Wednesday, October 19, 2011

The COAPI Cats: A directory of the 22 academic libraries setting the US open access agenda

The word is getting around from places like Library Journal that the recently formed  Coalition of Open Access Policy Institutions (COAPI)  will meet in person for the first time at a pre-conference meeting at the Berlin 9 Open Access Conference in Washington, DC, in early November 2011.   Just as SPARC fostered a vibrant and participatory Open Access Week site that substitutes for in-person meetings, SPARC is also promising to lend its advocacy expertise and even support a COAPI meeting at their own first North American OA meeting, to be held next March in Kansas City, MO.
<continue> - Originally posted Thu, August 11 2011

Tuesday, October 4, 2011

Streaming video case dismissed - UCLA

Yesterday a judge in Los Angeles dismissed the copyright infringement lawsuit brought by AIME, the Association for Information Media and Equipment, against UCLA.  The lawsuit had alleged that UCLA was infringing copyright by ripping DVDs to create a digital stream, which was then made available through a closed course management system to students in a particular class.  There are several technical issues that dominate the decision, but there is a little bit of good news, hardly definitive, for the fair use claim that was being made by UCLA.

The two major reasons for the decision were sovereign immunity — the doctrine that state entities can seldom be sued in federal court — and lack of standing.  AIME tried to argue that UCLA had waived its sovereign immunity when it signed a contract with AIME, but the judge rejected that argument as too broad.  So a major part of the decision applies only to state entities; it does not translate to private universities.

Source: Scholarly Communications @ Duke

Response from AIME - the Association for Information Media and Equipment 

Launch of the Keepers Registry Beta service

EDINA and the ISSN International Centre are pleased to announce the Beta release of the Keepers Registry, the e-journals preservation registry service. The Keepers Registry is available online at http://thekeepers.org.

The Keepers Registry renames and replaces the PEPRS Beta service which was launched in April 2011.  The Keepers Registry is the product of JISC-funded project activity and provides freely available means to discover which e-journals are being preserved by the leading archival organisations.  The metadata from an additional agency, HathiTrust, has been included in this release of the Keepers Registry, as well as new functionality to support browsing by journal title and publisher.

The PEPRS project was initially funded as a two-year project to scope, design and build a prototype, during which user requirements were gathered from librarians and preservation agencies. The present funding, until July 2012, is geared towards implementation of a service-quality system. Suitable developments from the PEPRS project activity will be implemented into the Keepers Registry.

The work of the PEPRS project and the launch of the Beta release of the Keepers Registry will be discussed at the annual meeting of the Directors of the ISSN National Centres to be held in Sarajevo, Bosnia Herzegovina, from 5th - 7th October 2011.

The idea for the registry was mooted in various reports since 2003 and the findings of a JISC-commissioned report carried out by the University of Loughborough and Rightscom and published in 2008. Further background information on the project and details of relevant reports are available on the PEPRS project website at http://edina.ac.uk/projects/peprs/index.html

The six archiving agencies which have been participating in the project and have made metadata available to the PEPRS Beta service include:
It is planned to extend the scope of the service by including metadata from other archiving agencies. Additional functionality will also be added to the service throughout 2011 and 2012 and details of this are set out in the FAQ section on the service.

A programme to test new functionality is being developed and the project team would welcome offers from users to assist in the testing process.

If you would like to get involved please contact us at edina@ed.ac.uk.

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Contact the EDINA HelpDesk at edina@ed.ac.uk
or at

+44 (0)131 650 3302 (telephone)
+44 (0)131 650 3308 (fax)

Causewayside House,
Univesity of Edinburgh
160 Causewayside,
Edinburgh,
Scotland,
United Kingdom
EH9 1PR

EDINA is a UK national academic data centre, designated by JISC on behalf of UK funding bodies to support the activity of universities, colleges and research institutes in the UK, by delivering access to a range of online data services through a UK academic infrastructure, as well as supporting knowledge exchange and ICT capacity building, nationally and internationally.  http://edina.ac.uk/about/

The ISSN International Centre, established through agreement between UNESCO and the French Government, has the aim of introducing and operating an automated system for the registration of serials and maintains the ISSN Register. The ISSN (International Standard Serial Number) is an eight-digit number which identifies periodical publications, including electronic serials.  http://www.issn.org/
The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in Scotland, with registration number SC005336.

lis-e-resources is a UKSG list - http://www.uksg.org/serials
UKSG groups also available on Facebook and LinkedIn

Day of Digital Archives

This Thursday, October 6th, 2011 is the first ever Day of Digital Archives. The Day of Digital Archives project has been created to raise awareness of digital archives among both users and managers. By collectively documenting what we do, we will be answering questions like: What are digital archives? Who uses them? How are they created and managed? Why are they important?

On the 6th, more than 30 archivists, librarians, scholars, and technologists will blog or tweet about their work with digital archives. Check out the project blog at http://dayofdigitalarchives.blogspot.com/ or look for the twitter hashtag #digitalArchivesDay