NEWS AND NOTES / NOUVELLES ET NOTES

Compiled by Sophie Regalado

<table><tr><td>MeSH vocabulary updated for 2008</td><td>29</td></tr><tr><td>A framework of guidance for building good digital collections</td><td>29</td></tr><tr><td>Reliability of journal impact factor rankings</td><td>29</td></tr><tr><td>Government retreats on copyright reform: Minister of Industry Jim Prentice delays plan to introduce controversial bill</td><td>30</td></tr><tr><td>Opposition to copyright bill seems to have blindsided Prentice</td><td>30</td></tr><tr><td>Research hospitals lobby for multi-year funding, national health research framework</td><td>30</td></tr><tr><td>The Survey of Library Database Licensing Practices</td><td>31</td></tr><tr><td>Google and other people's content</td><td>31</td></tr><tr><td>Copyright debate finds no shortage of missionary zeal</td><td>31</td></tr><tr><td>The Canadian DMCA: What you can do</td><td>32</td></tr><tr><td>News publishers push for changes to search engine rules</td><td>32</td></tr><tr><td>Online library offers 1.5 million works and counting</td><td>32</td></tr><tr><td>Slow-starting e-books find niche markets</td><td>33</td></tr><tr><td>Synergies: Building national infrastructure for Canadian scholarly publishing</td><td>33</td></tr><tr><td>University of Michigan librarian's new blog defends institution's deal with Google</td><td>33</td></tr><tr><td>University library goes digital</td><td>34</td></tr><tr><td>Canada's digital info strategy stuck in an analog world</td><td>34</td></tr><tr><td>Copyright Act key to Canada's industrial strategy</td><td>34</td></tr><tr><td>Alternatives to bonuses</td><td>35</td></tr><tr><td>Internet2 and libraries: serving your communities at the speed of light</td><td>35</td></tr><tr><td>Open access to research funded by US is at issue</td><td>35</td></tr><tr><td>Google takes aim at wireless industry with open software alliance</td><td>36</td></tr><tr><td>Rethinking collections – libraries and librarians in an open age: a theoretical view</td><td>36</td></tr><tr><td>When Wikipedia is the assignment</td><td>36</td></tr><tr><td>When is open access not open access?</td><td>37</td></tr><tr><td>Future reading: digitization and its discontents</td><td>37</td></tr><tr><td>Canada playing catch-up: Alberta takes Canadian lead in efforts to integrate cyber infrastructure assets</td><td>37</td></tr><tr><td>Canadian Digital Information Strategy (CDIS)</td><td>38</td></tr></table>
<table>
  <tr>
    <td>Libraries shun deals to place books on Web</td>
    <td>38</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>E-books multiply, but who's reading them?</td>
    <td>38</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>Library of Congress and UNESCO sign World Digital Library agreement</td>
    <td>39</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>Max Planck Society terminates licensing contract with Springer publishing house</td>
    <td>39</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>Mandate for public access to NIH-funded research poised to become law</td>
    <td>39</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>Preservation in the age of large-scale digitization: a white paper</td>
    <td>39</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>The future of electronic paper</td>
    <td>40</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>New site search engine allows easier, more efficient navigation of MedlinePlus and NLM Web site</td>
    <td>40</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>New assessment focuses on measuring return on health research investments</td>
    <td>40</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>Anti-open access group loses another supporter</td>
    <td>40</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>CHLA / ABSC 2008 Conference / Congrès 2008</td>
    <td>41</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>International Copyright Symposium – Amsterdam World Book Capital Foundation</td>
    <td>41</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>2008 Medical Library Association (MLA) Annual Meeting</td>
    <td>41</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>CLA 2008 Annual Conference and Trade Show</td>
    <td>41</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>SLA 2008 Annual Conference</td>
    <td>41</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>FIS Professional Learning Centre: Mastering Web searching (Web)</td>
    <td>42</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>FIS Professional Learning Centre: The information professional as educator – A PLC train-the-trainer course (Web)</td>
    <td>42</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>Education Institute: Search engines 101: How search engines work (audio conference)</td>
    <td>43</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>Education Institute: Search engine master class – Finding, choosing and using the best advanced features of the major search engines (online course)</td>
    <td>43</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>Education Institute: Library 2.0 without all the MySpace hype – How to use social tools to solve problems (Web conference)</td>
    <td>43</td>
  </tr>
</table>
NEWS AND NOTES / NOUVELLES ET NOTES

MeSH vocabulary updated for 2008

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NLM Technical Bulletin. 2007 November–December;359

The MeSH Browser (http://www.nlm.nih.gov/mesh/MBrowser.html) currently contains a link to the 2008 MeSH vocabulary. Searchers should consult the Browser to find MeSH headings of interest and to see these in relationship to other headings. The Browser contains MeSH Heading records that may include scope notes, annotations, entry terms, history notes, allowable qualifiers (subheadings), previous headings, and other information. It also includes Subheading records and Supplementary Concept Records (SCRs) for substances that are not MeSH Headings. This year, for the first time, the MeSH Tree Structures (http://www.nlm.nih.gov/mesh/trees2008.html) are available online in both PDF and HTML formats with all indented terms showing. For highlights about 2008 MeSH, see the forthcoming article, “What’s New for 2008 MeSH”, in the NLM Technical Bulletin (http://www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/techbull/nd07/nd07_medline_data_change

A framework of guidance for building good digital collections

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NISO Framework Working Group. National Information Standards Organization, December 2007
http://www.niso.org框架/framework/framework3.pdf

As the digital environment matured, the focus of digital collection-building efforts shifted toward the creation of useful and relevant collections that served the needs of one or more communities of users. The bar of “goodness” was raised to include lev- els of usability, accessibility, and fitness for use appropriate to the anticipated user group(s). Digital collection development has now evolved and matured to a stage where simply serving useful digital collections effectively to a known constituency is not sufficient. Issues of cost/value, sustainability, and trust have emerged as critical success criteria for good digital collections. Ob- jects, metadata, and collections must now be viewed not only within the context of the projects that created them, but as building blocks that others can reuse, repackage, repurpose, and build services upon. “Goodness” now demands interoperability, reusabil- ity, persistence, verification, documentation, and support for intellectual property rights.

Reliability of journal impact factor rankings

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Greenwood DC. BMC Medical Research Methodology. 2007 Nov 15;7(48)
http://www.biomedcentral.com/content/pdf/1471-2288-7-48.pdf

Journal citation reports are used widely as the basis for assessing research output. They are used by funding bodies to gauge the quality of publications, by researchers to assess which journals they choose to submit manuscripts to, and as a basis for journals to attract new subscriptions and advertising. Decisions placed on journal impact factors are potentially misleading where the uncertainty associated with the measure is ignored. This article proposes that caution should be exercised in the in- terpretation of journal impact factors and their ranks, and specifically, that a measure of uncertainty should be routinely pre- sented alongside the point estimate.
# Government retreats on copyright reform: Minister of Industry Jim Prentice delays plan to introduce controversial bill

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CBC News. 13 December 2007

http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2007/12/13/tech-copyright-delay.html

A controversial bill that seeks to reform Canadian copyright laws will not be introduced this week, federal officials con- firmed on Thursday. The House of Commons goes into recess for the holidays at the end of this week, meaning the bill could not be introduced until late January at the earliest. Prentice was expected to introduce the copyright reform bill earlier this week. The bill would have made such activities as the time-shifting of television shows, file-sharing of music and video, and copying files to CDs or MP3 players illegal. Prentice backtracked on the plan after more than 50 angry protesters showed up to question him at the meeting, and an online group formed to oppose it on the social networking site Facebook. The group was started by University of Ottawa professor Michael Geist, a chief opponent of the legislation, on 1 December 2007. More than 20 000 Facebook users have joined the group since then.

# Opposition to copyright bill seems to have blindsided Prentice

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McMurdy D. *Ottawa Citizen*. 12 December 2007

The game of politics has many rules. But probably one of the most important of all is this: never surprise or embarrass the boss. And yet, it would seem that that's exactly what's happened at Industry Canada over the contentious copyright reform file. Whatever the reasons or the context, Industry Minister Jim Prentice was, by many accounts, blindsided by the breadth and ferocity of opposition to the legislation he was expected to deliver before Parliament breaks for Christmas at week's end. If the minister was sufficiently moved by online petitions and a rally at his riding office over the past weekend to delay and revise the legislation, it's inevitable that those who favour a far more muscular copyright and intellectual property policy are now planning to turn up the heat on their aggressive lobbying efforts even more. Furthermore, the perceived victory among the cyber-rebels who have relentlessly attacked several of the principles that were expected to be included in the government's new policy, have also been encouraged to step up their efforts as well.

# Research hospitals lobby for multi-year funding, national health research framework

Research Money. 2007 Dec 10;21(19)

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Canada's research hospitals want the Science and Technology Strategy broadened to include multi-year funding and a na- tional strategic framework for health research. In a 76-page report released 28 November 2007, the Association of Canadian Academic Healthcare Organizations (ACAHO) calls on all players involved in health research, from governments and funding agencies to teaching hospitals, to take steps it says are necessary for Canada to maximize investments in health research, inno- vation, and commercialization.
# The Survey of Library Database Licensing Practices

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## Primary Research Group

http://primaryresearch.com

The study presents data from 90 libraries—corporate, legal, college, public, state, and nonprofit libraries—about their database licensing practices. More than half of the participating libraries are from the USA, and the rest are from Canada, Australia, the UK, and other countries. Data is broken out by type and size of library, as well as for overall level of database expenditure. The 100+ page study, with more than 400 tables and charts, presents benchmarking data enabling librarians to compare their library's practices to peers in many areas related to licensing.

# Google and other people's content

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## Fine J. Business Week. 3 December 2007

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_49/b4061083.htm

The formula is familiar: Sell ads, in many cases around content Google does not own; turn over the bulk of that revenue to the owner of the content; repeat until the end of time. Google's revenues almost tripled, to $11.8 billion, in the first nine months of 2007, so it is hard to argue with its approach. However, really, how long can this go on? Not even the most ardent Google apologist claims its profits will balloon by the billion forever. Some perched in lofty places throughout the media biosphere advance a quietly radical notion: Google will start buying content companies. In fact, they say, Google will have no choice.

# Copyright debate finds no shortage of missionary zeal

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## McMurdy D. *Ottawa Citizen*. 3 December 2007

With controversial copyright reform legislation expected as early as this week, it might be worth remembering that bitter, bloody fights have been an integral part of this deeply divisive issue since at least the sixth century. While it is not likely that opponents of the imminent bill will lay siege to Parliament Hill or have anyone exiled, there is no shortage of missionary zeal swirling around this issue. And if, as expected, it reflects the influence of the powerful American entertainment lobby, there will certainly be backlash if not bloodshed. That's principally because copyright is a major point of intersection between culture and money—both of which tend to ignite rather strong feelings and opinions. Another element that makes it so controversial—and underscores why it's so important for the federal government to strike the right balance—is that, according to experts, aggressive copyright rules are “a one-way street” and very hard to reverse.
## The Canadian DMCA: What you can do

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Geist M. 2 December 2007

http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/2431/125/

With the Canadian version of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) likely to be introduced within the next 2 weeks, there has been a remarkable outpouring of interest from individual Canadians about what they can do to have their concerns heard. The unfortunate reality is that there is nothing that can be done about what the bill will look like when it is introduced. Industry Minister Jim Prentice has simply decided to discard consumer, education, research, and privacy interests, ignore his own party's policy platform, and cave into US pressure. Once the bill is introduced, however, Canadians can send a message to their MPs, the ministers, and others, calling for a fair copyright bill that addresses Canadian concerns (those in Calgary can do so in person on 8 December as Prentice hosts an open house).

## News publishers push for changes to search engine rules

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Associated Press. 29 November 2007

http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2007/11/29/tech-news.html

Leading news organizations and other publishers have proposed changing the rules that tell search engines what they can and cannot collect when scouring the Web, saying the revisions would give site owners greater control over their content. Google Inc., Yahoo Inc., and other top search companies now voluntarily respect a Web site's wishes as stated in a document known as "robots.txt", which a search engine's indexing software, called a crawler, knows to look for on a site. Under the existing 13-year-old technology, a site can block indexing of individual Web pages, specific directories, or the entire site. Some search engines have added their own commands to the rules, but they are not universally observed.

## Online library offers 1.5 million works and counting

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Lombardi C. CNET News. 27 November 2007

http://www.news.com/Online-library-offers-1.5-million-works-and-counting/2100-1025_3-6220358.html?tag=newsmap

The Universal Digital Library, a book-scanning project backed by several major libraries across the globe, has completed the digitization of 1.5 million books and on Tuesday made them free and publically available. The online library offers full-text downloads of works that are in the public domain, or for which the copyright holder has been given permission to make available. Having the backing of prominent institutions such as the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Alexandria, Egypt, however, the collection goes far beyond the widely available classics, though those are there, too.
Slow-starting e-books find niche markets

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Svensson P. Associated Press. 4 December 2007

http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/071204/business_of_life.html

For a decade now, publishers have been hoping to wean readers off books and move them to electronic versions, which are much cheaper to produce and distribute. It just has not happened, even with the support of an electronics giant like Sony, which put out a dedicated e-book reader last year. Amazon.com Inc. recently followed up with its own reader. However, if you look away from the mainstream publishing industry, e-books are already a success in a few niches, where they are giving rise to new ways of doing business. Witness Gareth-Michael Skarka, a representative of one of our newest professions: the e-book publisher. “E-book publishers” that reformat printed books into electronic formats have been around for a while, but Skarka commissions, edits, and sells books that overwhelmingly never see print and would never have existed if it weren’t for electronic publishing.

Synergies: Building national infrastructure for Canadian scholarly publishing

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Devakos R, Turko K. ARL Bimonthly Report. 2007 July/Aug;252/253

http://www.arl.org/bm%7Edoc/arl-br-252-253-synergies.pdf

Smaller multilingual countries face particular challenges in addressing the crisis in scholarly communication. Yet a nation's voice is often defined, and refined, through its literature, including that of scholarship and research. Fortunately the academic community has benefited from a series of recent and emerging partnerships in the production and dissemination of new knowledge. This paper describes a collaborative project addressing publishing and access to research whose contribution will include testing scalability and generalizability. During its 4-year grant term, Synergies will not only develop publishing services and expertise within Canadian libraries, it will deliver production-level services to publishers and editors.

University of Michigan librarian's new blog defends institution's deal with Google

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Young JR. *The Chronicle of Higher Education*. 26 November 2007

http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/article/2565/u-of-michigan-librarians-new-blog-defends-institutions-deal-with.google

Paul Courant, who recently took the helm at the University of Michigan's libraries, has started a blog to defend the university's controversial book-scanning deal with Google, in which the search giant is digitizing and adding to its index millions of books from Michigan and a group of other major libraries. “I believe that the University of Michigan (and the other partner libraries) and Google are changing the world for the better,” he wrote earlier this month in one of his first posts. “Google is on pace to scan over 7 million volumes from U-M libraries in six years at no cost to the University. As part of our arrangement with Google, they give us copies of all the digital files, and we can keep them forever.”
## University library goes digital

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**Expatica. 26 November 2007**

http://www.expatica.com/be/articles/news/university-library-goes-digital-46310.html

Ghent University Library has teamed up with the Internet search engine Google in a deal that in time will make 300 000 books from the library's catalogue available to all via the World Wide Web. Ghent will be the first Belgian university library to make its collection available online. Soon anyone logging onto Google Book Search will be able to find digital versions of many of the books available in the famous Book Tower on Ghent's Blandijnberg. Ghent University will be the first to make a large number of Dutch-language books available. Ghent will also be only the second academic institution in the world (after BCU Lausanne in Switzerland) to make a large collection of French books available on the net.

## Canada's digital info strategy stuck in an analog world

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**Geist M. 12 November 2007**

http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/2375/135/

In today's technological world, most content is "born digital", yet there remains a rich history of books, music, film, photos, and other works in analog form. Since people increasingly have access solely to digital content, policy makers must confront the challenge of how to bring all of our culture and historical knowledge into the digital realm. The strategy makes for sobering reading: Canada may have once been a world-leader in Internet access, yet today it finds itself years behind other countries in developing a clearly focused strategy to link digital access with digital information. Most of our major trading partners, including the United States, European Union, Australia, New Zealand, and China have already established digitization strategies that feature robust programs and ambitious plans.

## Copyright Act key to Canada's industrial strategy

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**McMurdy D. *Ottawa Citizen*. 16 November 2007**

For most Canadians, the intense behind-the-scenes wrangling and lobbying over the terms of a revised Copyright Act—for which legislation will be tabled in the next 4 weeks—is background noise at the very most. Intellectual property is such an abstract notion, after all. And how can you possibly protect an idea or determine its ownership—especially in the age of file sharing and Internet access? The complex answers to those questions are among the many reasons why the long promised reform of this law has been delayed for so many years. Even Liberal governments with big, juicy majorities were unable to make it happen. But the copyright issue—which has been flagged as the biggest economic issue between Canada and the US since the end of the softwood lumber war a year ago—recently surfaced as a priority in the throne speech and there have been renewed efforts by the officials in both the Industry and Heritage departments to put together a bill that will be able to withstand the inevitable political pressure.
## Alternatives to bonuses

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Steele C. *The Australian*. 31 October 2007

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,22675134-21682,00.html

Michael Good's suggestion (“Push for medical research grouping”, HES, October 24) to pay staff bonuses of up to $5000 for papers in high-impact journals resembles election promises in that perceived short-term gain for a local area distorts consideration of long-term structural and economic change across the nation. What is at stake here is scholarly communication worldwide and the dissemination of Australian research. The search for higher citation rankings plays into the hands of increasingly dominant multinational publishers, whose main loyalty is to shareholders rather than to academe, which by and large gives away research and copyright in an increasingly frantic rush to publish or perish. In 2006, 20 publishers accounted for 84% of revenues of the US$11 billion publishing market in science, technology, and medicine. The top five STM publishers account for 50% of the market.

## Internet2 and libraries: serving your communities at the speed of light

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Werle J, Fox L. *Computers in Libraries*. 2007 Nov/Dec;27(10)

http://www.infotoday.com/cilmag/nov07/Werle_Fox.shtml

Formed in 1996, Internet2 is a not-for-profit advanced network consortium led by the US research and higher education community. Its goals are to provide leading-edge network capabilities and to facilitate the development, deployment, and use of revolutionary Internet technologies. Starting with 34 universities, Internet2 has grown to more than 300 members, including more than 200 US universities working in cooperation with 70 leading corporations, 45 government agencies, laboratories, and other research institutions. With fewer users and a backbone made entirely of fiber-optic cables, Internet2 is capable of moving data thousands of times faster with more consistent levels of performance than the commodity Internet. This has clear implications for those embracing the principles of a user-centered, multimedia-rich, socially engaged, and community-innovative library embodied by Library 2.0.

## Open access to research funded by US is at issue

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Weiss R. *The Washington Post*. 1 November 2007

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/31/AR2007103102668.html

At issue is whether scientists funded by the National Institutes of Health should be required to publish the results of their research solely in journals that promise to make the articles available free within a year after publication. The idea is that consumers should not have to buy expensive scientific journal subscriptions—or be subject to pricey per-page charges for nonsubscribers—to see the results of research they have already paid for with their taxes. Until now, repeated efforts to legislate such a mandate have failed under pressure from the well-heeled journal publishing industry and some nonprofit scientific societies whose educational activities are supported by the profits from journals that they publish. But proponents—including patient advocates, who want easy access to the latest biomedical findings, and cash-strapped libraries looking for ways to temper escalating subscription costs—have parlayed their consumer-friendly “public access” message into legislative language that has made it into the Senate and House versions of the new Department of Health and Human Services appropriations bill.
## Google takes aim at wireless industry with open software alliance

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CBC News. 5 November 2007

http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2007/11/05/tech-google.html

Google Inc. finally announced its intentions for the mobile phone industry Monday with the unveiling of the Open Handset Alliance, a group of manufacturers, technology companies, and wireless carriers that are aiming to free up handsets with free software. Google has criticized wireless carriers for keeping a tight grip on what sort of software consumers can put on their phones, holding back the development of the mobile Internet. Rumours about what the company would do have been circulating for months.

## Rethinking collections – libraries and librarians in an open age: a theoretical view

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Morrison H. *First Monday*. 2007 Oct 1;12(10)

http://www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/viewArticle/1965/1841

Open access, one of the most important of the potentials unleashed by the combination of the electronic medium and the World Wide Web, is already much more substantial in extent that most of us realize. More than 10 percent of the world's scholarly peer-reviewed journals are fully open access; this does not take into account the many journals offering hybrid open choice, free back access, or allowing authors to self-archive their works. Scientific Commons includes more than 16 million publications, nearly twice as much content as Science Direct. Meanwhile, even as we continue to focus on the scholarly peer-reviewed journal article, other potentials of the new technology are beginning to appear, such as open data and scholarly blogging. This paper examines the library collection of the near and medium future, suggests that libraries and librarians are in a key position to lead in the transition to an open age, and provides specific suggestions to aid in the transition.

## When Wikipedia is the assignment

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Guess A. Inside Higher Ed. 29 October 2007

http://insidehighered.com/news/2007/10/29/wikipedia

Wikipedia: time-saver for students, bane of professors everywhere. Or is it? If there's one place where scholars should be able to question assumptions about the use of technology in the classroom (and outside of it), it is the annual Educause conference. At a morning session featuring a professor and a specialist in learning technology from the University of Washington at Bothell, presenters showed how Wikipedia—often viewed warily by educators who worry that students too readily accept unverifiable information they find online—can be marshaled as a central component of a course's syllabus rather than viewed as a resource to be banned or reluctantly tolerated.
When is open access not open access?

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MacCallum CJ. PloS Biology. 2007 Oct 16;5(10)

http://biology.plosjournals.org/archive/1545-7885/5/10/pdf/10.1371_journal.pbio.0050285-S.pdf

Since 2003, when PLoS Biology was launched, there has been a spectacular growth in “open-access” journals. The Direc-
tory of Open Access Journals (http://www.doaj.org/), hosted by Lund University Libraries, lists 2816 open-access journals as
this article goes to press (and probably more by the time you read this). Authors also have various “open-access” options
within existing subscription journals offered by traditional publishers (e.g., Blackwell, Springer, Oxford University Press, and
many others). In return for a fee to the publisher, an author’s individual article is made freely available and (sometimes) de-
posited in Pub Med Central (PMC). But, as open access grows in prominence, so too has confusion about what open access
means, particularly with regard to unrestricted use of content—which true open access allows. This confusion is being pro-
mulgated by journal publishers at the expense of authors and funding agencies wanting to support open access.

Future reading: digitization and its discontents

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Grafton A. *The New Yorker*. 31 October 2007

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/11/05/071105fafactgrafton

Google's projects, together with rival initiatives by Microsoft and Amazon, have elicited millenarian prophecies about the possibilities of digitized knowledge and the end of the book as we know it. Predictions have ranged from all books in the world becoming “a single liquid fabric of interconnected words and ideas” to a universal archive that will contain not only all books and articles but all documents anywhere—the basis for a total history of the human race. In fact, the Internet will not bring us a universal library, much less an encyclopedic record of human experience. None of the firms now engaged in digitization projects claim that it will create anything of the kind. The hype and rhetoric make it hard to grasp what Google and Microsoft and their partner libraries are actually doing.

Canada playing catch-up: Alberta takes Canadian lead in efforts to integrate cyber
infrastructure assets

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Research Money. 2007 Oct 29;21(16)

After watching other nations take the lead, Canada is finally moving on developing its cyber infrastructure (CI) for the re-
search community with longer terms sights set on industry. Alberta is the first out of the gate with the creation earlier this
year of Cybera Inc., a not-for-profit organization designed to deliver integrated services and solutions to provincial researchers
utilizing CI technologies. Cybera was formed out of Netera Alliance, a regional high-speed research network serving Alberta.
It aims to make CI a shared utility that can be used by any organization or company on demand.
Canadian Digital Information Strategy (CDIS)

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Library and Archives Canada. 30 October 2007

http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/cdis/012033-1000-e.html

The draft version of the Canadian Digital Information Strategy has been released for public comment. The strategy results from a series of meetings that took place across the country in 2005 and 2006 to gather views from content producers, users, and government officials. In the course of the deliberations, more than 200 stakeholder organizations offered ideas or commentary, and nearly 100 of Canada's leading thinkers from across the information environment participated in a national summit in December 2006. Building on this rich set of input, the strategy has been drafted by a 24-member development committee. It addresses some of the critical issues in digital information production, preservation, and access, and proposes a range of actions to strengthen the Canadian digital information environment.

Libraries shun deals to place books on Web

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Hafner K. *The New York Times*. 22 October 2007

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/22/technology/22library.html?em&ex=1193284800&en=498fd16826652493&ei=5087%0A

Several major research libraries have rebuffed offers from Google and Microsoft to scan their books into computer databases, saying they are put off by restrictions these companies want to place on the new digital collections. The research libraries, including a large consortium in the Boston area, are instead signing on with the Open Content Alliance, a nonprofit effort aimed at making their materials broadly available.

E-books multiply, but who's reading them?

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Collins C. *The Chrsitian Science Monitor*. 19 October 2007

http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/1019/p11s02-stgn.html

Digital evolution has long since swept the audio and video realms, leaving holdout purists clinging to tubes, vinyl, and film. Holding back the broad digitization of books—besides the special sensory experience they deliver in their traditional form—has been a spotty digital inventory and the lack of a dominant device for displaying them. But as habits change and content inventory nears critical mass (Google, to name one prospective repository, is still wrangling with copyright issues), digital books might finally gain a foothold, observers say—not as a replacement format, but as an alternative delivery system not unlike the audiobook. Both the publishing industry and the reading public appear to be shaking the notion that for the beloved book, digital equals death.
## Library of Congress and UNESCO sign World Digital Library agreement

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Lamolinara G. The Library of Congress. 17 October 2007

http://www.loc.gov/today/pr/2007/07-196.html

Librarian of Congress James H. Billington and UNESCO Assistant Director for Communication and Information Abdul Waheed Khan today signed an agreement at UNESCO headquarters in Paris pledging cooperative efforts to build a World Digital Library Web site. The World Digital Library will digitize unique and rare materials from libraries and other cultural institutions around the world and make them available for free on the Internet. These materials will include manuscripts, maps, books, musical scores, sound recordings, films, prints, and photographs. The objectives of the World Digital Library include promoting international and intercultural understanding, increasing the quantity and diversity of cultural materials on the Internet, and contributing to education and scholarship.

## Max Planck Society terminates licensing contract with Springer publishing house

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heise online. 19 October 2007

http://www.heise.de/english/newsticker/news/97652

Following several fruitless rounds of talks the Max Planck Society (MPG) has, effective 1 January 2008, terminated the online contract with the Springer publishing house that for 8 years now has given all institutes electronic access to some 1200 scientific journals. The analysis of user statistics and comparisons with other important publishing houses had shown that Springer was charging twice the amount the MPG still considered justifiable for access to the journals, the Society declared. "And that 'justifiable' rate is still higher than comparable offers of other major publishing houses," a spokesman of the Max Planck Digital Library told heise online.

## Mandate for public access to NIH-funded research poised to become law

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The Alliance for Taxpayer Access. 24 October 2007

http://www.taxpayeraccess.org/media/release07-1024.html

The US Senate last night approved the FY2008 Labor, HHS, and Education Appropriations Bill (S.1710), including a provision that directs the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to strengthen its Public Access Policy by requiring rather than requesting participation by researchers. The bill will now be reconciled with the House Appropriations Bill, which contains a similar provision, in another step toward support for public access to publicly funded research becoming United States law.

## Preservation in the age of large-scale digitization: a white paper

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Rieger OY. Council on Library and Information Resources. February 2008

http://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub141/pub141.pdf

The digitization of millions of books under programs such as Google Book Search and Microsoft Live Search Books is dramatically expanding our ability to search and find information. For scholars, it is the unparalleled scale of these undertakings that holds such promise. But it is likewise the scale of such projects that gives rise to concerns that the quality of the digitized material is inconsistent and that the files sometimes lack important bibliographic information in their metadata. The primary aim of large-scale digitization projects—quantity rather than quality—presents a mixed blessing for many scholars and library staff who have worked so hard to create high-quality digital surrogates for their print collections. At the same time, large-scale digitization poses challenges for those who hold responsibility for maintaining these massive new collections. The point of the large-scale projects—to make content accessible—is interwoven with the question of how one keeps materials, whether digital or print, fit for use over time.
## The future of electronic paper

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### Genuth I. The Future of Things. 15 October 2007

http://www.tfot.info/articles/1000/the-future-of-electronic-paper.html

Thirty-five years in the making, electronic paper is now closer than ever to changing the way we read, write, and study—a revolution so profound that some see it as second only to the invention of the printing press in the 15th century. Made of flexible material, requiring ultra-low power consumption, cheap to manufacture, and—most important—easy and convenient to read, e-papers of the future are just around the corner, with the promise to hold libraries on a chip and replace most printed newspapers before the end of the next decade. This article covers the history, technology, and future of what will be the second paper revolution.

## New site search engine allows easier, more efficient navigation of MedlinePlus and NLM Web site

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### National Library of Medicine. 11 October 2007

http://www.nlm.nih.gov/news/searchengine_vivisimo.html

On Thursday, 11 October, the National Library of Medicine (NLM) released a new search engine for MedlinePlus, MedlinePlus en español, and the NLM Library Web site. NLM has made this change to better meet the expectations and preferences of the millions of people who use NLM Web sites each month. After extensive research, NLM selected search engine software from the Pittsburgh-based company Vivisimo. Vivisimo is also the current search solution for the www.usa.gov site (formerly FirstGov), which contains online information from the entire spectrum of US government agencies. The new search results feature enhanced relevance rankings and boldface search words in context to help users select the best Web documents for their queries.

## New assessment focuses on measuring return on health research investments

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### Research Money. 2007 Oct 10;21(15)

Return on investment (ROI) stemming from Canadian health research is the focus of a major new assessment by the Canadian Academy of Health Research (CAHS). The assessment will be conducted over the next 12 months to determine the best metrics for measuring ROI of health research from all sectors and funding organizations from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and provincial governments to pharmaceutical firms and not-for-profit organizations.

## Anti-open access group loses another supporter

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### Gawrylewski A. *Scholarly Communication News*. 8 October 2007

http://4sustainability.blogspot.com/2007/10/anti-open-access-group-loses-another.html

Another university press has disassociated itself from PRISM—the Partnership for Integrity in Science and Medicine—an anti-open access advocacy group established by the Association of American Publishers (AAP). MIT Press director Ellen Faran resigned from AAP's Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division. Faran told *The Chronicle* in an e-mail, “The Prism Web site continues to give the incorrect impression that it has the unanimous support of the Executive Council [of the AAP].”
# Meetings, conferences, and workshops

## CHLA / ABSC 2008 Conference / Congrès 2008

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The Canadian Health Libraries Association / Association des bibliothèques de la santé du Canada annual conference, “Navigating the Seas of Change / Naviguer sur les mers du changement”, will be held on 26–30 May 2008, in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. For details, check the conference Web site at http://www.chla-absc.ca/2008/.

## International Copyright Symposium – Amsterdam World Book Capital Foundation

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The symposium will be held on 21–22 April 2008, in Amsterdam, Netherlands. For more information, check the conference Web site at http://www.amsterdamworldbookcapital.com/index.cfm?page=Programme%20symposium.

## 2008 Medical Library Association (MLA) Annual Meeting

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This year’s MLA meeting will take place in Chicago, Illinois, USA, on 16–21 May 2008. For details, check the conference Web site at http://www.mlanet.org/am/am2008/.

## CLA 2008 Annual Conference and Trade Show

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The Canadian Library Association / Association Canadienne des Bibliothèques conference will be held on 21–24 May 2008, in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. For more information, check the conference Web site at http://www.cla.ca/conference/2008/index.htm.

## SLA 2008 Annual Conference

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The Special Libraries Association (SLA) annual conference will be held in Seattle, Washington, USA, on 14–17 June 2008. For details, check the conference Web site at http://www.sla.org/content/Events/conference/ac2008/index.cfm.
# Professional development

## FIS Professional Learning Centre: Mastering Web searching (Web)

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14 April – 2 June 2008 (7 weeks)

Instructor: Gwen Harris

Fee: $395.00 (US$395.00)

Which Web search engines are the best? What tool should be used for what purpose? How are they best used? How can I find answers to my questions more quickly? This in-depth course will help build skills in using the main tools and most effective strategies for searching the Web. Mastering Web Searching is a 7-week course conducted entirely via the Internet. The tours, exercises and assignments in this course along with direct tutoring from the instructor will give you the hands-on experience you need to search the Web more effectively.

## FIS Professional Learning Centre: The information professional as educator –
A PLC train-the-trainer course (Web)

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12 May – 29 June 2008 (7 weeks)

Instructor: Rebecca Jones

Fee: $395.00 (US$395.00)

The technological and organizational changes affecting the workplace have increased the importance of training and staff development as an organizational imperative. As organizations expand their investment in information resources and technologies, they increasingly recognize that effective learning is a prerequisite to effective decision-making. Information professionals, with their specialized knowledge of information content, tools, and processes, are well placed to play key roles as organizational learning leaders. This 7-week course will assist you in assessing the learning needs of your organization and show you how to design an effective training program, whether it be based on a delivery method that is face-to-face, e-learning, or blended learning. The course will introduce strategies for making learning for adults interactive and relevant and will also present methods for evaluating and determining the Return on Investment of your training activities.
## Education Institute: Search engines 101: How search engines work (audio conference)

10 April 2008
3:00 pm ET (1 hour)
Instructor: Rita Vine
Member: $72.00
Non-Member: $88.00

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If you use the Web, you've certainly used Google, and maybe other search engines too. But do you really know what a search engine is? For serious searchers, it's important to understand what's "under the hood" of search engines. How do they create their databases? What is included? Omitted? Why do search engines rank order results so differently? How does ranking work? And what about all those ads that appear—can they affect search results?

## Education Institute: Search engine master class – Finding, choosing and using the best advanced features of the major search engines (online course)

21 April – 30 May 2008 (6 weeks)
Instructor: Rita Vine
Member: $190.00
Non-Member: $240.00

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Search engines now offer so much beyond the keyword search box! All the major engines (Google, Yahoo, Ask, Gigablast, Live, and Exalead) offer substantial sets of advanced features and shortcuts, which can help serious searchers break through the clutter of the Web to access more meaningful results. Many of the major search engines also offer outstanding "secondary" search tools (like Google's Google Scholar) to help serious searchers find information that would otherwise be lost in huge search results lists. In this course, you'll learn the best features of the major search engines, how they work, plus practical methods for applying the features in your own Web searching.

## Education Institute: Library 2.0 without all the MySpace hype – How to use social tools to solve problems (Web conference)

14 April 2008
2:00 pm ET (1 hour)
Instructor: Jessamyn West
Member: $75.00
Non-Member: $95.00

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Social tools can assist libraries with tight budgets and small staff in solving problems. This session will review the idea of social software in libraries and discuss the Library 2.0 delivery model in simple language using lots of examples of 2.0 problem solving with library examples and very few buzzwords. While the focus will be on patron interaction, tools for interlibrary communication and solutions will be discussed as well.