UC Irvine 10 Things winner!

After ten months since the program was announced I was awarded the "First Finisher" of the UC Irvine 10 Things Library event. Wow! I finished the ten Web 2.0 tasks before Thanksgiving 2007 so we can get to the main issue - using these tools in a practical sense. Let us move forward, please ...

Microsoft Pulls Plug on Live Search Books

Microsoft Pulls Plug on Live Search Books
By Jim Milliot -- Publishers Weekly, 5/23/2008 8:53:00 AM
http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6563730.html?nid=2286&source=title&rid=

In an early morning post, Microsoft announced that it is ending Live Search Books and Live Search Academic projects and taking down both sites. Through the programs, Microsoft has digitized 750,000 books and indexed 80 million journal articles. Those results will now be integrated into general search results. Effective immediately, Microsoft has stopped digitizing new materials in both its library scanning and in-copyright book programs.

According to Microsoft, "based on our experience, we foresee that the best way for a search engine to make book content available will be by crawling content repositories created by book publishers and libraries."

Microsoft will be providing publishers with digital copies of their scanned books, and is working with Ingram Digital, which was doing much of the scanning, to provide publishers with sales and marketing opportunities for titles already in Live Search Books.

From Publisher's Weekly -- see also the blog post - http://blogs.msdn.com/livesearch/archive/2008/05/23/book-search-winding-down.aspx

Microsoft Announcement
http://blogs.msdn.com/livesearch/archive/2008/05/23/book-search-winding-down.aspx

New York Times
Friday news brief: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/24/technology/24soft.html?ex=1369281600&en=04f58de95a70d498&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink
Fuller article: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/24/technology/24soft.html?ex=1369368000&en=afece5de206c92e4&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

Internet Archive Statement
http://www.archive.org/iathreads/post-view.php?id=194217

PLoS Biology article on teaching evolution and creationism in high-school biology classes

Evolution and Creationism in America's Classrooms: A National Portrait

Michael B. Berkman^*, Julianna Sandell Pacheco, Eric Plutzer

Citation: Berkman MB, Pacheco JS, Plutzer E (2008) Evolution and Creationism in America's Classrooms: A National Portrait. PLoS Biol 6(5): e124 doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.0060124

Published: May 20, 2008

Copyright: © 2008 Berkman et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Abbreviations: ID, intelligent design; NSES, National Science Education Standards

Michael B. Berkman is Professor of Political Science, Julianna Sandell Pacheco is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science, and Eric Plutzer is Professor of Political Science and Academic Director of the Penn State Survey Research Center in the Department of Political Science, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania, United States of America.

Create an avatar Mii for Wii

Create your own unique avatar (called a "Mii" for the Wii) online at: http://nosheep.net/story/create-your-mii/.

ARL Scholarly Communication Discussion Guides Updated and Expanded

ARL Scholarly Communication Discussion Guides Updated and Expanded

Washington DC--The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) Office of Scholarly Communication has enhanced its popular series of free discussion guides on current scholarly communication issues to facilitate summer discussion programs among library staff.

As the scholarly communication system continues to change rapidly, the Library Brown-Bag Lunch Series on Issues in Scholarly Communication is a valuable resource for library staff to use in expanding their own awareness of key issues and preparing for campus outreach. The series now offers eight guides and a discussion leader's introduction. Entirely new discussion guides on new model publications and author rights have been created. The series now includes both an introductory guide for discussions of author rights and a second guide for discussions of institutional policies on author rights. Several others of the original guides have been revised to reflect advancements occurring in the past year and new suggestions for further reading have been added.

ARL's discussion series was developed by Karla Hahn, Director of the Office of Scholarly Communication, and covers:

• Starting discussions of scholarly communication
• Talking with faculty
• Access to publicly funded research
• Author rights
• Institutional strategies for rights management
• Scholarly society roles
• Peer review
• New model publications

Each guide offers prework and discussion questions for a meeting, along with resources that provide further background for the discussion leader of an hour-long session. The guides can serve as a starting point for a single discussion or for a series of conversations.

Using the discussion guides, library leaders can launch a program quickly without requiring special expertise on the topics. A brown-bag series could be initiated by a library director, a group of staff, or by any staff person with an interest in the scholarly communication system. The only requirements are the willingness to organize the gatherings and facilitate each meeting's discussion.

Electronic copies of the guides are freely available at http://www.arl.org/sc/brownbag/.

Webcat of Scholar2Scholar: How Web 2.0 is Changing Scholarly Communication

Webcast of the the 5th Annual Scholarly Communication Symposium: Scholar2Scholar: How Web 2.0 is Changing Scholarly Communication is now available from its web site: http://scholar2scholar.wikispaces.com/

See:

Watch webcast: Jean-Claude Bradley’s presentation
Watch webcast: Panel discussion

See also: Round Table Discussion for notes from various topics discussed and Further Reading on additional readings on Web 2.0 and scholarship.

Panelists

Jean-Claude Bradley, Associate Professor, Chemistry, Drexel University
Andre Brown, Ph.D. Candidate, Physics & Astronomy, University of Pennsylvania
Nicole Engard, Open Source Evangelist, LibLime
James Mitchell, Associate Professor, Civil, Architectural & Environmental Engineering, Drexel University
Banu Onaral, H. H. Sun Professor & Director, School of Biomedical Engineering, Science & Health Systems
Beth Ritter-Guth, Instructor of English & Communication, Lehigh Carbon Community College
Scott Warnock, Assistant Professor, English & Philosophy, Drexel University.

Panel Moderator: Karl Okamoto, Associate Professor of Law and Director of the Business and Entrepreneurship Law Concentration, Drexel College of Law.

From: Jay Bhatt, Information Services Librarian (Engineering), Drexel University

This article, "New Open-Access Humanities Press Makes Its Debut" is available online at this address:

http://chronicle.com/temp/email2.php?id=jghhr4Qw8wcwVqhpx3Jwq9pMt4mMFJmd

This article will be available to non-subscribers of The Chronicle for up to five days after it is e-mailed.

New Open-Access Humanities Press Makes Its Debut

By JENNIFER HOWARD

Scholars in the sciences have been light-years ahead of their peers in the humanities in exploring the possibilities of open-access publishing. But a new venture with prominent academic backers, the Open Humanities Press, wants to help humanists close the gap.

The nonprofit operation—described by those involved...

http://chronicle.com/daily/2008/05/2759n.htm

About Open Humanities Press
Gary Hall and Sigi Jottkandt met with faculty and librarians at UC Irvine on April 3, 2008 in a stimulating discussion. I know that I got a lot of useful information, and I sensed that it may have been the same for each of you. Here is a group of urls compiled by Maureen Burns (thank you, Maureen!), to which I've added a few, that came out of the meeting. I've also indicated where participants in today's meeting have affiliations with these journals/repositories, etc. If any of you would like to add others, or if you have some fine-tuning to the following, please respond to this e-list.

I also have gotten feedback from some of you expressing further interest in the e-Scholarship repository, for which I imagine a few of us could put together a workshop. Let me know if you have other ideas that came out of this meeting.

Open Humanities Press http://openhumanitiespress.org/ (Co-Founders: Gary Hall and Sigi Jottkandt)
Postmodern Culture http://www.iath.virginia.edu/pmc/contents.all.html (Editor: Eyal Amiran)
Project MUSE http://muse.jhu.edu/about/index.html
Council of Editors of Learned Journals http://www.celj.org/history.php
Karagarga Info (e-mail Mark Poster poster@uci.edu for an invite) http://criticalculture.blogspot.com/2007/03/karagarga.html
UC CDL eScholarship Repository http://repositories.cdlib.org/escholarship/
Journal for Learning through the Arts http://repositories.cdlib.org/clta/lta/ (Systems Administrator: Maureen Burns; Copy Editor, Barbara Cohen)
ibiblio http://www.ibiblio.org/
Public Knowledge Project http://pkp.sfu.ca/
Open Journal Systems http://pkp.sfu.ca/?q=ojs
Sample of Journals http://pkp.sfu.ca/ojs-journals
First Monday http://www.firstmonday.dk/
Culture Machine http://www.culturemachine.net (Co Executive Editor: Gary Hall)
Cultural Studies e-archive (CSeARCH) http://www.culturemachine.net/csearch (Gary Hall)
Thomson Scientific http://scientific.thomson.com/

Make Textbooks Affordable campaign
http://www.maketextbooksaffordable.org/textbooks.asp?id2=14215
Open Students
http://www.openstudents.org/

Open Access Directory by Peter Suber and Robin Peek

Open Access Directory: A wiki to organize information about the open access movement

Boston, April 30, 2008. Peter Suber and Robin Peek have launched the Open Access Directory (OAD), a wiki where the open access community can create and maintain simple factual lists about open access to science and scholarship. Suber, a Research Professor of Philosophy at Earlham College, and Peek, an Associate Professor of Library and Information Science at Simmons College, conceived the project in order to collect OA-related lists for one-stop reference and searching.

The wiki will start operating with about half a dozen lists --for example, conferences devoted to open access, discussion forums devoted to open access, and journal "declarations of independence"-- and add more over time.

The goal is to harness the knowledge and energy of the open access community itself to enlarge and correct the lists. A list on a wiki, revised continuously by its users, can be more comprehensive and up to date than the same list maintained by an individual. By bringing many OA-related lists together in one place, OAD will make it easier for users, especially newcomers, to discover them and use them for reference. The easier they are to maintain and discover, the more effectively they can spread useful, accurate information about open access.

The URL for the Open Access Directory is http://oad.simmons.edu .

To contact us, email Athanasia Pontika, the Assistant Editor (OAD.contact@gmail.com), or the Editorial Board (OAD.editors@gmail.com).

The wiki is represented by an editorial board consisting of prominent figures in the open access movement. The Graduate School of Library and Information Science (GSLIS) at Simmons College hosts and provides technical support to the OAD.
http://www.simmons.edu/gslis/


Editors and administrators
Robin Peek. Editor, Associate Professor, Graduate School of Library and Information Science, Simmons College
Athanasia Pontika. Assistant Editor, Doctoral Student, Graduate School of Library and Information Science, Simmons College
Terry Plum. Technical Coordinator, Assistant Dean for Technology and Director, Simmons GSLIS at Mount Holyoke College
Editorial board members
Charles Bailey. Publisher, Digital Scholarship
Leslie Chan. Program Supervisor for New Media Studies, University of Toronto Scarborough
Heather Joseph. Executive Director, Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC)
Melissa Hagemann. Open Society Institute
Peter Suber. Research Professor of Philosophy at Earlham College, Visiting Fellow at Yale Law School, and Senior Researcher at SPARC
Alma Swan. Key Perspectives Ltd
John Wilbanks. Vice President, Creative Commons

About the Berkeley Research Impact Initiative (BRII)

Berkeley Research Impact Initiative:
Advancing the Impact of UC Berkeley Research

co-sponsored by UC Berkeley's Vice Chancellor for Research and the University Librarian

The Berkeley Research Impact Initiative (BRII) supports faculty members, post-docs, and graduate students who want to make their journal articles free to all readers immediately upon publication.
An 18-month pilot program, BRII will subsidize, in various degrees, fees charged to authors who select open access or paid access publication. The pilot will also yield data that can be used to gauge faculty interest in — as well as the budgetary impacts of — these new modes of scholarly communication on the Berkeley campus.
http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/brii/

About the speaker: Charles (Chuck) Eckman is the Associate university Librarian and Director of Collections at the University of California, Berkeley where he provides leadership for the library's collections and scholarly communications programs. Prior to coming to Cal in June 2006, he worked at Stanford university as Head of Social Sciences Resource group (1997-2006) and Principal Government Documents Librarian (1995-20060. While at Stanford he also served as project director for the GATT Digital Library, a collaborative endeavor with the World Trade Organization aimed at digitizing and providing access to the historic record of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade <http:/gatt.stanford.edu/>. He also served as consultant to the California Digital Library (2002-2003) on a project sponsored by the Mellon Foundation assessing the challenges of preserving web-based government information. He holds an MLIS from UC Berkeley (1987) , Ph.D. in Politics from Princeton (1986), and BA in Political Science from Indiana (1979). His intellectual and professional energies are focused on expanding both scholarly and public access to research, a passion he attributes to his expriences working as a government documents depository librarian.

The New Polish Selena? My 15 minutes...

I was looking at this because I'm Don DeLillo fan, but then I saw the sidebar ad...and thought for a second that it was a picture of Mitchell!

http://www.theonion.com/content/magazine/author_tom_delillo

Meet the Polish Selena, April 11, 2008

• 

Steven R. Harris

Collection Development Librarian

Utah State University

(435) 797-3861

http://collections2point0.wordpress.com/