01 Monday Aug 2011
Posted in Spotted in the news
Now there’s a guy who wants his open access…
“Aaron Swartz, a Cambridge web entrepreneur and political activist who has lobbied for the free flow of information on the Internet, was charged in federal court with hacking into a subscription-based archive system at MIT and stealing more than 4 million articles, including scientific and academic journals.”
MIT was apparently just a conduit to access JSTOR. Did he actually release them to the world?
01 Friday Apr 2011
Posted in Spotted in the news
InfoDocket blog spots that Microsoft Asia appears to be about to expand the Microsoft Academic Search (beta). Previously this has been limited to computer science / information technology…
“[on the new front-page navigation menu] next to physics, mathematics, engineering, and chemistry you’ll notice the number of days until the launch. First up will be physics”
Then before the end of April they plan to add Chemistry, Mathematics, Engineering. Humanities still seems to be some way off.
InfoDocket also claims that the MS Search database has expanded from 8m to 15.7m links this week.
01 Friday Apr 2011
JISC and the University of Oxford are running a one-day meeting on 20th May 2011, Digital Impacts: How to Measure and Understand the Usage and Impact of Digital Content…
“The question of how we can measure and understand the usage and impact of digital content within the education sector is becoming increasingly important. Substantial investment goes into the creation of digital resources for research, teaching and learning and, in the current economic climate, both content creators, publishers as well as funding bodies are being asked to provide evidence of the value of the resources they’ve invested in. But how do we go about defining value and impact? Which metrics should we adopt to understand usage? When is a digital resource a well used resource?”
28 Monday Mar 2011
Posted in Spotted in the news
The Chinese search-giant Baidu has promised to remove in-copyright “literary” works “in three days” from its 18-million item free download-website for ebooks and other texts, Wenku. Although it’s possible that this will only cover the 50 or so Chinese writers with whom Baidu has been in a vociferous dispute, and not western books…
26 Saturday Mar 2011
Growing Knowledge, a new website and set of videos from the British Library on the future of online research knowledge…
“How have digital technologies changed research? What are the new challenges they pose? What role should a research library play in the 21st Century? Growing Knowledge at the British Library explores these questions with our researchers in order to inform the debate on the future of research.”
An accompanying exhibition at the British Library runs until 11th July 2011.
14 Monday Mar 2011
Posted in Academic search, Spotted in the news
A interesting new discovery, courtesy of AWOL. Sisyphos is an excellent full-text search-engine that indexes online resources in Egyptology / Ancient Near Eastern Studies / Classical Archaeology. The index encompasses a great many personal and institutional websites, online ebooks, and over 100 ejournals (current and scanned from the archives).
10 Thursday Mar 2011
A neat new service, Full-text RSS Feed Builder…
“Love the ease of RSS, but hate when feeds don’t display the whole article, forcing you to click through just to read it?
Regain control by entering the URL of a feed below and clicking the submit button to receive a full-text feed URL you can use anywhere.”
Ah, now if only open arts and humanities ejournals actually had any RSS feeds… but unfortunately most don’t.
10 Thursday Mar 2011
Posted in Economics of Open Access, Spotted in the news
The Persee journals open archiving service, for French humanities / social studies / geography journals, has reportedly been abruptly told that its funding is to be withdrawn by its hosting university Lyon 2, within months and without any consultation…
“Sans concertation préalable (personnels et direction de PERSÉE non sollicités, comité de suivi de PERSÉE, ministère de tutelle, organes institutionnels de l’Université (CTP, CS, CA) non avertis), la direction de Lyon 2 a décidé le 7 février 2011 de mettre fin à la convention-cadre soutenant l’existence du programme. Cette décision prend effet le 10 mai 2011.
L’ensemble des personnels du programme PERSÉE ne comprend pas la précipitation de la direction de Lyon 2. Aucune information n’a précédé cette décision. Aucune discussion n’est proposée par la direction de l’université. Aucune solution ne garantit la continuité des activités du programme et la préservation de l’équipe PERSÉE en raison du trop court calendrier imposé par Lyon 2.
Nous ne savons pas ce qu’il adviendra de PERSÉE au-delà du 10 mai 2011.”
The service hosts around 350,000 open journal articles.
23 Wednesday Feb 2011
Posted in Spotted in the news
Some of the ‘library pictures’ of the French artist Erik Desmazieres. A new edition of Desmazieres‘s three-volume catalogue raisonne will be published by the Fitch-Febvrel Gallery later in 2011. The last few copies of the original three-volume set are available at Warnock Fine Arts.
Borges’ The Library of Babel: The Salon of the Planets (1998)
Borges’ The Library of Babel: Upper Circular Gallery (1998)
La Librairie Paul Jammes (2000)
And a picture that appears to exemplify the influences on Desmazieres, Boullee’s Project for a Royal Library (1785)…
I’d also surmise that he may have been led to such work by having grown up reading French graphic novels such as Les Cites Obscures (1983, partly expanded as a ‘director’s cut’ in the mid 2000s, and partly published in English in 2004)…
03 Thursday Feb 2011
Posted in Economics of Open Access, Spotted in the news
Another possibility for funding Open Access: the baby boomers leave a bequest in their will that is sufficient to give open access to the archives of their favourite academic journal.