Sunshine Week 2016

March 13-19, 2016 marks Sunshine Week, an annual event which serves to raise awareness of the need for transparent and open government at all levels. Freedom of Information Day is also being observed on March 16, which coincides with James Madison's birthday. In 1822, Madison stated:

A popular Government without popular information or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy or perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power knowledge gives.

Sunshine laws such as the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and open meetings laws provide essential legal rights and remedies for citizen access to government records and information. FOIA, which was signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson on July 4, 1966 and went into effect one year later, created a "right to know" as the basis for access whereas previously citizens needed to demonstrate a "need to know." As Johnson observed at the time:

This legislation springs from one of our most essential principles: a democracy works best when the people have all the information that the security of the Nation permits. No one should be able to pull curtains of secrecy around decisions which can be revealed without injury to the public interest.

On March 15, 2016, the U.S. Senate passed Senate Bill 337 which contains a set of amendments to FOIA that would create a specific presumption of openness as well as other enhancements to government access if signed into law by the President. Further details can be found at the Fix FOIA by 50 Clearinghouse. The need for updates to FOIA is well illustrated by the Electronic Frontier Foundation's compilation of "the worst government responses to public records requests" during the last year.

For further information, the following resources may be of interest: The National Freedom of Information Coalition; The National Security Archive; The Center for Effective Government; The American Civil Liberties Union; The Electronic Frontier Foundation; and, for news of international freedom of information advocacy, FreedomInfo.org.

Opposition Grows against ACTA / TTP

As with SOPA and PIPA domestically, opposition is mounting against the international agreements, ACTA (the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement) and TPP (the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement). Both have lacked transparency in the negotiating process and threaten to rewrite intellectual property laws, thereby impacting citizens' rights globally to access content on the Internet and innovate with information technology. The Electronic Frontier Foundation provides further information on ACTA and TPP, and Fight for the Future is sponsoring a petition for people living around the world against the implementation of both.

In Europe, numerous protests are planned for February 11, 2012:

Wikipedia Protests SOPA / PIPA

On January 18, 2012, the Wikipedia community is blacking out millions of articles of content in the English version for 24 hours to protest pending US legislation: the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA). The decision to withdraw content was made by the global community of Wikipedia editors and is supported by the Wikimedia Foundation, which is the non-profit organization that operates Wikipedia and numerous related projects.

Wikipedia is urging US constituents to contact their elected representatives and voice their opposition to the two acts now under consideration in the House of Representatives and Senate. Wikipedia states further that:

SOPA and PIPA cripple the free and open internet. They put the onus on website owners to police user-contributed material and call for the blocking of entire sites, even if the links are not to infringing material. Small sites will not have the sufficient resources to mount a legal challenge. Without opposition, large media companies may seek to cut off funding sources for small competing foreign sites, even if big media are wrong. Foreign sites will be blacklisted, which means they won't show up in major search engines.

In a post SOPA/PIPA world, Wikipedia --and many other useful informational sites-- cannot survive in a world where politicians regulate the Internet based on the influence of big money in Washington. It represents a framework for future restrictions and suppression. Congress says it's trying to protect the rights of copyright owners, but the "cure" that SOPA and PIPA represent is much more destructive than the disease they are trying to fix.

To learn more about SOPA/PIPA, click here.

The Occupy Wall Street Library

Established by Betsy Fagin (according to a recent account in The New Yorker blog, The Book Bench), The Occupy Wall Street Library is still going strong, and now has a blog of its own. As might be expected, the library has flexible lending rules, leaving it up to borrowers' discretion whether to keep a given book, return it, or trade for it. Street librarians are currently creating a catalog of books in the library, and are soliciting donations of books and supplies as well as additional volunteer support.

More information about the Occupy Wall Street movement itself can be found at the NYC General Assembly web site, which also provides the text of the movement's manifesto, or Declaration of the Occupation of New York City. In addition, the progressive news aggregator, Common Dreams, has created a news portal for the Occupy movement around the U.S.

Note: The photo above was obtained from the Occupy Wall Street Library blog. Of related interest, the Common Curator in August profiled Street Books, a mobile library for the homeless.

The Internet Archive Builds a Physical Archive

As a complement to its online digital library, the Internet Archive is developing "a physical archive for the long term preservation of one copy of every book, record, and movie" that it can acquire, with a goal of obtaining ten million items. Founded in 1996, the Internet Archive's digital collections encompass millions of items, including texts, moving images, audio, software, and archived web pages. But as its founder Brewster Kahle noted in a recent blog post: "Books are being thrown away, or sometimes packed away, as digitized versions become more available. This is an important time to plan carefully for there is much at stake." He observed further that: "A library that would prefer to not be named was found to be thinning their collections and throwing out books based on what had been digitized by Google. While we understand the need to manage physical holdings, we believe this should be done thoughtfully and well."

In development since January 2009, the Internet Archive's first physical storage facility will be launched this month in Richmond, California (the image above depicts modified shipping containers that are utilized as environmentally controlled storage units). Further information on this initiative can be found in Kahle's blog post.

On a related note, the North Carolina History of Health Digital Collection is available online via the Internet Archive (The Common Curator was the principal investigator and project director for this grant-funded digitization project).

The Digital Public Library of America Announces "Beta Sprint"

The Steering Committee of the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) has announced a Beta Sprint to solicit ideas, recommendations, models, and so forth to inform the development of a large-scale digital library. The DPLA planning initiative is the outgrowth of a meeting in October 2010 at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, where representatives from numerous constituencies convened to discuss the creation of a national digital library. John Palfrey, chair of the DPLA Steering Committee, has stated:

As the DPLA planning initiative moves forward, we are optimistic that the DPLA community and public can help us think about what a DPLA might look like, in practical – and perhaps unexpected – ways, as platform, architecture, interface, and beyond. We hope geeks and librarians, especially, will join forces to develop beta submissions in support of this initiative.

Statements of Interest for the Beta Sprint are due by June 15, 2011, with final submissions due September 1, 2011. The DPLA Secretariat is located at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, and further information on the DPLA can be found on the Berkman Center web site. The DPLA also maintains a planning initiative wiki and a listserv for public discussion.

Wikipedia Celebrates Tenth Anniversary

Wikipedia, the open access encyclopedia, is celebrating its tenth anniversary today, January 15, 2011, with hundreds of events scheduled around the world. Wikipedia's growth has been nothing less than phenomenal, with over 17 million articles of content distributed over 278 languages at present. English is the largest Wikipedia language, with over 3.5 million articles.

Wikipedia is hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation, which also sponsors numerous other projects, such as Wiktionary, Wikiquote, Wikibooks, Wikimedia Commons, etc.

For previous Wikipedia-related posts, click here.

Banned Books Week 2010

Banned Books Week: Celebrating the Freedom to Read (September 25 to October 2, 2010) is an annual event celebrating the freedom to read and the importance of the First Amendment. Held during the last week of September, Banned Books Week highlights the benefits of free and open access to information while drawing attention to the harms of censorship by spotlighting actual or attempted bannings of books across the United States.

Banned Books Week is sponsored by the American Booksellers Association; American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression; the American Library Association; American Society of Journalists and Authors; Association of American Publishers; and the National Association of College Stores. It is endorsed by the Center for the Book in the Library of Congress.

For more information on getting involved with Banned Books Week: Celebrating the Freedom to Read, please see the American Library Association's Calendar of Events and Ideas and Resources. You can also contact the ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom at 1-800-545-2433, ext. 4220, or bbw@ala.org.

New Consortium for History of Medicine Finding Aids

The History of Medicine Division of the National Library of Medicine (NLM) is pleased to announce the release of its prototype History of Medicine Finding Aids Consortium, a search-and-discovery tool for archival resources in the health sciences that are described by finding aids and held by various institutions throughout the United States.

The new resource crawls existing Web content managed by partner institutions, provides keyword search functionality, and provides results organized by holding institution. Links point to the holding institution's Web sites. Formats indexed consist of HTML, PDF and Encoded Archival Description XML. The project does not include content held in bibliographic utilities or other database-type information. Crawls are conducted monthly to ensure information is current and to capture new content as it is released.

Current Consortium partners are:

-- NLM History of Medicine Division, Archives and Modern Manuscripts Program
-- Columbia University Health Center Library Archives and Special Collections
-- Medical Archives of the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions
-- University of California-San Francisco Library Archives and Special Collections
-- University of Virginia Health Sciences Library Historical Collections
-- Virginia Commonwealth University Tompkins-McCaw Library Special Collections and Archives

NLM's History of Medicine Division invites libraries, archives and museums which include in their collections archival materials related to the history of medicine and health sciences to join.

For more information about the project or requests to join the Consortium, please contact John P. Rees, Archivist and Digital Resources Manager, NLM, at reesj@nlm.nih.gov, or visit the Consortium's web site.

HSL Special Collections and Social Media

:: Special Collections at UNC Health Sciences Library

— Special Collections Website
— About Special Collections
— Exhibitions
— Digital Collections
— Historical Collections
— Archival Collections
— Oral History
— Donor Collections
— Highlights
— Guide to Research Resources
— Search Library Catalogs
— UNC Health Affairs History
— Friends of HSL

:: The Carolina Curator

— The Carolina Curator Blog
— The Carolina Curator on Delicious
— The Carolina Curator on Facebook
— The Carolina Curator on Flickr
— The Carolina Curator on Twitter

:: The Bullitt Club

— Bullitt History of Medicine Club
— Bullitt Lectures on iTunes [navigate to School of Medicine] [direct link]

:: Mobile

— Mobile Options for UNC
— Mobile for UNC Libraries
— Mobile for National Library of Medicine





Note: The image above was created using the image utility at Wordle.

UNC Health Sciences Library Awarded Digitization Grant

Special Collections at UNC Health Sciences Library has recently been awarded $42,675 for year two of a three-year NC ECHO digitization grant project for the creation of the North Carolina History of Health Digital Collection. Funded by the State Library of North Carolina through the Library Services and Technology Act (LSTA), the 2010-11 awards were announced June 10, 2010 and totalled $4.9 million for statewide library projects; the complete list of awards, including others at UNC, is available at the LSTA web site.

Work on the North Carolina History of Health Digital Collection commenced with a pilot project over two years ago, and through year one of the grant project (FY 09-10), over 130,000 pages of core journals and books in medicine, public health, dentistry, pharmacy, and nursing from 1849 to the present have been digitized. The digital collection will eventually grow to over 800 volumes and approximately 300,000 pages. This material thoroughly documents the development of health care and the health professions within North Carolina and is thus a significant part of the state’s cultural heritage and history.

While digitized content is also being made available via the Internet Archive, the project is actively developing an integrated web site that will provide consolidated online access and advanced searching functionalities. The digital collection will moreover provide historical context for the resources in the various health disciplines and K-12 educational materials for selected content. A glimpse of public health images from the digital collection is available via Flickr.

Daniel Smith, Special Collections Librarian at UNC Health Sciences Library, is the principal investigator and project manager, and has directed each phase of the grant. Partners in the project include the Carolina Digital Library and Archive, the UNC Library, and Learn NC.

Note: The image above is from the Health Bulletin (1927), v. 42, n. 2, p. 1, published by the North Carolina State Board of Health.

The Internet Archive Book Drive

The Internet Archive has been scanning books for some years now, and we're always looking for more. In addition to 1,000,000+ eBooks available to anyone available through Open Library, we've announced the release of modern books for the print-disabled community in a special format called DAISY. It's a brand new collection--one of the largest available online. For too long, print-disabled people have been denied access to the full breadth of contemporary books, and we'd like to assist in tipping that balance back to where it should be, universal access for all readers.

Please help us by donating books to be scanned or with financial support for the scanning process. Based on existing foundation funding, we are sponsoring the scanning of the first 10,000 books that are donated in this Book Drive. We're looking for wonderful and important books for this first 10,000 and even more books and money to keep it going. We will make these digital books as available to the world as we can, including the print-disabled, and will preserve the physical book for the long term.

How Does The Book Drive Work?
You can simply send up to 100 books or drop them off in person at our headquarters:

Internet Archive Book Drive
300 Funston Avenue
San Francisco, CA 94118

If you'd like to make a donation of more than 100 books, wow! That would be wonderful, but please give us a call on +1 415-561-6767 to arrange shipping and handling.

Read more . . . .

Study of Open Access Publishing Project

A survey is being conducted by the Study of Open Access Publishing (SOAP) project, financed by the European Commission. The study is investigating publishing practices and attitudes towards Open Access publishing. More information about the SOAP project can be found on the project's public website.

The survey is primarily aimed at active researchers in public and private organisations, from all fields of the research in the sciences and humanities. It focuses on publication of research articles in peer-reviewed journals. All responses will be confidential and submitted anonymously. It should take about 10-15 minutes to complete. Results will be made publicly available in the second half of 2010.

The SOAP consortium represents key stakeholders such as publishers (BioMed Central Ltd (BMC), Sage Publications Ltd (SAGE) UK and Springer Science+Business Media Deutschland GmbH (SSBM)), funding agencies (Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) UK), libraries (Max Planck Digital Library of the Max Planck Society) and a broad spectrum of research disciplines.

It aims to study the new open access business models that have emerged as a result of the shift from print to digital documents and inform the European Commission and all stakeholders about the risks, opportunities and essential requirements for a smooth transition to open access publishing.

Beyond Impact Factor: Panel & Discussion

Beyond Impact Factor: Understanding & Supporting Scholarly Work in the New Academy
Wednesday, June 9, 2010, 9am-12:30pm
Pleasants Family Assembly Room, Wilson Library, UNC

The UNC Libraries' Scholarly Communications Committee invites you to a half-day panel and discussion, exploring alternative forms of scholarly output and their impact on academia. Please register by Friday, June 4. Beverages and refreshments will be served.

Panelists include:

Gary Marchionini (moderator), Dean, School of Information and Library Science, UNC
Phil Edwards, Instructor in School of Information and Library Science, UNC
Molly Keener, Scholarly Communications Librarian, Wake Forest University
Erin O'Meara, Electronic Records Archivist, UNC
Kevin Smith, Scholarly Communications Officer, Duke

First National VIVO Conference: Enabling National Networking of Scientists

Enabling National Networking of Scientists
August 12-13, 2010
New York Hall of Science

The first annual National VIVO Conference, Enabling National Networking of Scientists, will bring together scientists, developers, publishers, funding agencies, research officers, students and those supporting the development of team science. This two day conference will begin with workshops and tutorials for those new to VIVO, those implementing VIVO at their institutions, and those wishing to develop applications using VIVO. Invited speakers will present regarding the Semantic Web, Linked Open Data and the role of VIVO in support of team science. Panelists will discuss adoption and implementation findings. Feedback sessions will engage participants in requirements gathering and brainstorming regarding future network services. Presenters will discuss mapping, social networking, crowd sourcing, support for societies and other national network applications. Learn more at the conference web site.

VIVO is an open source, open ontology, research discovery platform for hosting information about scientists, their interests, activities, and accomplishments. VIVO supports open development and integration of science through simple, standard semantic web technologies. Learn more at the VIVO web site. VIVO is funded by the National Institutes of Health, U24 RR029822.

New Mobile Application for PLoS Medicine

The Center for Biomedical Informatics at the Harvard Medical School in collaboration with the Public Library of Science (PLoS.org) have created a free iPhone application for PLoS Medicine, the open-access journal publishing important original research and analysis relevant to human health.

To give it a test drive, simply visit the iTunes Application store and download it to your iPhone or iPod Touch. To launch the application, simply touch the PLoS icon and you are immediately taken to a screen that contains the most recent and viewed articles, with an option to search for anything else from the current or archive issues using your touch keypad.
Other features include:

• Clear article layout – with options to view the PDF or view online
• Favorite and share – straight from your phone
• Access the full archive – never be without the content you need again
• Get further information – about PLoS in general and PLoS Medicine specifically
  

:: Check out related Carolina Curator blog entries for mobile options at UNC Libraries and the National Library of Medicine.

Open Knowledge Commons To Create Digital Medical Heritage Library

The Open Knowledge Commons has received a $1.5 million dollar award from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to launch its first major collaborative digitization initiative, a digital Medical Heritage Library project.

The project’s goal is to create a permanent, freely accessible digital library of all published medical heritage literature. This first round of funding will support collaborative digitization of approximately 30,000 volumes of public domain works from the collections of some of the world’s leading medical libraries, including the National Library of Medicine, the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and the New York Public Library.

Future plans for the project foresee the addition of other library partners and the creation of a web site for access to the shared digital collections.

The Open Knowledge Commons (OKC), a nonprofit organization based in Cambridge, MA, is dedicated to building a universal digital library for democratic access to information. OKC works to identify, instigate, and secure funding for projects that expand the digital commons and facilitate its use. Working with research libraries, cultural heritage institutions, funders, and their partners, it supports digitization of printed collections, the open availability and use of scanned and born-digital materials, and the long-term preservation of such works.

For more information, contact Maura Marx at maura at knowledgecommons dot org.

Note: This notice is from the Open Knowledge Commons website.

International Open Access Week

The first International Open Access Week will take place October 19-23, 2009. The Open Access movement aims to promote free, online access to content that has traditionally been available on a subscription or fee basis. Many examples of open access journals can be found in the Directory of Open Access Journals, which currently tallies 4,371 journals world-wide. BioMed Central and the Public Library of Science (PLoS) are among the leading publishers that make scientific and medical literature freely available to the public.

The UNC Health Sciences Library has long been a strong supporter of Open Access, and a number of useful Open Access and Scholarly Communication resources can be found on the HSL web site. Beginning in April 2008, Congress mandated that National Institutes of Health-funded researchers must submit articles produced from such funding to PubMed Central no later than 12 months after publication in a peer-reviewed journal. To facilitate this process, HSL has prepared an NIH Public Access Policy Toolkit, and also manages a fund to support Open Access publishing fees.

On Monday, October 19, the UNC Libraries Scholarly Communication Committee will be sponsoring a panel on Perspectives on Open Access, which will feature Phil Edwards, UNC School of Information and Library Science; Kate McGraw, UNC Health Sciences Library; James Boyle, Duke Law School; and Kevin Smith, Duke Scholarly Communications Officer. The event will be held in Room 214, Davis Library, from 3:30-4:30pm, and is open to the public.

The Public Library of Science Launches PLoS Currents

Harold Varmus, Chairman and Co-Founder of the Public Library of Science (PLoS), has just announced PLoS Currents (Beta), an experimental website that is designed to accelerate the communication of research and ideas. The first project is PLoS Currents: Influenza, which utilizes Google Knol and Rapid Research Notes, a new database of the National Center for Biotechnology Information. Contributions on all aspects of influenza are being solicited, but will not be subject to in-depth peer review; instead a board of moderators will screen submissions, and all results and conclusions must be regarded as preliminary until such time as they merit publication in a formal journal.

BMJ Offers Prize for Use of Its Online Archive

To celebrate online access to all research articles since the first published in October 1840, BMJ, or the British Medical Journal, is offering a 1,000-pound prize to the "most interesting use" of its archive. Entrants to the competition must describe their actual use of the archive in an article that is submitted by the September 30, 2009 deadline. Complete guidelines are available at the BMJ site.

To highlight some of the many influential contributions to medical scholarship and practice that have appeared in its pages over the years, BMJ is also producing a series of videos that describe the work of such people as James Simpson (chloroform), Joseph Lister (antisepsis), Ronald Ross and Patrick Manson (mosquitoes and malaria), Richard Dahl (smoking and cancer), Alice Stewart (x-rays and leukemia), and others. The first video in the series, "The Evidence," is now available online.

BMJ began as the Provincial Medical and Surgical Journal in 1840 and after various name changes became the British Medical Journal in 1857. BMJ was the first general medical journal to participate in PubMed Central, which offered to digitize and provide open access to the journal's back issues. Initial difficulties included assembling a complete run of the journal in all its incarnations as well as overcoming the many technical issues inherent in digitizing historical materials, such as poor paper quality and bleed-through during scanning.

The National Library of Medicine, and later, the Wellcome Trust and the Joint Information Systems Committee, provided financial support for the project, with an estimated expense of $1 per page for the 824,183 total pages of the print journal. At present, BMJ is available both at the BMJ web site and at PubMed Central. Access to article type, however, varies between the two resources. In January 2006, BMJ stopped offering free online access to non-research articles, although research articles are still available from the time of publication at both bmj.com and PubMed Central. Further information on the online archive can be found in a recent BMJ editorial.