MLA’s Profession 2011 is out and it includes six articles within the section on “Evaluating Digital Scholarship.” All of the articles within “Evaluating Digital Scholarship” are openly available (no library subscription needed), excellent, timely, and needed.

It is critically important for academia to engage and grapple with concerns over the evaluation of digital scholarship. This work is specifically needed to develop the necessary supports for evaluating digital scholarship as scholarship that “counts” for promotion and tenure. The official evaluation is difficult because traditional reporting separates work into three categories: research, teaching (or core job duties in some instances, as it is for me as a tenure-track librarian), and service. Digital scholarship is often public scholarship (and I would argue that it should always be the case) and is often collaborative, and so digital scholarship often crosses traditional evaluation categories. This is generally the case for a good deal of academic work, but not necessarily to the same extent or degree of complexity. The evaluation and measurement of digital scholarship is needed because digital/public scholarship is needed for inquiry into existing research areas, increased impact and benefit from research, and increased visibility and connection of scholarship with the public.

The articles in the section on “Evaluating Digital Scholarship” in Profession 2011 are:

• Introduction
  Susan Schreibman, Laura Mandell, and Stephen Olsen
  Full text (PDF)
• Engaging Digital Scholarship: Thoughts on Evaluating Multimedia Scholarship
  Steve Anderson and Tara McPherson
  Full text (PDF)
• On the Evaluation of Digital Media as Scholarship
  Geoffrey Rockwell
  Full text (PDF)
• Where Credit Is Due: Preconditions for the Evaluation of Collaborative Digital Scholarship
  Bethany Nowviskie
  Full text (PDF)
• On Creating a Usable Future
  Jerome McGann
  Full text (PDF)
• Peer Review, Judgment, and Reading
  Kathleen Fitzpatrick
  Full text (PDF)

Europeana has released their second whitepaper, Whitepaper No. 2: The Problem of the Yellow Milkmaid. The whitepaper begins with an excellent example, that of the yellow Milkmaid:

‘The Milkmaid’, one of Johannes Vermeer’s most famous pieces, depicts a scene of a woman quietly pouring milk into a bowl. During a survey the Rijksmuseum discovered that there were over 10,000 copies of the image on the internet—mostly poor, yellowish reproductions. As a result of all of these low-quality copies on the web, according to the Rijksmuseum, “people simply didn’t believe the postcards in our museum shop were showing the original painting. This was the trigger for us to put high-resolution images of the original work with open metadata on the web ourselves. Opening up our data is our best defence against the ‘yellow Milkmaid’.”

From the example comes the subtitle for the paper: “A Business Model Perspective on Open Metadata.” The problem, however, is far greater than a “business model perspective on open metadata” seems to suggest. If not truly present online (meaning accessible, connected, and information rich), cultural heritage institutions risk being erased in the deluge of information from other sources that make important concerns like authenticity and expertise seem less important in the face of sheer quantity.

The problem of the yellow milkmaid is an argument from a business perspective in terms of the core value propositions for cultural heritage institutions and their very reasons for existing. The problem of the yellow milkmaid is an excellent and memorable example of the need for cultural heritage institutions to engage with technologies in ways that support their core value propositions and their roles in society. The whitepaper as a whole is excellent and worth the read for its arguments on open data as well as for application to larger concerns.

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.

University of Florida journals can now easily take advantage of hosting using Open Journal Systems (OJS).  The Florida Center for Library Automation (FCLA) has a hosted instance of OJS. FCLA hosts and supports OJS for UF and all State Universities. Several journals are already using OJS and all can be seen from the main OJS page: http://journals.fcla.edu.

Open Journal Systems is open source journal management and publishing software developed, supported, and freely distributed by the Public Knowledge Project under the GNU General Public License. The system facilitates the entire peer review and publishing process, and the work flow support is shown here.

Many have already started using OJS because it’s simple to set up and run. However, sustainability and preservation can be a major concern if there isn’t sufficient support outside of the journals themselves. Many libraries offer journal hosting to ensure ongoing support and preservation of academic materials. UF journals can now take advantage of just that support through the libraries. As an added benefit, FCLA has designed an automated archiving process to ensure that all of the OJS journals they host are also archived to the Florida Digital Archive.

Faculty interested in using OJS can contact their subject specialists or the UF Digital Collections group for assistance. For more on OJS, there are many tutorials already available and many journals already using OJS. Reviewing the journals already powered by OJS is extremely useful in seeing the variety of design and layout options that can be done.

The UF Digital Collections include Daniel Defoe’s “Robinson Crusoe” & the Robinsonades, a digital collection of various editions of Robinson Crusoe and similarly themed texts such as the popular The Swiss Family Robinson, all from the Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature. The collection is an excellent resource for scholars and Digital Defoe is an excellent scholarly journal that has just announced the publication of it’s second issue, as detailed below.

News Announcement:

We are excited to announce the publication of the second issue of Digital Defoe: Studies in Defoe & His Contemporaries, the peer-reviewed online journal of the Defoe Society that celebrates the works and culture of the late seventeenth to mid-eighteenth century. You can now access the second issue of the journal at http://www.english.ilstu.edu/digitaldefoe.

This issue, “Strangers, Gods, & Monsters,” features scholarly and pedagogical articles, two book reviews, a note, and recent dissertation and conference paper abstracts. We are also very pleased to feature a special online collection of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century critical writings on Defoe researched and compiled by Penny Pritchard.  The articles, book reviews and note are as follows:

Geoffrey Sill, “Defoe and the Birth of the Imaginary”
Maximillian E. Novak, “Defoe’s Spirits, Apparitions and the Occult”
Joshua Grasso, “The Providence of Pirates: Defoe and the ‘True-Bred Merchant’”
Scott Nowka, “Building the Wall: Crusoe and the Other”
Allison Muri, “Digital Natives or Digital Strangers’ Teaching the Eighteenth Century Online, from Ctrl-F to Digital Editions”
George E. Haggerty’s Review of Defoe’s Writing and Manliness: Contrary Men, by Stephen H. Gregg
Gabriel Cervantes’s Review of A Critical Study of Daniel Defoe’s Verse: Recovering the Neglected Corpus of His Poetic Work, by Andreas K. E. Mueller
Patrick Tonks’s Note on “Robinson Crusoe’s Brazilian Expedition and The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database”

Each work is accompanied by a downloadable and print-friendly PDF.  On the site you will also find our submission guidelines and copyright information, an introduction to our editorial board, announcements of upcoming events, and the CFP for our third issue, “Eighteenth-Century Studies and the State of Education,” with a submission deadline of April 1, 2011 (please send submissions as Word .doc files following MLA citation to Katherine Ellison at keellis@ilstu.edu and Holly Faith Nelson at hnelson@sfu.ca). We welcome multimedia submissions that push the boundaries of scholarship in our field as well as more traditional essays, reviews, notes, and dissertation and conference abstracts.

Europeana has released their Public Domain Charter. The document seeks not be be prescriptive, but to foster discussion and innovation to aid cultural heritage institutions in meeting their core missions with costly digitization as a new and growing part of that mission.

This is one of the best documents I’ve seen in terms of explaining the necessity and difficulty of balancing support for open and free public access with the costs of creating and maintaining digitized content.

See the excerpt from the Public Domain Charter below, with my bolding of significant portions for emphasis:

This Charter is a policy statement [...]

[T]he transformation from guardians of analogue collections to providers of digital services places enormous challenges on these organisations. Creating and maintaining digital collections is expensive; the cultural heritage sector may lack resources for this new responsibility. Government sponsors may encourage or require organisations to generate income by way of licensing content to a wide variety of commercial users.

Public-Private Partnerships have become one option for funding large scale digitisation efforts. Commercial content aggregators pay for the digitisation in exchange for privileged access to the digitised collections. These activities are seen as a reason for attempting to exercise as much control as possible over digital reproductions of Public Domain works. Organisations are claiming exclusive rights in digitised versions of Public Domain works and are entering into exclusive relationships with commercial partners that hinder free access.

When this exclusivity locks down digital content and inhibits access and re-use by teachers, innovators and citizens, memory organisations may be compromising their core mission and undermining their relationship with their users. Works that are in the Public Domain in analogue form must remain freely available in digital form and digitisation of such works must lead to increased access by the public instead of new restrictions. To remain relevant in the digital age, cultural and scientific heritage organisations must strive to increase access to our shared knowledge and culture by being the primary points of access to the works that they have in their collections. Value-added services can be developed around content without the need to claim exclusive rights over works that have been in the Public Domain in analogue form.

Ultimately, at a political and policy-making level, it is in the interests of society that Public Domain knowledge and information be digitised. Once digitised, it should be freely available to creative enterprise, R&D innovators and technical entrepreneurs to use as the basis for generating ideas and applications yet to be envisaged.

The aim of this Charter is to give a clear signal to content providers, policy makers and the public that Europeana and the Europeana Foundation believe in and wish to strengthen the concept of the Public Domain in the digitised world.
(direct link to English online version of the Charter)

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.

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!