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 | Columbia University Joins Microsoft Scan Plan
Fresh off its recent agreement with Google, Columbia University announced this week that it has also entered into an agreement with Microsoft to digitize books from the Columbia University Libraries. Under the agreement, Microsoft will digitize portions of the Libraries' public domain collections in American history, literature, and humanities, with "the specific areas to be decided mutually by Microsoft and Columbia."
The initiative will make Columbia's collections available through Microsoft's Live Search Books. Microsoft will also provide Columbia with copies of the scans, allowing the library to "provide worldwide access through its own digital library," and to "share the content with non-commercial academic initiatives and non-profit organizations."
Columbia's back-to-back book scanning deals with competitors Google and Microsoft underscores that there is room for many partners in the book scanning realm. Columbia joins Cornell University as an equal opportunity scanner. Cornell also has book scanning deals with both Google and Microsoft, as well as a deal with BookSurge, a subsidiary of Amazon.com, to offer print-on-demand (PoD) books from its digitized materials. Currently, 3500 titles from the Cornell libraries are available through Amazon.com, with than number set to increase to more than 6000.
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SPARC Releases New Campaign for Student Engagement
After ten years of efforts to launch competing journals, educate faculty, and lobby lawmakers for open access, SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) is looking to the future: students. This week, it launched its latest educational effort, a brochure, web site, and blog campaign entitled The Right to Research designed to engage students on open access.
SPARC officials said the campaign is the result of a year-long effort with students on open access issues, that began with the Day of Action for Open Access in February 2007, conceived by Students for Free Culture, and spearheaded by SPARC's first summer intern, Gavin Baker.
The Right to Research campaign aims to help students:
- Recognize access problems, such as having to skip over research that could be important to their papers.
- Introduces the principle of open access, from journals to repositories, copyright management, and policies.
- Offers advice for both graduate students approaching publishing decisions and undergraduates on how to support open access issues.
The campaign comes on the heels of several SPARC-sponsored student initiatives. In 2007, designated a group of students as SPARC Innovators; initiated the first annual SPARKY awards, a video contest to showcase student views on information sharing; and, at the recent ALA Midwinter Meeting students addressed librarians at the ACRL/SPARC Forum. SPARC executive director Heather Joseph said that students' "zeal and commitment" is helping to "breathe new life into the vision for scholarly exchange in future."
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| TCU Library to Go All Night
It's been said it before that the best thing a library can be is open-and administrators at Texas Christian University (TCU) have taken that mantra to heart. TCU officials announced they will expand to 24-hour library access on weekdays beginning next semester after student lobbying, according to a report in the Daily Skiff, the TCU student newspaper.
"Students have been talking about this for the last three or four years," Don Mills, vice chancellor for student affairs, told reporters, adding that the university was finally able to find the money to add the additional hours. The library is currently working on hiring more staff to run the library as well as beefing up its security and other potential effects of the hours shift. "The library has been open 24 hours for exam week for a number of years and with the current patterns, it is logical to expect that some of the building usage will shift to the new hours," Dean of Libraries June Koelker told the Daily Skiff.
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| In Sad Chapter, NYS Archivist Confesses to "Hundreds" of Thefts
An archivist at the New York State Library (NYSL) has been arrested and charged with stealing rare historical documents and selling them online. According to various news reports, Daniel Lorello, a 30-year employee at the library confessed to prosecutors that he smuggled "hundreds" of rare documents from the library's collections and sold them on eBay. Lorello now faces several felony counts, including grand larceny. In his confession, Lorello told prosecutors he stole hundreds of documents and used the money to pay bills, including those for renovations to his house and his daughter's credit card. At a news conference, Attorney General Andrew Cuomo said his office was working to ensure recovery of other items stolen and sold by Lorello.
Lorello was caught after an attorney and former history professor, Joseph Romito discovered an 1823 letter penned by John C. Calhoun up for auction on eBay. Realizing the document as one indexed at the NYSL, Romito alerted librarians to the auction. Librarians searched the collections and discovered the document missing. Richard Mills, commissioner for the state Department of Education, which oversees the library, said that in light of the thefts, the department was "assembling respected national experts in research library and archives security to examine current security procedures and make recommendations to strengthen them."
Ironically, Lorello is listed as a coauthor on Lincoln biographer Harold Holzer's 1999 book The Union Preserved: A Guide to the Civil War Records in the New York State Archives, billed as a reference work that "makes available to a wide public one of the most important and extensive Civil War resources in the nation: the collections of the New York State Archives and Records Administration."
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