The National Archives of Australia developed and maintain Vroom – Virtual Reading Room (http://vrroom.naa.gov.au/). Vrroom is like many systems in that it provides access to archival collection records and digitized materials. To those, Vrroom has added educational and contextual materials for a number of the items. Also, items are presented together in groups with more educational context for the group of items; thus, people can learn more about specific things/people/etc as well as the larger context for those items in relation to other items all in context together.

From this description, Vrroom may seem like many educational websites. It is, but it is also an excellent example of policy needs can dictate technology (and the opposite should never be true; technology should not dictate policy) to provide needed supports that enable access. As a website, Vrroom enables access in expected ways. As a cultural heritage website, Vrroom enables access by supporting cultural heritage protections specifically by blurring thumbnail images of people and providing a warning before showing the full image and text. The warning states: “Warning. Indigenous Australians are advised that this document includes images or names of people now deceased.” (example). Technologically, this is simple. While simple, it’s also very important because enabling access means more than simply putting materials online.

Enabling access means ensuring materials can be found (outreach, promotion, search engine optimization, etc) and that the materials are usable (usability studies, help documents, etc), as well as ensuring that the materials can be made sense of and used (contextual supports, educational guides, exhibits, cultural heritage supports, etc).  Vrroom is an excellent resource for archival research and teaching, as well as being an excellent example of how cultural heritage institutions support access and what supporting access really means.

UNESCO’s Global Open Access Portal (GOAP) lists many important Open Access initiatives and programs. One of those listed is the Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC), for which the University of Florida is the technical partner. There’s more on GOAP below and more on dLOC on the dLOC site (www.dloc.com), which is a cooperative digital library for resources from and about the Caribbean and circum-Caribbean. dLOC provides open access to digitized versions of Caribbean cultural, historical and research materials currently held in archives, libraries, and private collections.

Global Open Access Portal

Features of GOAP

The portal provides a high-level view of the Open Access environment and is not designed to provide an inventory of repositories, OA journals, and other associated initiatives. The primary target audience includes policy-makers, advocates, and delegates from national, regional, and non-governmental organizations as well as members of the OA community. The Portal aims at being the first destination of information seekers on OA. It is also supplemented by a Community of Practice through the exiting online platform “WSIS Knowledge Communities”. The GOAP is a knowledge portal that has the following features:

• Country-wise distilled knowledge on the status of Open Access
• Key organizations engaged in OA in Member States
• Thematic focus areas of OA
• Important publications on OA coming from different regions of the world
• Critical assessment of major barriers to OA in each country
• Potential of OA in UNESCO Member States
• Funding and deposit mandates
• Links to OA initiatives in the world

The University of Florida Libraries joined the HathiTrust Digital Library to expand digital access to orphan works, as announced July 14, 2011. As of July 19, 2011, the Orphan works list from the University of Michigan is now live. Much of the news on HathiTrust is focused on access to the digitized materials. That’s important and great work, but the orphan works list and clearing rights to make them accessible is enormously important work. Even if HathiTrust was only using the digitized materials as part of the components to power the orphan works list, it would be an excellent use of resources.

Libraries and cultural heritage institutions are always working to find new ways to enable access to more materials for more people. Melissa Levine, the University of Michigan’s lead copyright officer, succinctly explains the importance of the orphan works list and processing done by partners in HathiTrust, stating: “Sharing these orphan works, once we’ve diligently searched for copyright holders, is integral to the mission of the Library.”From Levine’s sentence, the Library could be the University of Michigan Library of the Library as an ideal and concept. Her statement is true for both.

Developing the orphan works list as a step towards great access is essential and exemplary work. I’m thrilled to read each new press release on new members signing up to support HathiTrust’s work on access to orphan works, and proud to be with an institution that has already done so.

“Why Linked Data is Not Enough for Scientists” is an excellent article dealing with the very real and very complicated factors, over and above access, that impact data reuse.

“Abstract—Scienti?c data stands to represent a signi?cant portion of the linked open data cloud and science itself stands to bene?t from the data fusion capability that this will afford. However, simply publishing linked data into the cloud does not necessarily meet the requirements of reuse. Publishing has requirements of provenance, quality, credit, attribution, methods in order to provide the reproducibility that allows validation of results. In this paper we make the case for a scienti?c data publication model on top of linked data and introduce the notion of Research Objects as ?rst class citizens for sharing and publishing.”

Read the whole article here. >

International Publishers and Librarians Agree to Enhance The Debate on Open Access

Geneva/The Hague 20 May 2009 – For immediate release

A joint statement released today by the International Publishers Association, the International Association of Scientific Technical and Medical (STM) Publishers, and the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) calls for a more rational, evidence based debate on open access. It encourages experimentation and piloting of new concepts and ideas, whilst acknowledging that the differences in the different academic disciplines and publishing traditions may lead to differentiated approaches and business models in support of authors.

The joint statement is intended to move the oftentimes heated and polarised debate about open access as a model for scholarly communication towards a more measured and nuanced discourse.

Says IPA President Herman P. Spruijt “The debate about open access is important and publishers welcome it. Publishing is never at a standstill and we should not fear change. Now that more experience has been gained with open access publishing and now that data is available on its success, the open access debate should be able to move away from emotional accusations and oversimplification. Our discussions with IFLA on this topic are always spirited, but have become more insightful and less polarised as we moved towards facts, evidence and differentiated arguments. There is a lesson here to be learned for the public debate on this issue.”

Says IFLA Working Group co-chairman Ingrid Parent: “IFLA is pleased to announce the joint declaration on open access with IPA. This statement shows that both our associations share the important objective of providing the broadest possible access to information. IFLA and IPA believe publishers and librarians have a lot to gain by supporting innovation, experimentation and pilot projects in developing open access to scholarly publications.”

Notes for Editors:
The full text of the statement is available here.

More about IPA:
The International Publishers Association (IPA) is an international industry federation representing all aspects of book and journal publishing. Established in 1896, IPA’s mission is to promote and protect publishing and to raise awareness for publishing as a force for economic, cultural and political development. Around the world IPA actively fights against censorship and promotes copyright, literacy and freedom to publish.

More about IFLA:
The International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) is the leading international body representing the interests of library and information services and their users. It is the global voice of the library and information profession. IFLA promotes the principles of freedom of access to information, ideas and works of imagination and freedom of expression. The delivery of high quality and equitable library and information services helps guarantee that access and improve the social, educational, cultural, democratic and economic well-being of those communities and organizations libraries serve. IFLA has 1600 Members in approximately 150 countries around the world.

The American Historical Association has a recent blog post over the problems caused by the lack of access to certain newspapers during transition from “Paper of Record” to Google’s news archives. The blog post notes:

Regrettably, this proves yet again Roy Rosenzweig’s warning to the profession six years ago about the “the fragility of evidence in the digital era.” While it may be beyond our capacity to adjust copyright laws and the behavior of large corporations (however well meaning), as a profession we can and perhaps should develop new habits for working with digital materials—by copying down information when we see it online, and not becoming overly dependent on any one data source or having illusions about its permanence.

Seeing the problems from the Paper of Record transitioning to Google as a call to “develop new habits for working with digital materials—by copying down information when we see it online, and not becoming overly dependent on any one data source or having illusions about its permanence,” is essentially a call to develop personal copies of existing archives and it’s a poor solution to the larger problem.*

In this particular instance, there are several concerns related to technology, trust, and the public good. For technology, the transition is a normal instance of downtime (which is still normal for any technology related transition, and its normalcy is why so many of the tech folks were amazed at the speed and elegance of the most recent Whitehouse.gov transition that overcame the normal problems). However, technical issues are a parallel to the very real potential for loss if digital records are not supported and the very real problem of lost access if digital records are not supported as a need for the public good. One of the respondents to the blog post notes that perhaps newspapers should be moved into the public domain, which is a concern because copyright is often an obstacle to access, but even papers in the public domain still need financial support to ensure access to them whether in digital or physical form.

Even after covering the initial costs for requesting permissions, digitization, and hosting, new costs emerge. For instance, the University of Florida Digital Collections (UFDC) has grown by leaps and bounds in the past two years and now has over 664,269 pages of Florida newspapers alone. These newspapers include historic newspapers and current newspapers. The Digital Library Center has successfully requested and received permissions to digitize over 60 current newspapers, newspapers that in many cases were microfilmed and that are now being digitized for online access and longterm preservation (and we’re also slowly digitizing earlier years from the microfilm and will continue to do so until all of the microfilm holdings are digital).

All of the collections in UFDC, including the Florida Digital Newspaper Library, continue to grow and that growth encourages a growth in usage that, in turn, requires UFDC have more resources to support the higher usage rates. In March 2009, UFDC had 618,148 unique hits and that many hits along with the knowledge that the hits are only going to increase means that the UF Libraries have to implement additional programming to ensure the server memory usage can handle the increased load without problems for users. Other digital collections will have similar needs as they grow, and that will require support from users and the public.

Rather than attempting to copy existing resources (which would reduce the resource to a single item photocopy instead of a point within the full context and content of the database), the emphasis should be on building and supporting trusted digital archives to ensure access. The Florida Digital Newspaper Library presents one of many models, housing historic and current newspapers for open online access for all in perpetuity (and it was luck enough to build the digital model from that same model for microfilm, allowing it to utilize the existing support infrastructure that was already available).  Many archives already offer the same promises for access in perpetuity, albeit for physical access to items not yet digital, and those archives will need support to ensure they place the same importance on access and preservation for their digital collections.

Digital collections and archives need support for new and existing digital collections to build and sustain the infrastructure needed to ensure open access in perpetuity. As La Asociación Mexicana de Historia Económica (AMHE) explains in their protest to the lack of access to Mexican newspapers, the newspapers on Paper of Record are essential reference materials for research. The removal of access–even if only a delay for technical reasons–does harm. The public needs to have trust in their archival institutions, and ensuring access to physical and digital archives is a necessity to build and maintain that trust.

*{Copying single items or even attempting to copy masses of materials without infrastructure is still like photocopying. The materials would not be structured (or minimally so) and would not benefit from organization and identification. If a physical archive was in danger and photocopying was the only option, then photocopying the resource makes sense. This is not to say that photocopying is a bad solution in all cases–researches regularly photocopy materials from archives and those photocopies are then copied and shared and, in some cases, those are the only available copies for access. Photocopying is a poor solution to the overall problem, but for researchers who need access to the materials right now and who cannot wait for a new trusted archive to built over years of advocacy and funding, photocopying style solutions are wise temporary options. Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine maintains copies of many web sites and pages for just this reason.}

President Barack Obama has already begun implementing important changes, including restoring public access to presidential records by revoking the Bush administration’s Executive Order 13233. The text for President Obama’s executive order is available on the Whitehouse website.

Before the Internet made information access faster and easier (and it continues to improve), libraries were already mass-sharing information through interlibrary loan. Interlibrary loan is such a simple concept–libraries share books with other libraries–but it was and continues to be carefully planned and implemented to ensure availability and access through cooperative collection plans, lists of records and methods for disseminating them (National Union Catalog, publishing bibliographies of what books were where), and agreements to make sure users know about the materials in order to request them.

Thanks to interlibrary loan systems everywhere for making information available and accessible. Making information findable, available, and usable is always something to celebrate, especially when they’ve been doing it for so very long. The original interlibrary groups have expanded, merged, and reformed, but some carry on under the same names like Florida’s interlibrary loan network, FLIN (The Florida Library Information Network) which turns 40 this year. Over those years FLIN has shared 6.6 million items, or 167,000 items a year! Congratulations to FLIN! And, congratulations to all of the interlibrary loan networks celebrating another year or another decade of service!

The Internet is now the main information source for many, but making the Internet really work (with information on where to find information, the information wanted) begins with the infrastructure for information access. Information architectures, systems for finding and accessing information, and making sure that information is in the best form possible has been a long tradition within interlibrary loan and with the subsequent technologies it employed, including facsimiles, microfilm (or microphotography), electronic, and digital. Without the systems for interlibrary loan, we wouldn’t be able to access many books in print and our digital-only systems wouldn’t have had the benefit of the painstaking work done through postal/train/car/horse/shoe/sneaker/net of interlibrary loan.

As this year comes to a close, thanks to all of the interlibrary loan services who have shared so much!

I’ve stolen the title of this post from Shawn Rider’s article “Why Nintendo Gets It” because the title explains the whole point of this post and because of the parallels between Google and Nintendo. Nintendo gets it because they understand that games are about playability more so than technological innovation and because they understand that innovation can be  evolutionary or sustaining as well as disruptive. Evolutionary or sustaining innovations build incrementally on existing structures, but disruptive innovation changes the whole landscape.

The 8-bit NES to the Super Nintendo was an evolutionary or sustaining innovation, largely technological, but that technology enabled longer and deeper games. The current console gaming market changed in response to the Sony PlayStation 2 both because of the system and because so many had grown up with games. In the last console release, however, Nintendo showed how they got it by releasing the Wii and inviting all non-players and casual players to get into gaming and inviting existing players to learn to play in new ways. Nintendo used a disruptive technology to their advantage–investing in its development instead of in the best graphics card on the market and instead of pushing an ever-increasing polygon count, they focused on playability and leveraged it for an even greater market share and for a community of Nintendo followers.

Google announced yesterday that they’re scanning microfilm to digitize historical newspapers, which is just the latest of their work to get more content online. This could be seen as an evolutionary innovation, where Google has digitized books and now they’re working on newspapers. However, Google gets it because they make interoperable and open content. Google is digitizing whatever it can and indexing whatever it can to ensure that it has access to the most data for use by Google’s search engine and for Google’s paid services like advertisements. Google isn’t simply adding newspapers into this collective vat of information, though. Google has shown time and again that they’re adding and indexing content so that it can be faceted–for searching only by news or only by places with mapped locations–and that they’re allowing those facets to be connected together in context.

Placing content in context is an enormous task, especially when context means historical, spatial, cultural, social, and personal. Some of the existing components in traditional library records (if complete) can be extended and mined to create a basic infrastructure that can then be further enhanced, mined, and adapted for further use and this is what Google has done. This enhancement, mining, and adaptation are also what UF’s Digital Library Center has been doing for several years beginning in earnest with the Ephemeral Cities Project. The Ephemeral Cities Project began before I came to the Digital Library Center and its goals are only now beginning to be fully realized with the Map It! feature for items in the UF Digital Collections, enabled through KML becoming an Open Standard in 2008 leading to our use of the Google Maps API.

We’ve also been digitizing newspapers for the Florida Digital Newspaper Library and the Caribbean Newspaper Imaging Project, the same reasons Google is interested. Newspapers tell the stories of history in the making, connecting the current social and personal concerns to the larger cultural and historical movements and eras, and newspapers tell the local stories of their areas, along with the larger national and international stories of their days.

What surprises me most is not that Google gets it in terms of seeing the immediate need and the long tail future goals for massive amounts of interoperable data, but that there are so many people who got it and were working toward so much earlier than I’d have expected. In UF’s Digital Library Center alone, Director Erich Kesse first proposed the Ephemeral Cities Project in 2003 and Mark Sullivan (our wonderful programmer at the time who’s still with us as well) began developing the digital library software for users to access such data and for the digital library staff to most easily create the necessary metadata within the digitization process. I can’t say that I got it in 2003, but I’m glad so many others did so that the infrastructure is in place to help support the wonderful projects to come.

I’m also extremely happy that Google gets it in particular because they have the business infrastructure to make the incredibly tedious and expensive work of digitizing materials in context affordable and sustainable through ads which have a return on investment value. Universities return investments from society in the form of knowledge, a more educated and capable workforce and community, and through the infrastructure necessary for other advances, but in difficult economic times the investment itself becomes more difficult. Luckily for all, Google gets the full context of their investment and knows that digitized materials have more value when they can easily be used, thus ensuring greater usage. The smart business plan for Google requires keeping materials open and usable by as many others as possible,making it good business for Google to do what’s already in the public interest. Of course, Google is facing monopolistic concerns and smart business models can go bad with changes in leadership, so its smartest public institutions like universities to continue getting it and ensuring that the digital revolution brings as many benefits as it can for accessing, using, and understanding information while building the infrastructure for the next innovations be they sustaining or disruptive.

Last week, UC Santa Barbara announced that they received a massive collection of aerial photography, valued at $14.3 Million, from Pacific Western Aerial Surveys of Santa Barbara. The collection includes more than 500,000 aerial images of 65 major metropolitan areas in the United States at the turn of the 21st Century (1999-2002). This is really amazing, especially so because UCSB Map & Imagery Library is home to the Alexandria Digital Library (ADL), so these materials will be preserved and accessible in the future.