From the press release:

"Washington DC-The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) has published Processing Decisions for Manuscripts & Archives, SPEC Kit 314, which examines the current policies and practices for processing manuscript and archival collections in Special Collections. This SPEC Kit is organized around four general areas: personnel, job responsibilities, and training; processing policies, procedures, and priorities; impacts on processing decisions; and management tools.

...

The survey responses speak to the classic issues of the management of processing: how to process collections efficiently but yet adequately so that collections are usable with minimal meditation; how to balance demands for more description and item-level cataloging (digitization) with initiatives to make more collections available ("more product, less processing"); and how to manage staff effectively and to assess processing progress."

January 18-22, 2010
Boston, Massachusetts
ALA Hotel TBD and 90 Mt. Auburn, Harvard University

"The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) has published the ARL Annual Salary Survey 2008-2009, which analyzes salary data for all professional staff working in the 123 ARL member libraries during 2008-2009. Data are reported for 10,148 professional staff in the 113 university ARL libraries and for 3,748 professional staff in the 10 non-university ARL libraries.

The 2008-2009 data show that ARL librarians' salaries did not keep pace with inflation. The combined median professional salary in US and Canadian ARL university libraries was $64,823--a 3.8% increase from the previous year. Over the same period, the Consumer Price Index rose 5.6% in the US and 3.4% in Canada."

Washington, DC--The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) has published the ARL Preservation Statistics 2006-2007, a compilation of data on the levels of preservation efforts in ARL libraries throughout North America.

Highlights from the report suggest that the patterns of preservation activities may be changing, with digitization increasing and microfilming declining. 112 ARL libraries reported expenditures of $108,278,519 in 2006-2007 with a total 1,149.13 library-wide preservation staff engaged in preservation duties.

ALA, ARL Release Guidance on Digital Delivery of Content to Classrooms
WASHINGTON, D.C. - The American Library Association (ALA) and the Association of Research Libraries have released a document titled "Performance of or Showing Films in the Classroom" to provide guidance on digital delivery of content to the "physical" classroom.

According to the associations, the Technology, Education and Copyright Harmonization (TEACH) Act enacted in 2002 does not provide librarians clarity on copyright exceptions for the digital delivery of content for distance education. Thus, understanding what is permitted under the TEACH Act in combination with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and existing exceptions, such as fair use, is becoming increasingly confusing to many practitioners.

The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) are co-hosting a Forum, "An Age of Discovery: Distinctive Collections in the Digital Age." It will be held October 15-16, 2009, in Washington, DC.

The Forum builds on the work of the ARL Special Collections Working Group [PDF]. The goal is to focus attention on opportunities available in the digital environment for leveraging the strengths of special collections, making them more widely accessible. The co-hosts seek to bring together librarians, archivists, and others with responsibilities for stewarding special and distinctive resources, and to identify strategies for advancing this goal

Washington DC--The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) Special Collections Working Group has launched a blog on "Transformative Issues in Special Collections" to accompany the Web conference scheduled for tomorrow, July 7, 1:00-2:00 p.m. EDT.

The blog is an opportunity for the special collections community to continue the conversation after the event on Tuesday. The discussion will be moderated by ARL Visiting Program Officer Lisa Carter, Head of the Special Collections Research Center, North Carolina State University Libraries. Members of the community who have read the recent ARL Special Collections Working Group report or who attend the Web conference and have feedback about transformative issues for special collections are encouraged to participate in the blog.

Washington DC--The American Library Association (ALA), the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), and the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) announce the release of "A Guide for the Perplexed Part II: The Amended Google-Michigan Agreement." The amendment represents important additions and this guide provides an overview to help librarians better understand the revised terms.

"The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) Board of Directors voted in support of a resolution introduced by its Scholarly Communication Steering Committee to strongly encourage ARL member libraries to refrain from signing agreements with publishers or vendors, either individually or through consortia, that include nondisclosure or confidentiality clauses. In addition, the Board encourages ARL members to share upon request from other libraries information contained in these agreements (save for trade secrets or proprietary technical details) for licensing content, licensing software or other tools, and for digitization contracts with third-party vendors."

The report by ARL Visiting Program Officer Lars Meyer, "Safeguarding Collections at the Dawn of the 21st Century: Describing Roles & Measuring Contemporary Preservation Activities in ARL Libraries," responds to a recommendation of the 2006 ARL Task Force on the Future of Preservation in ARL Libraries. The task force encouraged ARL to conduct a high-level investigation of the range and balance of preservation activities represented among the ARL membership. Meyer's report is a thoughtful and thorough qualitative examination of how research libraries' preservation activities are evolving and expanding in the 21st century. He not only considered activities traditionally captured by ARL's Preservation Statistics, but also a host of emerging activities largely, but not exclusively, centered on developing digital collections and involving collaborative efforts.

Washington DC--The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) Working Group on Special Collections, formed in 2007, has released a discussion report that identifies key issues in the management and exposure of special collections material in the 21st century.

The report uses a broad definition of "special collections," which encompasses distinctive material in all media and attendant library services. The group's main focus was on 19th- and 20th-century materials, including emerging digital materials and media, but most of the report applies with equal force to collecting and caring for materials from previous centuries. While the report focuses on special collections in North American research libraries, it has potential application more broadly.

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The report includes overviews of and recommendations in three areas:

1. Collecting Carefully, with Regard to Costs, and Ethical and Legal Concerns
2. Ensuring Discovery and Access
3. The Challenge of Born-Digital Collections

Ad Hoc Task Force to Review the Proposed OCLC Policy for Use and Transfer of WorldCat Records
Final Report to the ARL Board

January 30, 2009

Washington DC-The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and the American Library Association (ALA) have released "A Guide for the Perplexed: Libraries and the Google Library Project Settlement," by Jonathan Band, JD.

The guide is designed to help the library community better understand the terms and conditions of the recent settlement agreement between Google, the Authors Guild, and the Association of American Publishers concerning Google's scanning of copyrighted works. Band notes that the settlement is extremely complex and presents significant challenges and opportunities to libraries. The guide outlines and simplifies the settlement's provisions, with special emphasis on the provisions that apply directly to libraries.

Interesting analysis of how the courts applied fair use to the Harry Potter Lexicon case.   This was not just a case of the deep pockets winning.   The details of the ruling show it as a win for fair use.  

What Jangle (Just another generic library environment) is an experiment with middleware for library applications. If you build, use, manage or just want simple access to a library system, Jangle could be for you. Why The aim of the Jangle project is to provide a free, easy to use framework for building web services for LMSs/ILSs by exposing resources through the Atom Publishing Protocol. The goal of Jangle is to develop conventions intercommunication between the backend library services, such as ILSes and other applications and the AtomPub server (known as the Jangle "core"). By leveraging AtomPub, it eliminates the need to develop an entirely new API and allows developers to use existing client library and knowledge to easily integrate library data into new places.

Joomla is an award-winning content management system (CMS), which enables you to build Web sites and powerful online applications. Many aspects, including its ease-of-use and extensibility, have made Joomla the most popular Web site software available. Best of all, Joomla is an open source solution that is freely available to everyone.

HUBzero allows you to create dynamic web sites that connect a community in scientific research and educational activities. HUBzero sites combine powerful Web 2.0 concepts with a middleware that provides instant access to interactive simulation tools. These tools are not just Java applets, but real research codes that can access TeraGrid, the Open Science Grid, and other national Grid computing resources for extra cycles. HUBzero was created by researchers at Purdue University in conjunction with the NSF-sponsored Network for Computational Nanotechnology. The technology was originally developed to support nanoHUB.org, a national resource for nanotechnology simulation. It has since been extended to create science gateways for other scientific domains.

The Rappture toolkit provides the basic infrastructure for a large class of scientific applications, letting scientists focus on their core algorithm when developing new simulators. Here's a demo of a Rappture interface for a Matlab script which simulates conduction through a molecule. This interface was generated automatically by Rappture, based on a description of the tool inputs and outputs. Rappture also makes it easy to put a friendly, interactive interface on existing legacy applications, without having to rewrite the code. For example, the SPICE circuit simulator has been around since 1972. You can now run SPICE on the nanoHUB via a simple Rappture interface. This shows the power of taking a powerful, batch-processing tool, and making it more interactive and accessible.

The objectives of the MEDICUS project are to promote transparent and non-proprietary solutions for medical image processing, and medical image and data sharing between heath care providers, physicians, and researchers in the life sciences. The Globus Toolkit provides the necessary architecture platform and standards to engage in this diverse and difficult field. As such it provides a vendor independent solution to efficiently communicate medical images and image outcome at various levels in the healthcare enterprise. This project will hopefully excel imaging research and health care by delivering a Globus Toolkit compliant extension to efficiently communicate medical image, diagnosis, and related data between health care providers in Grid environments.

Beyond Being There: A Blueprint for Advancing the Design, Development, and Evaluation of Virtual Organizations [PDF 3.3 MB]

Goals

* Conduct an analysis of previous and current models for sustainable digital preservation, and identify current best practices among existing collections, repositories and analogous enterprises.

* Develop a set of economically viable recommendations to catalyze the development of reliable strategies for the preservation of digital information.

* Provide a research agenda to organize and motivate future work in the specific area of economic sustainability of digital information.

The Data Audit Framework (DAF) provides organisations with the means to identify, locate, describe and assess how they are managing their research data assets. DAF combines a set of methods with an online tool to enable data auditors to gather this information. DAF will help ensure that research data produced in UK Higher Education Institutions is preserved and remains accessible in the long term.

The Digital Curation Centre (DCC) and DigitalPreservationEurope (DPE) are delighted to announce the release of the Digital Repository Audit Method Based on Risk Assessment (DRAMBORA) toolkit. This toolkit is intended to facilitate internal audit by providing repository administrators with a means to assess their capabilities, identify their weaknesses, and recognise their strengths. Digital repositories are still in their infancy and this model is designed to be responsive to the rapidly developing landscape. The development of the toolkit follows a concentrated period of repository pilot audits undertaken by the DCC, conducted at a diverse range of organisations including national libraries, scientific data centres and cultural and heritage data archives.

SKOS is an area of work developing specifications and standards to support the use of knowledge organization systems (KOS) such as thesauri, classification schemes, subject heading systems and taxonomies within the framework of the Semantic Web. SKOS & RDF SKOS provides a standard way to represent knowledge organization systems using the Resource Description Framework (RDF). Encoding this information in RDF allows it to be passed between computer applications in an interoperable way. Using RDF also allows knowledge organization systems to be used in distributed, decentralised metadata applications. Decentralised metadata is becoming a typical scenario, where service providers want to add value to metadata harvested from multiple sources.

A clearinghouse for ideas, news, and resources in support of citizen science-- partnerships between volunteers and scientists that answer real-world questions. managed by cornell

Scientists in a variety of disciplines (e.g., biology, ecology, astronomy) need access to scientific data and flexible means for executing complex analyses on those data. Such analyses can be captured as 'scientific workflows' in which the flow of data from one analytical step to another is captured in a formal workflow language. The Kepler project's overall goal is to produce an open-source scientific workflow system that allows scientists to design scientific workflows and execute them efficiently using emerging Grid-based approaches to distributed computation. Kepler is based on the Ptolemy II system for heterogeneous, concurrent modeling and design. Ptolemy II was developed by the members of the Ptolemy project at UC Berkeley. Although not originally intended for scientific workflows, it provides a mature platform for building and executing workflows, and supports multiple models of computation.

Metacat is a flexible metadata database. It utilizes XML as a common syntax for representing the large number of metadata content standards that are relevant to ecology. Thus, Metacat is a generic XML database that allows storage, query, and retrieval of arbitrary XML documents without prior knowledge of the XML schema.

The Metacat database models XML documents as a DOM tree, basically decomposing the nodes of the XML document and storing the node data as a series of records in a relational database via a JDBC connection. At this point, only Oracle and PostgreSQL have been tested as a backend databases, but we have avoided RDBMS specific features in order to maintain portability to other relational databases.

Metacat is implemented as a Java Servlet, and so communicates using basic HTTP protocol semantics. The figure below shows the basic structure of the Metacat architecture. A well defined interface for inserting, updating, deleting, querying, and transforming (using XSL) XML documents is presented. We would like to add the DOM API as an alternative supported mechanism for interacting with Metacat, but have not yet implemented this functionality.

ARL has published a book and Web site profiling selected rare and special collections in major research libraries of North America, Celebrating Research: Rare and Special Collections from the Membership of the Association of Research Libraries.Celebrating Research book cover

The compendium is a sampling of the abundance and variety of collections available for use. Special collections have been broadly construed to encompass distinctive, rare and unique, emerging media, born-digital, digitized, uncommon, non-standard, primary, and heritage materials.

Celebrating Research includes 118 collection profiles, each from a different ARL member library."

This SPEC survey investigated how metadata is implemented in ARL member libraries: which staff are creating metadata and for what kinds of digital objects, what schemas and tools they use to create and manage metadata, what skills metadata staff need and how they acquire them, and the organizational changes and challenges that metadata has brought to libraries."

"With digital information forming a growing share of the cultural record-joining a variety of analog formats-a new level of attention needs to be focused on preservation strategies. Research libraries must continue to invest in local preservation activities while increasingly engaging in collaborative preservation activities as well."

Survey to Identify Common Interests in Unprocessed Collections, 2004

8/21/07:  search uinterface to survey not working