RedLightGreen – Search 130 Million Library Titles and automatically create citations

http://www.redlightgreen.com/

Via David Mattison came news from the library world of this service aimed at undergraduates and the librarians that support them. RedLightGreen is a service from the Research Libraries Group (get it?) that allows users to search over 130 million library catalogue entries. The user can then automatically create citations in either MLA, APA, Chicago or Turabian styles, and with one click also check their local library for title availability. The service is free to anyone; if you are like me and only have to do academic citations irregularly, this is invaluable. – SWL

BC Commons licence

http://www.bccampus.ca/Page93.aspx

It struck me that while there will be quite a few out there who have seen this before, I haven’t seen it make the rounds of the blogosphere and so maybe it is worthwhile…

The BCcommons Licence is a “open content” licence inspired by Creative Commons but aimed specifically at facilitating sharing of content created within the BC post-secondary system with the rest of that system. It has been developed by my employers (and my boss, Paul Stacey) at BCcampus. It’s a kind of middle ground between “closed” content and the full Creative Commons, a way for our provincial system to promote sharing between institutions but hopefully not pushing people as far out of their comfort zone as the full on Creative Commons might. The first content to be released under this licence should be coming along shortly so we will soon see if this fills the anticipated niche and has the desired effect. And a final note: in a cool twist, the BCcommons licence itself has been released under the creative commons, so if it somehow inspires you and you think it could serve as the basis for your own middle way, dig in! – SWL

Open Repository – a U.K.-based DSpace implementor

http://www.openrepository.com/

As if additional proof was needed that there is legs to the value-added open source service model, another example in the field of ‘institutional repositories’ (in addition to the Fedora implementors, VTLS) is this U.K.-based company that is making a business of implementing DSpace.
In addition, the existance of not one but 2 commercialized Institutional Repository packages gives weight to the idea that the IR market is likely to become more well-formed, quicker, than the LOR market (whose budget do you think is bigger – the ed tech department’s or the library’s?) – SWL

Draft of Creative COmmons for Canada licence

http://creativecommons.org/projects/international/
ca/english-changes.pdf

Potentially of interest to Canadian readers, the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic has released a draft of a Canadian Creative Commons (cc-ca) licence.
The biggest difference – we spell ‘Licence’ different than Americans! But seriously now, there is value to having Canadian lawyers translate this into language used in our courts, and without being a lawyer myself, it seems like the biggest differences are sections on the notion of ‘Moral Rights,’ and one concerning Canadian’s right to copy material we already own for personal use (which I seem to think provided the some dubious lynchpin to the argument that p2p filesharing from one’s own hard drive was ‘legal’ in Canada.) The licence is set to be ‘launched’ this Thursday September 30 – SWL

Digicult Techwatch – Natural Language Processing

http://www.digicult.info/pages/techwatch.php

Digicult is a fabulous publication aimed at the cultural and scientific heritage sectors funded by the European Union. In addition to their newsletter and thematic issues, they produce shorter documents called “Techwatches” that help to introduce a specific field of technology to their readers and draw out some of the implications for the future.

TechWatch 14 concerns the broad field of Natural Language Processing – which can variously include everything from text parsing software, to speech recognition, to automatic translation and knowledge mining. This paper starts out with a broad overview of the field and then moves on to draw out some of the potential uses for the technology. Well worth a read to get a sense of what this truly disruptive technology may hold (though with the caveat that this has long been an area that has over-promised and under-delivered). – SWL

SciX – Open, self organising repository for scientific information exchange

http://www.scix.net/

Via David Mattison came news of this ‘repository’ project from the European Union to enable open publishing of scientific literature. This is definitely more of the ‘institutional’ repository-type projects, but still lots of interesting stuff to learn from – check out the work packages they defined (who would have thunk to include “repository content” as part of the work) as well as a score of interesting papers they term their ‘deliverables.’

(P.S. Please forgive me if I end up posting a few things you’ve seen before over the next while – it’s tough catching up a month’s absence from the blogosphere). – SWL

13 days later…

and now finally back home after my latest hospital stay, this time for a full-on bowel ressection. At least it’s done now, and hopefully I can now enjoy a few years of relatively hassle-free life before the Crohn’s rears it’s ugly head again.

Apologies to those who have tried to contact me over the last few weeks – I will get back to you as soon as I can, but even though I am back home now I am still be on the disabled list for a week or two more and likely won’t be putting in more than an hour or two a day. – SWL

International LOM Survey

http://phenom.educ.ualberta.ca/n/papers/
LOM_Survey_Report.doc

As mentioned by Stephen, this is the second year Norm Friesen has produced this important report. The survey focuses on two questions: 1) “Which elements were selected for use or population?”; and 2) “How were these elements used, or what where the types of values assigned to them?” Maybe this makes sense as a starting point, but it misses out an even more important question for the builders of repository systems and other consumers of metadata – how are the elements that are selected for use actually employed to deliver functionality to users (or other systems). Maybe that is a premature question, but the current situation resembles a comment a fellow from Oxford made in the Learning Design working group at the Alt-I-Lab sessions a few weeks back – “It’s like you’ve spent all this time working on the data model before you had an idea what the application it was supposed to support was going to be.” Don’t laugh, that’s exactly what this feels like at times.

Which is why the last paragraphs of the paper are so important, the ones in which Norm engages the position laid out by Erik Duval and Wayne Hodgins in their paper titled ‘Metadata Matters.‘ I am sympathetic with Norm’s concern that

“speculations on future developments in technologies and the social practices that develop with them are notoriously prone to error, and especially subject to ideological and other distortions. While the possibilities of such developments and solutions should certainly not be ignored in standards development, they do not provide a solid foundation for standardization work.”

But maybe what this means is that metadata standards need to be driven from two directions that are in tension; one from the direction of studies like Norm’s that look at what fields are currently being populated, but then also from the perspective of current and future usages of the metadata fields so that the limitations of manual metadata collection practices (one of the points I think Hodgins and Duval are trying to make) don’t end up dictating a standard that ultimately doesn’t enable any new functionality (which I thought was supposed to be the reason for all of this to begin with.) – SWL