Research Infrastructure
Library and Information Center
Rowland Institute at Harvard
Library News & Notes -- Archive
November 28, 2003
Internet Sites of the Week
Digital Archives for Science and Engineering Resources (DASER)
The American Society for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T)
hosted a summit at MIT this past weekend which brought together
scientists, information technology specialists and librarians, among
others, for a series of talks on developments in the preservation of
digital information.
Some of the more visible initiatives include institutional repositories
such as MIT’s DSpace (), University of California’s
eScholarship (), and
Caltech’s Collection of Open Digital Archives (CODA)
(). While some of these
have attracted technical reports, working papers, pre- and postprints of
faculty and departmental publications at these institutions, some have
launched their own publications (eScholarship) and some aim to accept
datasets and superseded courseware (DSpace). All have carefully thought
out policies, insisting that the authors must hold the rights (not
necessarily the copyright) to place the material on the institutional
server.
Other novel ideas include systems for distributing educational
resources, such as the SMETE Digital Library (Science, Math,
Engineering, and Technology Education) (). It was
suggested that if academics gained widespread visibility through the
distribution of teaching and educational resources, it might provide an
alternative to the current reward system based on scholarly publication.
Meanwhile, open research archives are faring quite well. BioMedCentral
() publishes close to 100 open access
journals, 35 of them started by scientists (for more info on starting a
journal, see );
BMC has published more than 2000 articles in 2003 and had almost four
million downloads from their web site. The journals are mirrored on
NLM’s PubMedCentral and on servers in Germany and the Netherlands. Soon
users will be able to syndicate content from BMC pages using RSS, as can
be done already with the Scientist
().
Another subject-based archive, Harvard’s Astrophysics Data System (ADS),
, contains complete scanned images from astronomy
and astrophysics journals and conference proceedings and observatory
publications (although most only as recent as 1996). In addition,
there’s a search engine enabling one to enter in a citation and find the
online paper (although this is governed by subscription access).
Other issues discussed at the summit included the question of linking
datasets with journal content, the development of standards for encoding
and retrieving archival materials, distributed and redundant content
systems and software and risk management for digital data. The keynote
speaker, Clifford Lynch, of the Coalition for Networked Information
(CNI) (see: ), provoked much
thought with the idea, among other things, that there may be non-human
as well as human readers of all this intellectual output – currently,
dumb ones, such as web-crawling spiders, but ultimately perhaps
intelligent data-mining software agents. Presentations from the
proceedings will eventually be available on the summit web site:
Proclamation of Thanksgiving (Abraham Lincoln, 1863)
(Source: Jep Streit)
Turkey for the Holidays
Features all about turkey preparation, including safe food handling, entertaining tips and trivia.
(Source: Librarian’s Index to the Internet)
NEW BOOKS
Received Nov. 22-28, 2003
Title
Author/Editor
(Publisher, Year)
To be Shelved at:
Requested by
TCP/IP Lean: Web Servers for Embedded Systems, 2nd ed.
Bentham, Jeremy
(CMP Press, 2002)
TK 5105.585 .B464 2002
Requested by W. Hill
The Rowland Institute Library catalog can be searched via the Internet at
These books will be displayed on the new books cart (near the newspaper and journals tables)
for approximately one week. The person who requested the book has priority for checking it out during the first week.
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