ACRL College & Research Libraries News

College & Research Libraries News

News from the Field

Stephanie Orphan

ALA/ACRL encourage participation on RoweCom creditor committee

ALA and ACRL have undertaken steps to ensure that library interests are well-represented in the RoweCom bankruptcy proceedings. ALA filed to join a creditor’s committee established by the Eastern Division of the U.S. Bankruptcy Court, where subscription agency RoweCom has filed for Chapter 11 status. In its application, ALA seeks to represent the interests of smaller libraries nationwide affected by the RoweCom failure. ACRL has taken the lead in encouraging academic and research libraries, a number of whom are among the 40 libraries with the largest exposure, to join the committee.

DSpace Federation collaboration announced

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Libraries have announced initial development of the DSpace Federation with six major research universities: Columbia University, Cornell University, Ohio State University, and the Universities of Rochester, Toronto, and Washington. DSpace, a digital repository for intellectual output, was launched worldwide in November 2002. The federation project will explore the adaptability of DSpace to institutions beyond MIT, develop documentation for future federators, and investigate new types of services that can be built on federated collections held in DSpace repositories at different institutions. MIT believes that by developing a federation of institutions that employ the same software and protocols, the sustainability and potential for continued development of the system are enhanced.

Ebrary launches new database collections

Ebrary has announced the availability of unique database collections that combine more than 20,000 books and other documents from more than 150 leading academic, trade, and general subject areas, as well as publishers collections, featuring highly specialized content from individual academic and professional publishers. Ebrary’s database collections enable simultaneous, multi-user access and integrate with existing ILS systems and digital resources, with full MARC records provided. The company also announced that is offering a new selection of hundreds of individual eBooks. Separate from its database collections, eBooks may be purchased by libraries who then own individual titles and provide check-out options allowing only a certain number of students or patrons to access a title at a given time.

NYPL Picture Collection goes digital

The New York Public Library has begun a major initiative to make thousands of digital images from its Picture Collection available online. The more than one million images housed at the Mid-Manhattan Library are currently at the disposal of some 140,000 visitors each year. Through the new initiative, 30,000 digital images will be online by the end of 2003 in some of the most popular subject areas.

Organized into more than two dozen subjects, including African Americans, American history, costumes, fashion drawings, New York City, dragons, and animals, the digitized images date from the 1700s through the first quarter of the 20th century. The images are drawn from the Picture Collection’s vast holdings of images clipped from books, newspapers, and magazines, as well as original photographs, prints and postcards. The Picture Collection is accessible online at http:// picturecollection.nypl.org.

Innovative offers digital collections solutions

Innovative Interfaces is offering a suite of products designed to better organize libraries’ electronic collections. Digital collections products include Electronic Resource Management, XML Server, Millennium Access Plus (MAP), and Metasource. Electronic Resource Management, currently in alpha testing at the University of Washington and scheduled for general release in 2003, replaces the need for libraries to build separate databases and controls subscription and licensing information for licensed resources, such as e-journals and fulltext databases. XML server, also scheduled for release this year, outputs catalog data in XML format. MAP is an integrated portal solution that manages access to information resources, while MetaSource includes tools for digital object storage, crawling external collections, and full support for metadata schemes.

All of the products can be integrated with the Millennium system, with Electronic Resource Management and MAP available as stand-alone products.

Smithsonian opens natural history library

The Smithsonian Institutions Libraries has opened a state-of-the-art natural history and rare book library, the Joseph F. Cullman III Library of Natural History. It houses, for the first time in one place, the Smithsonian Libraries’ entire collection of approximately 10,000 rare and valuable natural history books and manuscripts. Located in the Smithsonian’s

National Museum of Natural History, the Cullman Library offers easy access to natural history scientists, museum curators, researchers, students, and visitors. The library is named for New York City businessman Joseph F. Cullman III, whose $2 million gift established an endowment to support the programs and operations of the facilities.

Among the manuscripts in the collection are Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, works by ornithologists John James Audubon, Daniel G. Eliott, and John Gould; and Konrad Gesner’s 17th-century lcones Animαlium, an early zoological encyclopedia with many woodcuts of recognizable and imaginary animals. The Cullman Library complements the Dibner Library of the History of Science and Technology, located in the National Museum of American History.

ProQuest enters into linking partnerships

ProQuest’s Information and Learning unit announced that it has entered into several linking partnerships and enhanced its OpenURL capabilities to allow users to move seamlessly between ProQuest databases and their other online resources, such as e-journal subscriptions, library catalogs, aggregator databases, and document delivery services. ProQuest’s OpenURL architecture supports linking from ProQuest to other resources and vice versa.

UTA Libraries feature Tejano Voices

The University of Texas-Arlington (UTA) Libraries have created a Web site that allows access to digitized oral history interviews with Mexican American public figures in Texas. The interviews, conducted by UTA political science professor Jose Angel Gutierrez, emphasize the personal stories and struggles of Tejano leaders, many of whom are the first individuals of Mexican descent in their communities elected or appointed to government office. The Web site provides background information on the Tejano Voices Project and features a page devoted to each interviewee, with photos of the interviewee, a biographical note, an interview summary, full text of the interview, and an audio file of the entire interview. Seventy-seven interviews are currently available through the site at http://libraries.uta.edu/tejanovoices. An additional 81 interviews are held by UTA’s Special Collections but have not yet been catalogued and digitized.

Ingenta provides online solutions for World Bank, Oxford Univ. Press

Ingenta has been selected to create the World Bank’s e-library, an electronic collection of World Bank publications, documents, and papers. The e-library will be one of the most comprehensive online collections of works in the area of international social and economic development available today, including more than 1,000 World Bank published titles in electronic format. The e-library content will be accessible on the World Bank site as well as through IngentaSelect.com.

The company has also been appointed to build a specialist monograph Web site on behalf of Oxford University Press. The site will be online and cross-searchable in late 2003.

Richard Clement named editor of RBM

ACRL is pleased to announce the appointment of Richard Clement as the new editor for RBM: A Journal of Rare Books, Manuscripts, and Cultural Heritage (RBM). Clement is special collections librarian and head of the Department of Special Collections at the Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas. He will carry on the editorial focus of the journal in addressing important current issues in special collections librarianship and preserving our cultural heritage and will assist the current coeditors in producing the spring issue of RBM. Clement’s term officially begins at the end of the 2003 ALA Annual Conference, and his first issue will be in fall 2003.

Turkish archive available through Texas Tech

Texas Tech University’s Southwest Collection/ Special Collections Library has made available online the Archive of Turkish Oral Narrative (ATON). The archive consists of more than 6 million translated words from a range of texts, all of which are available through the ATON Web site. The Web site launched in October 2002 and in the first three weeks of January was accessed by more patrons than the total number of visitors to the archives premises in its 40-year existence. To visit the ATON online, go to http://aton.tte.edu.

UNC Charlotte joins ASERL's Kudzu Project

The University of North Carolina (UNC)-Charlotte is the latest ASERL library to join the Kudzu shared catalog system developed by the Association of Southeastern Research Libraries (ASERL). Launched in January 2001 as a means of connecting library catalogs at 12 ASERL institutions, Kudzu now connects more than 300,000 faculty and student users from 17 institutions. The addition of UNC-Charlotte brings the total number of volumes searchable via the Kudzu interface to more than 30 million. The Kudzu system uses OCLC’s SiteSearch software as its search engine. Once materials are identified, a cooperatively developed set of ILL policies and procedures ensures expedited delivery of materials to the borrowing library.

IEEE offers information technology library

The IEEE Information Technology Library (IteL) is a new online collection offering the full text of more than 900 IEEE conference proceedings and periodicals in computing, communications, signal processing, and circuits and systems dating back to 1993-The collection provides access to many of the world’s leading information technology publications, the top five telecommunications journals, and 22 of the 50 top-rated journals in electrical and electronic engineering. Also included are top-cited journals in software engineering, hardware, computer theory and methods, artificial intelligence, and information. ■