The relationship between research behaviors and technology is a topic Danielle Cooper has a birdseye view on, through her work at Ithaka S+R, where she oversees a program examining scholars’ research practices discipline-by-discipline. On 25 March 2020, she gave the introductory talk to NISO’s virtual conference on Research Behaviors and the Impact of Technology. She focused on how the current crisis shows the limits of technology for researchers. In spite of the many affordances, research is not propelled by technology alone and it is the human dimension to scholarly inquiry that matters more than ever.

This blog series aims to surface the often hidden work of infrastructure, and digital preservation is a great example of a robust and ongoing function that is by definition mostly ‘behind the scenes.’ For more information on other established digital preservation organizations, please refer to the Keepers Registry.

In this interview with CLOCKSS Executive Director Craig Van Dyck, key questions are raised as how digital preseravation works, what are the challenges, or how it is funded.

In 2019, Portico made great progress on scholarly preservation with the support of their library and publisher participants. Together, they expanded the archive, developed efficient new processes, and engaged with the community on critical issues in preservation. In 2020, Portico will deliver a set of guidelines and best practices for publishers to ensure that new forms of digital scholarship have the best chance to be preserved successfully.

Center for Research Libraries and East View Information Services have released Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) Newspapers, the second collection of titles digitized under the Global Press Archive (GPA) CRL Charter Alliance. MENA Newspapers adds to the growing collection of Open Access material available through East View’s Global Press Archive® program.

The PKP 2019 International Scholarly Publishing Conference was held on 20-22 November 2019 at the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona. Attended by more than 150 community members from around the world, six workshops, five keynotes, and more than 30 presentations took place. Read the Swedish OJS-network’s report.

The presentations are online.

The HathiTrust Research Center offers a workshop series to develop a community of users, teachers, and supporters of computational text analysis with HathiTrust data. Each training event is 1.5 days long and consists of a full day train-the-trainer session for librarians and a half day introduction to text mining with HathiTrust session for researchers. This new series, which will span from March to May 2020, builds on previous train-the-trainer workshops from HTRC.

Learn more about hosting | attending.

Since 2008 the HathiTrust Copyright Review Program has been researching hundreds of thousands of books to find ones that are in the public domain and can be opened for view in the HathiTrust Digital Library. Over the past 11 years, 168 people across North America have worked together for a common goal: the ability to share public domain works from US libraries. As of September 2019, the HathiTrust Copyright Review Program has performed copyright reviews on 506,989 US publications; of those, 302,915 (59.7%) have been determined to be in the public domain in the United States. The opening of these works in HathiTrust has brought the total of openly available volumes to 6,540,522. In early January 2020, 40,000+ titles in the 17 million item HathiTrust corpus will be in the public domain in the U.S. with some global access. Thanks to HathiTrust’s 148 member libraries committed to preservation and access of these titles.

The Proceedings of iPRES 2019 are now available for download! As the official record of all the peer reviewed submissions presented at the conference, the proceedings ensure visibility and promotion of both academic research work and the projects and initiatives of institutions involved in digital preservation practices. You can download the iPRES 2019 Proceedings as a PDF (ISBN: 9789062590438) or EPUB (ISBN: 9789062590452) file via the iPRES 2019 Web Site and soon also via the Phaidra Repository to be found on https://ipres-conference.org.

One of the biggest threats to ensuring long-term access to our digital heritage is the cost of preservation; also, one of the critical cost drivers is the set of activities associated with selection, acquisition, and other pre-ingest processing (such as quality assurance of acquired artifacts). Therefore, this question is raised: how do we scale what might be called “pre-ingest” activities without scaling up our costs at the same rate?

As Portico was working on their “next-generation” technical infrastructure, they developed new analytics services.  These services automated among others the insurance of storage policy consistency and some of those pre-ingest processes associated with quality assurance of content.

The not-for-profit technology provider for research and education, Jisc, and the publisher Wiley, are to digitise a one-million-page collection on the history of science. Through the partnership, the resulting digital collection will be free to all UK universities and colleges and, once the licences to the content expire, will be made available openly and globally password-free. Scholars and teachers will be able to freely access materials dating roughly between 1800 to the 1970s via the Wiley Digital Archives platform. The history of science collection will be available from March next year, giving access to primary source material that might otherwise have been hard to access, and difficult to use.