Category — Cultural Informatics

The ACLS is pleased to announce that “Our Cultural Commonwealth: The final report of the American Council of Learned Societies Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities & Social Sciences” was released December 13, 2006.

In 2004, ACLS appointed the Commission and charged it to recommend how the humanities and social sciences could develop online research environments that would empower scholars and students. The Commission, chaired by John Unsworth, Dean of the Graduate School of Library and Information Science and Professor of English at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, has worked over two years to present a guide to achieving that goal.

A grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation supported the work of the Commission and the publication of the report.

Additional print and digital copies of Our Cultural Commonwealth may be obtained at no charge at http://www.acls.org/cyberinfrastructure/.

Largest archive of free culture to be built in the Netherlands:
From the Netherlands, the “Images for the Future” project is building a large-scale conservation and digitization project to make available 285,000 hours of film, television, and radio recordings, as well as more than 2.9 million photos from the Netherlands’ film and television archives. A basic collection drawn from the archive will be made available on the Internet either under CC licenses, or in some cases, in the public domain. The Government of the Netherlands, a long time supporter of the local Dutch CC project, will invest a total of 173 million Euros over a seven-year period. Their aim is to spur innovative applications with new media, while providing valuable services to the public.
——–

this will be great… free content is the backbone of innovation and production.

PrattNews:
PRATT INSTITUTE SCHOOL OF INFORMATION AND LIBRARY SCEINCE LAUNCHES COUNTRY’S FIRST ADVANCED CERTIFICATE IN MUSEUM LIBRARIES NEW YORK, N.Y.

November 8, 2006 – Pratt Institute’s School of Information and Library Science (SILS) introduced the world’s first program focusing on museum libraries this fall semester. The Advanced Certificate in Museum Libraries will yield a Master’s degree in a course of study that consists of four required areas of study: research/curatorial, digital technology, education and outreach, and field experience.

The Advanced Certificate in Museum Libraries, which was approved by the New York State Education Department in June 2006, will prepare graduates to assume leadership roles in museum libraries, and in a range of other cultural institutions, including research and academic libraries and “virtual” libraries.

————-

This is a new program. There are some interesting developments in this field. It will also be great to get more people involved with museum libraries.

LibraryThing: BookSuggester and UnSuggester:
Play with it a few minutes, and patterns emerge. Philosophy and postmodern literary criticism oppose chic lit, popular thrillers and the young adult section. Programming does not truck with classic literature. Memoirs of depression, like Prozac Nation, meet their match in the cheery The Night Before Christmas. Ann Coulter and David Sedaris do not see eye-to-eye. There is a strong disconnect between readers of much recent Protestant, mostly evangelical, non-fiction, and large swaths of contemporary literary fiction. For example, LibraryThing includes 2,300 readers who’ve logged Jeffrey Eugenides’ epic gender-bender novel Middlesex, and 222 readers of John Piper’s The Passion of the Christ: 50 Reasons He Came to Die. But the groups don’t overlap. No reader has both. Similar instances occur again and again.

——

finally a useful tool… for book unsuggesting.

Web Curator Tool:
The Web Curator Tool (WCT) is a tool for managing the selective
web harvesting process. It is designed for use in libraries and
other collecting organisations, and supports collection by
non-technical users while still allowing complete control of the
web harvesting process.

——-

this looks like a great tool.

Electronic Literature Collection, Volume One:
\]

Electronic Literature Collection, Volume One
——–

60 works of electronic literature, under cc license.. in one volume. good deal.

Planning for Library Camp Mid-Atlantic:
Planning proceeds apace – Jeremy Hunsinger is kindly checking to see if space is available at Pratt Institute, and has posted about the event to a mailing list he’s on. I will likely do the same on BUSLIB-L, assuming it’s OK with Dan Lester.
I’ve created a very brief survey for people who might be interested in attending:
Click here to take survey
Even if you’re not interested, please pass the information on to people who might be.

——–

the fine folks at the business librarian are… thinking of putting on library camp mid-atlantic. it could be fun.

I made it to newark airport… My only hangup of course is that is did something to my back yesterday afternoon and basically haven’t slept much, but eh, that only caused me to walk up and down 34th street for 10-15 minutes wondering where the heck the penn station door was, because I’d never been in before, eventually i just decided to walk against traffic and voila, it was at the end of stream of people. Beyond that, the symposium looks interesting, I’m really happy that I was invited even though… it means flying across the u.s. 2 times in 48 hours so that i can be back in time for the digital archives class.

Governance and conflict resolution in probably a better construct for the Linden Lab meeting, but I think that I’ll easily fit in, and make some of my points. The symposium is all day tomorrow. Tonight I’m trying to meet up with my friend and colleague David Silver, whose teaching until 8pm.

EC calls on Member States to contribute to the European digital library:
The European Commission urged EU Member States on 25 August to set up large-scale digitisation facilities, so as to accelerate the process of getting Europe’s cultural heritage on line via the European digital library. In a Recommendation on digitisation and digital preservation, it calls on Member States to act in various areas, ranging from copyright questions to the systematic preservation of digital content in order to ensure long term access to the material.
———

yet another point of resistance in google’s ‘all your book belong to us’ campaign. oh… and… it means that citizens get access to books instead of consumers… same people, different perspective.

The Journal of Electronic Publishing:


The Journal of Electronic Publishing – Summer 2006 edition now available
——
some of these articles are interesting.