The Sound Directions project at Harvard University and Indiana University announces the publication of Sound Directions: Best Practices for Audio Preservation available to download as PDF from their web site. This 168-page publication presents the results of two years of research and development funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities in the United States. This work was carried out by project and permanent staff at both institutions in consultation with an advisory board of experts in audio engineering, audio preservation, and digital libraries.

Sound Directions: Best Practices for Audio Preservation establishes best practices in many areas where they did not previously exist. This work also explores the testing and use of existing and emerging standards. It includes chapters on personnel and equipment for preservation transfer, digital files, metadata, storage, preservation packages and interchange, and audio preservation systems and workflows. Each chapter is divided into two major parts: a preservation overview that summarizes key concepts for collection managers and curators, followed by a section that presents recommended technical practices for audio engineers, digital librarians, and other technical staff. This latter section includes a detailed look at the inner workings of the audio preservation systems at both Harvard and Indiana.

This first phase of the Sound Directions project produced four key results: the publication of findings and best practices, the development of much needed software tools for audio preservation, the creation or further development of audio preservation systems at each institution, and the preservation of a large number of critically endangered and highly valuable recordings. All of these are detailed in this publication, which provides solid grounding for institutions pursuing audio preservation either in-house or in collaboration with an outside vendor.

For further information on the Sound Directions project: soundir@indiana.edu

The concept behind Googalyzer is interesting, though it’s probably not for everyone. It’s basically an open-source, tabbed web browser with built-in note-taking, web-clipping, outlining and bibliographic tools. The idea is to consolidate these different aspects of web research into one application.

This way you can have multiple research projects with all the relevant information kept in one place, without getting data from different project intermingled (this reminds me of the thinking behind Panic’s recent Coda web design application). If you do a lot of research online, and are not already using something like DEVONthink, this might be worth a look.

Googalyzer 3.0 beta 1 has just recently been released and is a free download from Funkware.

Via The Unofficial Apple Weblog

BBC News has published an article by Internet law professor Michael Geist which takes a look at a fundamental shift in the way research journals become available to the public.

Last month five leading European research institutions launched a petition that called on the European Commission to establish a new policy that would require all government-funded research to be made available to the public shortly after publication. That requirement - called an open access principle - would leverage widespread internet connectivity with low-cost electronic publication to create a freely available virtual scientific library available to the entire globe.

The article gives a fair introduction to Open Access and Institutional Repositories….such exposure to a large audience can only be a good thing! The University of Southampton and Brunel University School of Information Systems are mentioned as the only two UK universities to establish both a repository and a policy requesting that faculty submit electronic copies of all publications.

Read the full article here.

David, Iain and Ewan attended a half day conference at St. Andrews University run by SHERPA as part of their series of UK roadshows that have also called at such places as the University of Liverpool and the University of Durham.

SHERPA aims to investigate ‘issues in the future of scholarly communication’ and is currently developing open-access institutional repositories in a number of research universities to ‘facilitate the rapid and efficient worldwide dissemination of research’.

The day started for the three of us at the Powmill Milk Bar where we ate lunch while listening to David’s funny anecdotes about his numerous adventures.

Half an hour after Powmill we arrived just in time for the beginning of the conference. The first presentation was by Gareth Johnson who spoke generally about Open Access including its current and future use and the various barriers it currently experiences.

The next presentation was carried out by representatives from St. Andrews University. They spoke about their internal experiences of Open Access and the successes and opposition that they had faced and continue to face. The speakers outlined an interesting anecdote which involved one academic saying that open access repositories only existed ‘to give librarians some work to do’.

The final presentation was by Jane H. Smith who spoke about the RoMEO and Juliet services. RoMEO is a useful repository of journal publishers’ listings that is run with support form JISC and the Wellcome Trust. Juliet is a ‘complement to the RoMEO service provided by SHERPA for authors and repository administrators, which lists summaries of publishers’ copyright transfer agreements as they relate to archiving’.

The day was of most interest as it illustrated the view points on Open Access of those from a range of academic areas. The conference also almost acted as a reassurance that the barriers to Open Access are common throughout all institutions.

The 3rd International Conference on Open Repositories takes place in Southampton between the 1st - 4th April 2008. The Conference will be hosted by the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, which has a long history of research into the technological aspects of open repositories. The conference will provide focused workshops and tutorials and will also use general conference sessions as a platform to debate and bring together all the issues raised over the four days.

As part of the SHERPA Plus project SHERPA is holding a series of half day roadshow events across the UK. In this half day session speakers from the SHERPA organisation will explore various key issues surrounding Open Access, institutional repositories, scholarly publication and authors’ rights.

As well as sharing experiences garnered from their various projects and extensive network of partner institutions, there will be an opportunity to hear about the latest developments in the SHERPA suite of supporting websites including OpenDOAR, SHERPA/RoMEO and JULIET. There will be an opportunity to engage in informed debate with the team members presents, as well as to share practical advice with other interested parties in attendance.

The full events programme and booking details are available at http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/guidance/roadshows.html

The closest event to GCU will most likely be at my alma mater St Andrews University, date TBA

Over 10,000 individuals sign petition to European Commission to guarantee public access to publicly funded research

January 29th 2007. Nobel laureates Harold Varmus and Rich Roberts are among the more than ten thousand concerned researchers, senior academics, lecturers, librarians, and citizens from across Europe and around the world who are signing an internet petition calling on the European Commission to adopt polices to guarantee free public access to research results and maximise the worldwide visibility of European research.

Organisations too are lending their support, with the most senior representatives from over 500 education, research and cultural organisations in the world adding their weight to the petition, including CERN, the UK’s Medical Research Council, the Wellcome Trust, the Italian Rector’s Conference, the Royal Netherlands Academy for Arts & Sciences (KNAW) and the Swiss Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences (SAGW), alongside the petition’s sponsors, SPARC Europe, JISC, the SURF Foundation, the German Research Foundation (DFG) and the Danish Electronic Research Library (DEFF).

Full JISC Press Release