InfoLit@Purdue: Learning Biology in a Messy World

May 30th, 2012

Centennial tribute to Nobel winner Brown to include archives exhibit

May 30th, 2012

MTSR12: Metadata and Semantics for Open Access Repositories, Research Information Systems and Infrastructures

May 29th, 2012

Special Track on Metadata & Semantics for Open Access Repositories, Research Information Systems and Infrastructures (http://mtsr2012.uca.es/track_open_access.php) Part of the Sixth International Conference on Metadata and Semantic Research (MTSR’12) 28-30 November 2012 – Cádiz, Spain (http://mtsr2012.uca.es/)

IMPORTANT DATES
•  20 July 2012: Paper submission (PDF File formatted in Springer LNCS style)
•  1 September 2012: Acceptance (or rejection) notification
•  15 September 2012: Camera-ready, revised version of accepted papers
•  28-30 November 2012: MTSR’12 at University of Cadiz

AIM
The aim of the Special Track on Metadata & Semantics for Open Access Repositories, Research Information Systems and Infrastructures is to serve as a discussion forum for experts to present recent results and experiences, establish liaisons with other groups, and reflect on the state-of-the-art of metadata and semantic aspects of open access repositories, research information systems and data management in research infrastructures.

SCOPE
Handling metadata and semantics is an issue of increasing significance in open access repositories and research information systems (the commonly known as CRIS). Furthermore, research infrastructures of various disciplines need to manage vast amount of data sets that are produced on a daily basis and need rich and high quality metadata to assist in storing, discovering, processing, preserving and re-using them.

Taming the complexity of metadata and semantics in open access repositories, CRIS and research infrastructures is a major challenge and the subject of intense ongoing activities worldwide. The impact of these efforts can be very significant, including aspects like semantic interoperability among systems, reduced cost of information exchange and integration, availability of advanced mechanisms for discovery, navigation and preservation, wide re-use of data and services across disciplines and availability of high quality, reliable value-added services.

SUBMISSIONS
Interested authors can submit either full papers (12 pages) or short papers (6 pages) reporting on either mature or ongoing research.

Papers should be original and not previously submitted to other venues. Submission will be available through the EasyChair submission system https://www.easychair.org/account/signin.cgi?conf=mtsr2012.
If you haven’t an EasyChair account yet, you’ll be asked to create it before you can access the MTSR’12 page.

SELECTION OF BEST PAPERS TO BE INCLUDED IN:
The submissions to the Special Track will be reviewed by at least two members of the Program Committee. Accepted papers will be published in the book of MTSR’12 proceedings by Springer (CCIS Series http://www.springer.com/computer?SGWID=0-146-6-466612-0).

ABOUT MTSR’12
The 6th International Conference on Metadata and Semantics Research (MTSR’12) will be hosted by the University of Cadiz in Spain from 28th to 30th November, 2012. MTSR’12 targets researchers and practitioners from the fields of metadata and semantics research as well as applications of the semantic web and related technologies.

IDCC13: Infrastructure, Intelligence, Innovation: driving the Data Science agenda – Call for Papers

May 29th, 2012

8th International Digital Curation Conference 2013 (IDCC13)
14-16 January 2013
Mövenpick Hotel, Amsterdam, Netherlands
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IDCC brings together those who create and manage data and information, those who use it and those who research and teach about curation processes. Our view of ‘data’ is a broad one – video games and virtual worlds are of just as much interest as data from laboratory instruments or field observation. Whether the information originates in the arts, humanities, social or experimental sciences the issues faced are cross-disciplinary. Digital curators maintain, preserve, and add value to digital information throughout its life, reducing threats to its long-term value, mitigating the risk of digital obsolescence, and enhancing the potential for reuse for all purposes. If you are a curator, if you teach or train future curators, or if you depend on them for your work, IDCC is for you. www.dcc.ac.uk/events/idcc13

Call for Papers
The IDCC11 Programme Committee invites submissions to the 8th International Digital Curation Conference that reflect our conference theme. Our theme recognizes that in recent years there has been an explosion in the amount of data available, whether from tweets to blogs, data from sensors through to “citizen science,” government data, health and genome data and social survey data. Technology allows us to treat as ‘data’ content which would not once have merited the term – recordings of speech or song, video of dance or theatre or animal behavior – and to treat as quantitative what once could only be qualitative. There are challenges in finding data and making it findable, in the ability to use it effectively, to take and understand data, to process, to analyze and extract value from data, to visualize data and then to communicate the stories behind it.

This process is now being termed data science. It is being used across sectors to describe a wide range of data activities in the commercial, government and academic sectors dealing with information whose primary purpose is often not research-related. Activities are not discipline-specific; in fact data science is being described in some quarters as a new discipline.

The Call for Papers including a list of topics can be found at: www.dcc.ac.uk/events/idcc13/call-papers
Submissions will be accepted from 4 June 2012

Sent on behalf of IDCC13 Programme Committee Co-chaired by Kevin Ashley – Director of the Digital Curation Centre (DCC), Liz Lyon – Associate Director of the DCC and Clifford Lynch, Executive Director of the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI)

DCC overhauls catalog to better aid in management of data

May 29th, 2012

Digital Curation Centre is pleased to announce our refreshed and replenished catalog of tools and services for managing and curating research data. The catalog is at http://www.dcc.ac.uk/resources/external/tools-services

This is more than a new look; the catalog has been overhauled to focus on software and services that directly perform curation and management tasks. It splits these resources into five major categories, based on who the intended users are and what stage of the data lifecycle they will be most useful in. Sub-categories contain tables for quick comparison of tools against others that perform similar functions, linked to in-depth descriptions of how the resource can help. This resource will evolve; if you have suggestions of tools to add please send them to info@dcc.ac.uk

The Digital Curation Centre launches DMP Online v3.0

May 29th, 2012

This new release marks a major progression in the software’s functionality. For the first time users can create data management plans incorporating multiple templates, so if your institution, your funder and your publisher all require data management plans, you can now create a single plan to satisfy them all.

There are also more granular export options, so you can choose to output only the sections you want to include in any given report, targeting it towards the intended readership. If you want to focus attention on just one facet of your data management plan, it’s easy: just select and deselect as required.

Other new features in v3.0 include:
– Ability to share plans, and to edit them jointly with colleagues
– Simultaneous viewing of multiple custom guidance notes
– More flexible project stages (phases) for templates
– User maintainable profile/login details
– XLSX output

Over the coming months we will be rolling out a number of additional features, and further announcements will flag their release:
– A facility for boilerplate text to be included within templates
– Display of funder constraints on output (e.g. number of pages, word count etc)
– Increased institutional customisability, including a new ‘administrator’ user type
– Support for non-English Language versions of the tool

Also, as a result of ongoing consultation with our users, we’ll be developing an API together with more new features to enable improved interoperation between DMP Online and other related systems and tools, and enhanced reporting capabilities for both system users and administrators including running word and page count to help users adhere to funders’ constraints, and a facility to publish plans without the need to log in.

If you would like to see any of these prioritized, we can move it up the list – just drop us a line and let us know, or request a new feature at https://github.com/DigitalCurationCentre/DMPOnline/issue

Visit http://dmponline.dcc.ac.uk and get started now, or check out the Open Source code on GitHub. And as ever, if you have suggestions about how we might continue to extend and improve DMP Online, we want to hear from you. Email dmponline@dcc.ac.uk and let us know what you think.

Copyright in the News: Court rules on e-reserves case

May 16th, 2012

The long awaited decision in the Georgia State e-reserves case was handed down on May 11. Georgia State was sued in 2008 by three publishers, Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press and Sage Publications, for materials in the library e-reserves system. The trial was held a year ago. In many ways it was a win for Georgia State but there are still some unanswered questions.

Georgia State won on all but five of the 99 infringement claims. The Court only looked at books and not journal articles. Before the judge even applied a fair use analysis to each work, she reviewed whether or not the publisher had a valid copyright claim to the work. There were several cases where the publisher could not definitively prove ownership so Georgia State won on those claims without fair use ever being applied.

The following are some of the highlights of the 350 page decision:

1. Repeated use of the same work qualifies for fair use.
2. Fair use is applied to the entire book including the table of contents, index, etc. and not just the chapters. The judge also ruled that chapters are not complete works.
3. If a book is ten chapters or more in length, then only one chapter can be used under fair use. If the book is less than ten chapters, then 10% of the work can be used.
4. If there are licensed digital excerpts available at a reasonable cost, then the license should be utilized.
5. The Court set aside the Classroom Guidelines which were part of the 1976 legislative history stating that they are contrary to the intent of the actual law of fair use.
6. The following is the breakdown of the five books that were found to be infringing:
1. Book 1 – four chapters or 8.38% of the work was used.
2. Book 2 – two chapters or 8.38% of the work was used.
3. Book 3 – seven chapters of 12.29% of the work was used.
4. Book 4 – two chapters that were also considered the heart of the work or 12.57% of the work was used.
5. Book 5 – two chapters or 8.28% of the work was used.
7. The publishers have 30 days in which to petition the court to request damages for the five works that were infringed.

This case was argued in the 11th Circuit.

Copyright in the News is written by University Copyright Office Director, Donna Ferullo. www.lib.purdue.edu/uco 

Libraries’ Dean James Mullins Honored by ARL

May 11th, 2012

Information Literacy at the Soybean and Corn Competition

May 8th, 2012

Do Engineers and Technologists Solve Problems in the Same Way?

May 8th, 2012