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 | Boston Library Consortium Announces Partnership with Open Content Alliance
The Boston Library Consortium, Inc. (BLC) today announced a major partnership with the Open Content Alliance (OCA) to "build a freely accessible library of digital materials from all 19 member institutions." With the move, the BLC becomes the first large-scale consortium to embark on such a self-funded digitization project with the OCA. The effort will draw on the vast collective resources of the BLC members to make "high-resolution, downloadable, reusable files of public domain materials," using Internet Archive technology, for roughly ten cents a page. The scanning center for the BLC/OCA partnership is located at the Boston Public Library (BPL).
The announcement comes shortly after OCA founder Brewster Kahle told Library Journal that Boston Public Library officials had chosen not to pursue the chance to participate in commercial projects, choosing instead to work with OCA. "Revolutions aren't started by majorities," Kahle said. "They come from leaders who see things that need to be done. Boston Public Library, for example, has been courted by Google, but it has said it is going to remain open."
Doron Weber, program director, Universal Access to Recorded Knowledge, at the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, a financial supporter of the OCA since its inception, also praised the BLC. "Unlike corporate-backed efforts by Google, Microsoft, Amazon et al, which all impose different, albeit understandable, levels of restriction," Weber said, "the BLC has shown libraries all across the country the right way to take institutional responsibility and manage this historic transition to a universal digital archive that serves the needs of scholars, researchers and the general public without compromise." BPL President Bernard Margolis said, succinctly, "we are doing what libraries are supposed to do."
The OCA has been making steady, if quiet progress in comparison to its commercial counterparts. It now counts 40 members and regional scanning centers in six cities scanning up to 12,000 books a month, over four million pages. Unlike with commercial scan plans, there are no restrictions on public domain books scanned by OCA members. Users are not forced to use proprietary interfaces, and OCA scans are not hidden from rival search engines. Books scanned under the BLC initiative will be hosted by the Internet Archive and available to "be indexed by any search engine following the BLC and OCA's philosophy of open access to digitized content," Kahle said.
BLC members include: Boston College, Boston Public Library, Boston University, Brandeis University, Brown University, the Marine Biological Laboratory & Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Northeastern University, the State Library of Massachusetts, Tufts University, University of Connecticut, University of Massachusetts Amherst, University of Massachusetts Boston, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, University of Massachusetts Lowell, University of Massachusetts Medical Center, University of New Hampshire, Wellesley College, and Williams College.
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Broward County, NSU May Compromise Over Joint-Use Facility
Weeks after some tough talk about severing its agreement to support the joint use library at Nova Southeastern University, it now appears that Broward County, FL, lawmakers have cut a deal. According to a report in the Miami Herald, university officials will accept a cut from the county of about $725,000 but will get more parking around the library for students and faculty.
University officials had argued that the county should be paying roughly $1 million more than it currently pays under a usage-based formula for determining county support. Instead, County administrators have questioned the usage figures and threatened to find a way to walk away from its contractual obligation to support the library. The joint-use Alvin Sherman Library, Research and Information Technology Center on the NSU Davie campus opened to the public on December 8, 2001. Broward County contributed over $30 million to its construction.
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| Library Consortiums Urge AAAS To Reconsider JSTOR Defection
At least two major library consortia have passed a resolution urging the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) to reconsider its recent decision to pull future issues of its flagship journal, Science, from the popular online journal archive JSTOR. Resolutions condemning the move were passed by both the Greater Western Library Alliance (GWLA) and the Consortium of Academic and Research Libraries in Illinois (CARLI). Specifically, the resolution criticizes AAAS' decision to retract access to Science from JSTOR as it is "in conflict with AAAS' mission of advancing science, serving society" and is an "action which hurts and diminishes the value and contribution of both Science and JSTOR to researchers, the academy, and society."
In a unanimous vote, the GWLA resolution expressed "its disagreement" with AAAS' decision to withdraw future issues of Science from JSTOR and noted that "GWLA urges AAAS to reconsider its decision with particular attention and consideration to the damage such action would be to the mission and purpose of AAAS."
AAAS officials announced this summer that it would become the first member publisher to withdraw from JSTOR,
the groundbreaking Mellon-founded online journal archive. In a statement, a Science spokesperson told reporters that it was a matter of "strategic planning" and that, in a competitive environment, more scientific societies are "digitizing and controlling" their content. "AAAS shares the belief that it is now time to assume the full responsibility for maintaining a complete electronic archive of its flagship publication." JSTOR executive director Michael Spinella, however, told Inside Higher Ed that he was "disappointed" to lose Science, as well as somewhat puzzled, because JSTOR contracts are non-exclusive, and Science could have both maintained its own archive and remained in JSTOR, which shares with publishers the fees it collects from subscriber libraries.
JSTOR has proven to be an enormous success for libraries. In the resolution, librarians made a point of calling JSTOR "a singular success in the academy and with researchers in meeting the needs of librarians, scholars, and publishers and which offers a rich, elegant, and robust platform for cross-disciplinary discovery and integration of content."
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| Book Sale Volunteers Find Abolitionist Text, Slave Memoir
Volunteers sorting through books for a public library book sale came across a rare find: a single, leatherbound volume containing a first edition of Lydia Maria Child's 1833 book, An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called African, and an 1840 second edition of The Slave: Memoirs of Archy Moore. Liza Holzinger, coordinator of the Bethlehem (PA) Area Public Library book sale, told reporters she couldn't believe what landed on her desk. "I was pretty impressed by it, especially after I started doing research on the topic," she said. Holzinger confirmed the library has no idea where the books came from and will not keep the volumes, since it does not collect rare books actively in that area of history. She does, however, expect the finds to add nicely to the book sale's coffers, landing as much as $500 from either a collector—or perhaps an interested academic library? The sale is scheduled for September 27 and 29.
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| LJ's last call for nominations for LJ Teaching Award
The LJ Teaching Award, sponsored by ProQuest, recognizes excellence in educating the next generation of librarians. This annual award, now in its first year, honors the winning LIS teacher with an article in Library Journal in the Nov. 15 issue of the magazine, a $5000 prize, and a cocktail reception at ALA-Midwinter. Learn more and submit your nominations here.
Postmark deadline: October 1, 2007
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