Monday, April 30, 2012
Thursday, April 26, 2012
Harvard Releases Metadata Into Public Domain
April 24, 2012 By Meredith Schwartz
Harvard is making more than 12 million catalog records from its 73 libraries publicly available under a Creative Commons public domain license, the university announced today.
The records can be bulk downloaded from Harvard in the standard MARC21 format, and are available for programmatic access by software applications via API at the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA).
The records contain bibliographic information about books, videos, audio recordings, images, manuscripts, maps, and more, including creator, title, publisher, date, language, and subject headings, plus descriptors usually invisible to end users, such as the equalization system used in a recording.
“The accessibility of the entire set of data for each item will, we hope, spur imaginative uses that will find new value in what libraries know,” said Mary Lee Kennedy, Senior Associate Provost for the Harvard Library.
Harvard also announced its open distribution of metadata from its Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard (DASH) scholarly article repository under a similar license.
John Palfrey, Chair of the DPLA, said he hoped that this would encourage other institutions to make their own collection metadata publicly available. According to Harvard’s FAQ, other libraries that have already done so include 3 million records from the British Library, 5.4 million from Cologne libraries, 3.6 million from the University of Cambridge, and 8 million from OCLC’s OhioLINK–OCLC Collection and Circulation Analysis Project.
The release is an instance of Harvard putting its (lack of) money where its mouth is when it comes to open access; the news comes just days after
the library sent a memo to faculty urging them to “move prestige to open access” by their actions, including where they submit their own papers and their actions on editorial boards and as members of professional organizations, because “major periodical subscriptions… cannot be sustained.”
Other instances of major institutions buying into open access this month include the U.K.’sWellcome Trust cracking down on failure to comply with its open access mandate, and the World Bank adopting an open access policy.
Source | http://www.thedigitalshift.com
Google launches storage service
Google is hoping to build the world’s largest digital filing cabinet in the latest attempt to deepen people’s dependence on its services. The Internet search leader began its pursuit of the audacious goal on Tuesday with the much-anticipated debut of Google Drive, a product that stores personal documents, photos, videos and a wide range of other digital content on Google’s computers.
By keeping files in massive data centers, users will be able to call up the information on their smartphones, tablet computers, laptops and just about any other Internet-connected device. Content can also be more easily shared among friends, family and co-workers by sending links to the information instead of emailing large attachments.
Google Drive is offering the first five gigabytes of storage per account for free. Additional storage will be sold for prices starting at $2.5 per month for 25 gigabytes up to $50.0 per month for one terabyte, equivalent to five laptops with 200-gigabyte drives.
The service is initially available for installation on Windows-based computers, Mac computers, laptops running on Google’s Chrome operating system and smartphones powered by Google’s Android software. A version compatible with Apple Inc’s hot-selling iPhone and iPad is due in the next few weeks.
Source | Hindustan Times | 26 April 2012
Tuesday, April 24, 2012
Tuesday, April 17, 2012
Tuesday, April 10, 2012
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)