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If you are a librarian and do not know who Aaron Swartz is, that should probably change now. He helped developing the RSS standard, was the co-founder of Reddit, worked on the Open Library project, downloaded and freed 20% (2.7 million documents) of the Public Access to Court Electronic Records (PACER) database that charges fees for the United States federal court documents, out of which about 1,600 had privacy issues, played a lead role in preventing the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), and wrote the Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto.
(Photo from Wikipedia)
Exploring the potential impact of open access on the librarian and their role within the institution. "...the future of open access for libraries will involve: More advanced discovery services
Communication, training and networking with own institutional community
Repository building and curation
And to further summarise the above, they all point at developing a strong(er) service culture to look at end-users’ needs directly, rather than focusing on pure collection building. Not by coincidence, these themes are echoed in a paper presented in May 2012 by Lorcan Dempsey (Vice President and Chief Strategist at OCLC), which are nicely summarized on the OCLC’s website. It is easy to apply each of these points to the current and future OA landscape: “Education, local government, and publishing are being reshaped by economic and networking pressures. Changes here will increasingly drive library changes and libraries need to understand those environments.
Libraries continue to shift from a collection-based view to a service-based view, with deeper engagement with the research, learning and information behaviors of their users.
Community engagement drives the need for new skills, more responsive organizational structures, and a readiness to reallocate resources to important areas.”
"The Internet of Things & Services is a major driver for technological development and will dramatically change products, services, and markets. It not only empowers people to collaborate, but any product or service developed by people – or those emerging from such collaboration. The technology will definitely change business, but the social implications will change our society beyond our wildest dreams. We are in the transition to a new society: We are in the 2nd Renaissance."
Via Pierre Tran
Joris Pekel is a Berlin based Community Coordinator for the OKFN and works specifically with digital heritage. He is co-editor of the Open GLAM blog: "Linked Open Data is getting more attention from the information world, as well as from memory institutions. But what exactly is it and more important, why is it a good thing? To explain this, Europeana has released an animation."
RT @magnusenger: "Facilitating Access to the Web of Data: A Guide for Librarians" http://t.co/vAoOKZiI" "The web is changing from a web of documents to a web of data; from a web that can be read by humans, to one that can be read by machines. These are fascinating advances for anyone interested in the changing nature of the web and the way we access information. The technologies being forged in this new landscape will provide a host of opportunities for library and information professionals to shape the information landscape of the future." "Key topics covered include: • open data
• A semantic web: one that’s meaningful to computers
• data silos
• the semantic web: the RDF vision
• embedded semantics
• the library and the web of data
• the future of the librarian and the web of data."
Librarians have played a crucial, leading role in advocating for Open Access worldwide. As a traditional focal point for scholarly communication innovation, libraries continue to exercise their leadership by encouraging faculty members, administrators, and students to engage in Open Access Week activities.
LODLAM stands for Linked Open Data in Libraries, Archives and Museums. This is a very exciting, innovative area. If you do a Google search on “LODLAM” you bring up a lot of hits, however, sitting right at the top of the list is lod-lam.net. I’ve embedded an Introductory talk on LODLAM by Jon Voss from that site which is a great place to start the LODLAM journey. If you’d like to learn more then I’d highly recommend exploring the websites resources further; they include talks, slideshows, reading lists and information on upcoming events. For those of us in the Southern Hemisphere it’s also worth noting the LODLAM-NZ is coming up in Wellington on 1 December 2011 (Bookings Open). - Fiona Sullivan
Creative Commons licenses provide a flexible range of protections and freedoms for authors, artists, and educators.
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by AUDREY WATTERS: "...the year’s major ed-tech developments. I’ve identified the 10 trends that I think have been 2012’s most interesting and important. I’ll string out the posts that cover these over the next 6 weeks — and not just because it’s time for the obligatory-end-of-year-wrap-up-crap posts that we bloggers churn out throughout the month of December. I find the reflection is useful (although time-consuming), and it’s a good process for me to go through all the news and all my writing to assess what’s innovative and what’s hype and what's changed and why."
By Timothy Vollmer:
"As reported a few weeks ago, OCLC has recommended (http://www.oclc.org/news/releases/2012/201248.htm) that its member libraries adopt the Open Data Commons Attribution license (ODC-BY) (http://opendatacommons.org/licenses/by/1.0/) when they share their library catalog data online. The recommendation to use an open license like ODC-BY is a positive step forward for OCLC because it helps communicate in advance the rights and responsibilities available to potential users of bibliographic metadata from library catalogs. But the decision by OCLC to recommend the licensing route — as opposed to releasing bibliographic metadata into the public domain — raises concerns that warrants more discussion."
Via Bibliodata, Errol A. Adams JD/MLS
Interviewers: "Kai Eckert is computer scientist and vice head of the IT departement of the Mannheim University Library. He coordinates the linked open data activities and developed the linked data service of the library. He held various presentations, both national and international, about linked data and open data. Adrian Pohl has been working at the Cologne-based North Rhine-Westphalian Library Service Center (hbz) since 2008. His main focuses are Open Data, Linked Data and its conceptual, theoretical and legal implications. Since June 2010 Adrian has been coordinating the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Working Group on Open Bibliographic Data." "At OKCon 2011, we had the opportunity to interview Brewster Kahle who is a computer engineer, internet entrepreneur, activist, and digital librarian. He is the founder and director of the Internet Archive, a non-profit digital library with the stated mission of “universal access to all knowledge”. Besides the widely known “Wayback Machine“, where archived copies of most webpages can be accessed, the Internet Archive is very active in the digitization of books, as well, and provides with the “Open Library” a free catalog that aims to describe “every book ever published”. Kahle and his wife, Mary Austin, created the Kahle/Austin Foundation that supports the Internet Archive and other non-profit organizations. As open data enthusiasts from the library world, we were especially interested in how the activities of the Internet Archive relate to libraries. We wanted to know how its general approach and service could be useful for libraries in Europe. Brewster Kahle, what is the Internet Archive and what is your vision for its future?..." Interview here: http://blog.okfn.org/2012/03/23/building-the-ecology-of-libraries-an-interview-with-brewster-kahle/
"The Global Open Access Portal (GOAP), aiming at presenting a top level view of Open Access to scientific information, was launched at a special side event organized during the UNESCO General Conference, on Tuesday 1 November 2011, at Paris Headquarters. The portal has country reports from over 148 countries with weblinks to over 2000 initiatives/projects in Member States. The GOAP is a knowledge portal that has the following features: Country-wise distilled knowledge on the status of Open Access Key organizations engaged in OA in Member States Thematic focus areas of OA Important publications on OA coming from different regions of the world Critical assessment of major barriers to OA in each country Potential of OA in UNESCO Member States Funding and deposit mandates Links to OA initiatives in the world
Learn. Share. Advance Open Access Week, a global event now entering its fourth year, is an opportunity for the academic and research community to continue to to learn about the potential benefits of Open Access, to share what they’ve learned with colleagues, and to help inspire wider participation in helping to make Open Access a new norm in scholarship and research. “Open Access” to information – the free, immediate, online access to the results of scholarly research, and the right to use and re-use those results as you need – has the power to transform the way research and scientific inquiry are conducted. It has direct and widespread implications for academia, medicine, science, industry, and for society as a whole. Open Access (OA) has the potential to maximize research investments, increase the exposure and use of published research, facilitate the ability to conduct research across available literature, and enhance the overall advancement of scholarship. Research funding agencies, academic institutions, researchers and scientists, teachers, students, and members of the general public are supporting a move towards Open Access in increasing numbers every year. Open Access Week is a key opportunity for all members of the community to take action to keep this momentum moving forward. Get involved. Participating in Open Access Week can be as simple or involved as you like. It can also be a chance to let your imagination have full rein and come up with something more ambitious, wacky, fun. OA Week is an invaluable chance to connect the global momentum toward open sharing with the advancement of policy changes on the local level. Universities, colleges, research institutes, funding agencies, libraries, and think tanks have used Open Access Week as a platform to host faculty votes on campus open-access policies, to issue reports on the societal and economic benefits of Open Access, to commit new funds in support of open-access publication, and more.
Many are happy to share their research but far more are reluctant to do the same with teaching resources. Do you value open educational resources? (RT @GdnHigherEd: We'd like to hear from librarians: are your #digital skills in demand?
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Not sure if these manuscripts also included in those being burned and looted (?), but an indication of the magnificence of these collections!