eResearch Australasia

The eResearch Australasia conference will be held in Sydney this year, from the 9 - 13 November 2009. This year's theme is No boundaries. The conference planners are seeking to engage conference participants by asking them, "What challenges are raised by a world with no boundaries? What potential can we unlock?" I am excited to be attending the conference to co-present with a number of seasoned information professionals on data management support. I will be demonstrating an online data management planning tutorial for Griffith University that is supported by Blackboard. It includes a nifty online journal tool developed in-house by my colleagues at Flexible Learning and Access Services --Business, Science, Environment, Engineering and Technology Team. The journal tool is used by tutorial users to create their own data management plan.

Stumbling Upon Open ID

I was reviewing a collaborative site for scientists called My Experiment, when I stumbled upon Open ID, a distributed identity system that gives you single sign-on anywhere where Open ID is supported. Now I can use my single Open ID sign on to access web sites that support Open ID. Sign up is free and it is quite simple to do.

A Plug for the Recuva Freeware Program

Have you ever worked your arse off on a document and then lose it due to some Microsoft file corruption nonsense? Did you try your best to recover it using the regular steps of searching your hard drive and temp files and as a last ditch effort, trying the recovery console options on your computer, with still no luck at recovering the file??? This scenario happened to me last Thursday. I lost a document that I was working on all day. I made a big mistake by saving it to a flash drive. When I went to save the latest version before I left for work, wham-o, I received an error message about file corruption. The file was no longer listed on my flash drive, and there was no trace of the file on my hard drive. Panic set in! My work buddies were on the move trying to help me locate the file, but had no luck. The next morning an IT colleague suggested I download a copy of Recuva, a freeware Windows utility that restore files that have been accidentally deleted from your computer. I downloaded a copy and activated the program. Recuva took about 2 minutes to recover several versions of my file and at least several hundred of others that I deleted from my flash several months ago. It was easy to use, and I am thankful to the Recuva programmers for producing such a gem. THANK YOU Recuva!

Developments on the Google Library Project and Copyright Infringement

The recently published Congressional Research Services Report titled the Google Library Project: Is Digitisation for Purposes of Online Indexing Fair Use Under Copyright Law includes the following legal questions by legislative attorney Kate Manuel:

1. Does an entity conducting an unauthorized digitization and indexing project
   avoid committing copyright infringement by offering rights holders the opportunity to “opt out,”or request removal or exclusion of their content?
2. Is requiring rights holders to take steps to stop allegedly infringing digitization and indexing like requiring rights holders to use meta-tags to keep search engines from indexing online content? Or do rights holders employ sufficient measures to keep their books from being digitized and indexed online by publishing in print?
3. Can unauthorized digitization, indexing, and display of “snippets” of print works
   constitute a fair use?
4. Assuming unauthorized indexing and display of “snippets” are fair uses, can digitization claim to be a fair use on the grounds that apparently prima facie infringing activities that facilitate legitimate uses are fair uses?

The report offers interesting analysis concerning this grey area of law.

KM World's Top 100 KM Companies List

KM World's annual top 100 companies that matter in knowledge management was released yesterday. I find it gratifying that InMagic's Presto is included, considering those of us in the library and information management fields have recognised the potential in InMagic's indexing and knowledge sharing capabilities. Information solutions companies that specialise in InMagic implementation including AndorNot and TriMagic are worth contacting when developing a KM application with an InMagic product for your organisation.

World Ranking of Repositories - Australian & NZ Institutions That Made the List

The Cybermetrics Lab, a research group belonging to the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC), the largest public research body in Spain, recently released the Ranking of World Repositories. The group provides detailed information on their ranking methodology, including the following criteria:

• Only repositories with an autonomous web domain or subdomain were included (i.e.
  repository.xxx.zz)
• repositories consisting only of one or several electronic journals (journal' portals), or devoted to non scientific papers or focusing in archival material were excluded.

Here are the fourteen Australian repositories that made the top 300 listing:

• University of Queensland's Espace (#14)
• QUT's ePrints (#26)
• Australian National University Dspace (#59)
• University of Tasmania ePrints (#62)
• University of Adelaide Digital Library (#66)
• University of Technology Sydney Press Institutional Repository (#121)
• University of Sydney e-Scholarship (#137)
• University of Southern Queensland ePrints (#146)
• Australian Digital Theses Program (#173)
• University of Wollongong Research Online (#183)
• University of Queensland ePrint Archive (#192)
• Flinders University Academic Commons (#218)
• Bond University Epublications (#250)
• Australian Defence Science and Technology Organization Repository (#261)

The University of Otago School of Business Pilot Repository represented New Zealand.

A Decade of Google

The Washington Post's Sunday edition (Oct 12, '08) includes a fascinating article on the last ten years of Google titled the Way we Webbed: A decade of Google. It highlights the challenges of archiving the web and mentions several organisations that have made capturing historical information on the web their primary purpose. All of us in the "information know" already use the Internet Archive for researching older material that was once posted on the web. Journalist Monica Hesse mentions several other resources including the Library of Congress' National Digital Preservation Program and Paleoweb.org, an initiative from French software developer Marc-Olivier Barnard which will launch in November 2008. Australia has PANDORA (Preserving and Accessing Networked Documentary Resources of Australia), which "is a growing collection of Australian online publications, established initially by the National Library of Australia in 1996, and now built in collaboration with nine other Australian libraries and cultural collecting organisations."


My favorite snippet from the Post article is this one:

"Naturally, there are people trying to organize the splats into a meaningful order. Naturally, those people are librarians and archivists. Google was not the first group to think of delving into the ghosts of our Internet past."