milestones for the National Digital Newspaper Program

Today there was an exciting press event at the Newseum for the National Digital Newspaper Program, sponsored by the Library of Congress and the National Endowment for the Humanities. There was a great live demo, a video on digital production for the project from the University of Kentucky, and some nice speechmaking. The event promoted the milestone where the project surpassed 1,000,000 pages available at the Chronicling America site, the addition of seven new state partners, and the addition of images of illustrated newspaper supplements to the LoC Flickr Commons set (with more to come every month).

So far the AP has an article available, and there were representatives of other news outlets at the event. Check out the press release. Roy Tennant has a post that includes some of the technical specs supplied by my colleague Ed Summers. Ed and Dan Krech have done some great work to update the underlying application, improving the ingest and search functionality, adding the functionality that allows the site to be crawled, and exposing the data as RDF for a multitude of possibilities.

Edit: Here's the Washington Post article, and the official LoC blog posting.

New LC multimedia collection sharing initiatives

This is news ... The Library of Congress will begin sharing content from its vast video and audio collections on the YouTube and Apple iTunes web services as part of a continuing initiative to make its incomparable treasures more widely accessible to a broad audience. The new Library of Congress channels on each of the popular services will launch within the next few weeks.

...

The General Services Administration today also announced agreements with Flickr, YouTube, Vimeo and blip.tv that will allow other federal agencies to participate in new media while meeting legal requirements and the unique needs of government. GSA plans to negotiate agreements with other providers, and the Library will explore these new media services when they are appropriate to its mission and as resources permit.

Read the Press Release.

FDsys federal content management system

Via Open Access News, the FDsys (Federal Digital System) of the US Government Printing Office (GPO) has entered its public beta. FDsys is an advanced digital system that will enable GPO to manage Government information in a digital form, and enable GPO to manage information from all three branches of the U.S. Government.

For more detail, see Joab Jackson's article about it in Government Computer News, February 5, 2009. There are five major releases planned over the next three years.

open access to museum collections

Last Friday there was a post on Open Access News that Wake Forest University's Anthropology Museum had issued a press release about the launch of its online collections, supported by an IMLS grant.

I welcomed this news on many fronts -- there aren't enough ethnographic or archaeological collections online; the museum is using Re:discovery, a great product geared toward small museums; and I have a number of friends with ties to Wake Forest and I've visited Winston-Salem many times and have a fondness for the area.

What made me sit down to think about this for a few days was the passing description of this an an Open Access project.

I worked for many years in the museum community, and every museum that I ever worked for or consulted for wanted to make its collections available in one digital form or another. The Museum Computer Network was founded in 1967 to enable museums to automate their processes and convert collections records to digital form. Museums were among the earliest institutions to share their collections online in the mid 1990s. The University of California Museum of Paleontology had a web site in 1994. The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco brought their Thinker "imagebase" online in 1996 -- and they had volunteers assist with an early form of experimental user supplied subject metadata. e.g., proto-tagging. By 1997 the National Gallery of Art provided access to over 100,000 objects in its collection, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art experimented with converting print museum catalogs into freely available online publications.

Sure, there have been lengthy discourses about levels of access to the digital media surrogates and questions of rights and control of those new media assets, and there is some information about the acquisition of objects that's subject to privacy restrictions, but no museum wants to limit discovery of their collections -- they want to facilitate their collections' use in research and teaching.

I've just not heard it described as "open access" before.

I'm not saying that it isn't a sort of open access initiative -- it most obviously is -- but I just think of it as such a normal museum activity I don't categorize it in my mind as anything other than business as usual. Then it hit me -- for the past 15 years museums have been major players in the open access movement without necessarily always knowing it.

Labeling this an open access initiative re-contextualizes this core museum activity into a different realm -- one that I hope will make museum collections information more visible and reinforce the importance of all categories of open access content.

Registry of U.S. Government Publication Digitization Projects

I didn't know the Registry of U. S. Government Publication Digitization Projects existed:

"The Registry contains records for projects that include digitized copies of publications originating from the U.S. Government. It serves as a locator tool for publicly accessible collections of digitized U.S. Government publications; increases awareness of U.S. Government publication digitization projects that are planned, in progress, or completed; fosters collaboration for digitization projects; and provides models for future digitization projects."

The Registry has recently been updated, and they welcome additions. Institutions need to apply to contribute.

Harvard open access policy

I am thrilled about the Harvard open access mandate. The text is available in this PDF. Robert Dranton made a strong case in a Harvard Crimson article. Here's the article reporting the approval in the Crimson and a brief article in the NY Times. Peter Suber has an excellent post roundup, another roundup, and a post on responses from Library Academic newswire. I especially recommend Dorothea's comments to all.

NIH mandate questions

T. Scott Plutchak has a great post on questions that should be addressed at the January ARL meeting on the NIH public access policy. I understand that this is an invitation-only meeting, but I wish I could find some details about this meeting, whoi's going to attend, and what is going to be discussed. If it's on the ARL web site I can't find it. If someone can point me toward more info, I'd appreciate it. Since we don't yet have an IR in place, we have questions about compliance.

Cal Berkeley pilot to subsidize open access fees

Via OA Librarian, the U.C. Berkeley Research Impact Initiative (BRII) is launching an 18-month pilot program, to 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.

TheAtlantic.com

I was initially very excited by the announcement on BoingBoing that The Atlantic had opened its archive. I read the Editor's Note describing the decision. I followed the link to start my exploration.

It's a little misleading. The _site_ is now open to all. They have "Unbound" (web only) content and full issues back to 1995 open. But their other free content seems to be selected material. Some thing that I looked for are there (Vannevar Bush's "As We May Think"). I've seen other people's examples of known article with no results. There is still a "Premium Archive" for the full content going back to 1857.

Still, there's some great content. Try the search at http://www.theatlantic.com/a/search.mhtml