Army Retores Public Access to Online Library

Earlier this month, the Army password-protected the Reimer Digital Library, an online collection popular with researchers. In response to a Freedom of Information Act request, they’ve agreed to re-open it.

Inside Higher Ed: Open Source Library Software

Inside Higher Ed has a brief article on open-source library software, mainly OPACS. Commenters fill in with your favorites that didn’t get mentioned in the article.

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/02/19/opensource

Harvard: All Publishing Is Public Access by Default

The Science journal Nature recently ran an item about Harvard’s publishing policies. From now on, “scholarly articles written by Harvard researchers will automatically be licensed to the university and published on the university’s website for free, unless an exemption is asked for by the researcher.”

According to the article, Harvard is the first University with a policy that makes articles Open Access unless researchers explicitly opt-out.

(And no big surprise: not everybody’s wild about the new policy.)

MINDS@UW Overview

The DoIT newswire had a brief article last week about happenings with Minds@UW. In case you’re not familiar with MINDS:

“MINDS@UW has become a useful way to gather, preserve and distribute scholarly content in digital form. Faculty and staff can easily upload research papers and reports, datasets and other primary research materials, learning objects, videos, theses, student projects, conference papers and presentations, and other research and instructional materials.”

Digital Books Return Themselves

This article about the Chicago Public Library System discusses digital books with that expire after three weeks, essentially returning themselves.

Gates Foundation: Computers for Libraries in Impoverished Neighborhoods

The Gates Foundation is providing $4.1 million in grants for computers in the libraries of economically-challenged New York neighborhoods.

State of the Union… as a Tag Cloud?

While tagging is used heavily for taxonomy/folksonomy, it’s enjoyed some other interesting uses. This technique was new to me: identifying the key concepts in a speech by turning it into a tag cloud, in this case a cloud version of the President’s State of the Union Address.

This related site has a tag cloud of the countries mentioned in the Address.

Though it’s not literally a tag cloud, that application of tagging reminded me of the NewsMap, which I always find fascinating and yet for some reason hardly ever use.