable economic model for libraries and publishers has been challenging ... This model overcomes that hurdle, unlocking a wealth of content for libraries and internet users with unique research needs.

What's not mentioned in the press release, but is noted in a recent Library Journal post, is that the "workable model" of which he speaks involves Google picking up the tab on the digital conversion work -- in exchange for placing advertising next to the newspaper page images. Hundreds of millions of newspaper pages. I'm certainly all for creative funding strategies, but I'm sure more than a few librarian eyebrows will be raised by this news. LJ also reportst that ProQuest is considering a "Premium Content" strategy where users will pay extra for certain content like The New York Times. They might want to consider asking the NYTimes about their NYTimesSelect project before they start premium-atizing content.

Although the project is already underway, ProQuest and Google have been frank about not being entirely sure about how they will handle content that neither ProQuest nor Google have permission to digitize and release. It'll be interesting to see what happens when they run up against the end of the papers they have rights to and have to begin negotiating the murky water in which the Books Project is still swimming/treading.

Code4LibNYC and Digitization at METRO

It's the beginning of a pretty busy season for us here at METRO, and I'm pretty excited about some of the developments we have brewing.

Last week marked the first meeting of the Code4LibNYC chapter, convening under the umbrella of Special Interest Groups (SIGs) hosted by METRO. According to the conveners, this new group aspires to "provide a forum where library technologists can share information about library technology and discuss their current projects ... [it] is open to all library staff interested in the coding, deployment, and design of library software, systems, and web services." The group of 25+ met for a series of lightning talks and general discussion about the direction this new chapter/SIG will be taking over the course of the next series of meetings (approximately 4 per year). Notes from this first meeting are already posted on the Code4LibNYC SIG wiki.

On Tuesday, METRO will be hosting the a re-convening of the Digitization SIG at 5pm at the METRO Training Center (57 E. 11). After an extended hiatus, new conveners are "getting the band back together" to, once again, provide a venue for information and best practices sharing on all aspects of digitization in libraries. Read more about the group's history and sign up for the mailing list here.

Both of these mark what I see to be a renewed commitment at METRO to provide resources and catalysts for bringing together bright librarians who are tackling some of the big issues and opportunities our libraries are facing.

Wednesday Workhack: techMETRO services

My position here as the Emerging Technologies Manager is still being defined, but one theme underlies all the work I do here: I am a sort of public servant working for the diverse membership of the Metropolitan New York Library Council. To that end, this blog is intended as one tool to meet those needs, and seems a suitable point of discussion for the Wednesday Workhack.

Now that we're a little more than a month into this blog, I thought it made sense to lay out some of the services I intend to deliver here. I really envision techMETRO as a go-to resource for all things related to emerging technologies and digitization in libraries. Lofty...and ultimately impractical, right? We'll see about that. Here's what we have lined up so far:

• Content: I'll be doing my best to balance entries here to cover both digitization and emerging technologies. Although I won't make it here, there's an argument to be made for the blurring of our distinctions between emerging technologies and the recent (but rich, nonetheless) tradition of digital collections. Hopefully we'll be fleshing that argument out right here.
• Compendium: I'm using delicious to tag resources with a simple taxonomy geared to make it easy to find certain types of resources, experts in particular areas, vendors, and more. The working taxonomy can be viewed here, and the delicious library can be viewed here. Add us to your del.icio.us network!
• Calendar: I'm also maintaining a calendar featuring local, national, and global conferences, CFPs, events, workshops, and the like. View the calendar here or using the link to the right. You may also add the techMETRO calendar to your own Gmail calendar.
• Connections: I see tremendous potential in connecting the seemingly infinite pockets of creativity, ingenuity, and outright brilliance in the library community in the greater metropolitan NY area. This blog is just one way I'd like to help make those connections. Leave comments. Suggest events for the calendar. Send me links to projects and people that you think more of us should know about. You can always reach me at jkucsma_at_metro_dot_org.