September 2008 | Main | November 2008
October 28, 2008
Announcement from Google
News on Google Book Search.
Google has come to an agreement today, October 28, 2008, with the The Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers, regarding the future of Google Book Search, which had been under litigation since 2005.
Google will make payments to establish the Book Rights Registry, "to resolve existing claims by authors and publishers and to cover legal fees" (See Announcement Link above).
Google claims this will expand institutional access to millions of online books via subscriptions.
--Susan Wood
Posted by colldev at 05:50 PM
October 19, 2008
Social Constructivist Perspective on IRs
A recent article by Oya Y. Rieger titled "Opening Up Institutional Repositories: Social Construction of Innovation in Scholarly Communication" in the Journal of Electronic Publishing vol.11, no. 3, Fall 2008 "explores IRs from a social constructivist perspective in order to understand the choices made in their design and implementation." The article notes that "although the technical features of IRs are critical for user acceptance, in and of themselves they are not sufficient to dertmine the scholarly community's appropriation of IR technologies." The article goes on to explore the difference in how the crisis in scholarly publishing is perceived by the various stakeholders; and how that difference in perception leads to the creation of IRs by institutions, and the non-use of IRs by faculty. The sociological analysis of how IR's are being constructed, interpreted and used offers insight into the reasons that IR's continue to be under utilized. A very interesting look at the technical vs sociological factors in scholarly communication. (the article can be found @ http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/3336451.001.301) Deborah Job
This article may now be found @ http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=jep;cc=jep;rgn=main;view=text;idno=3336451.0011.301 Deborah Job
Posted by colldev at 03:01 PM
October 14, 2008
The 78 Terabyte Digital Library
ArsTechnica recently posted an article about the launching of a digital repository that spans 78 terabytes of storage space. HathiTrust is the result of the collaboration of multiple research universities. The repository is similar to GoogleBooks in many ways, but what is special is that it represents intense collaboration. HathiTrust is monumental in size and ambition, and it illustrates the potential that lies in collaborative efforts towards accessiblity. For us, this provides another opportunity for the sharing of scholarly information. In an effort this massive, scholarly communication via open access channels can gain more prominence, giving open access a chance to show what it can do.
-Posted by Anna Galyon
Posted by colldev at 02:10 PM