Cambridge and Oxford – rivals joining forces to save Jewish history.

Cambridge University Library and the University of Oxford’s Bodleian Libraries announced that they will join forces to purchase a collection of 1,700 fragments of Hebrew and Arabic manuscripts from the 9th – 19th century. http://www.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/news/historic-rivals-join-forces-to-save-1,000-years-of-jewish-history

Guardian Higher Education Live Tweet Chat

The Higher Education section of the Guardian Newspaper recently held a live chat. Their article, What role do university librarians play in access to research?, and the chat explored “ways in which librarians can and do support access to research, including institutional repositories, Open Access, and support and collaboration.”

Ruth Jenkins created a Storify of the Tweets.

Collaborative CS infrastructure in the humanities

This First Monday article looks pretty good.

“Digging into data using new collaborative infrastructures supporting humanities-based computer science research” by Michael Simeone, Jennifer Guiliano, Rob Kooper, and Peter Bajcsy

This paper explores infrastructure supporting humanities–computer science research in large–scale image data by asking: Why is collaboration a requirement for work within digital humanities projects? What is required for fruitful interdisciplinary collaboration? What are the technical and intellectual approaches to constructing such an infrastructure? What are the challenges associated with digital humanities collaborative work? We reveal that digital humanities collaboration requires the creation and deployment of tools for sharing that function to improve collaboration involving large–scale data repository analysis among multiple sites, academic disciplines, and participants through data sharing, software sharing, and knowledge sharing practices.

Championing Open Publishing

Be Creative, Determined, and Wise: Open Library Publishing and the Global South
By Matthew Baker
COMPUTERS IN LIBRARIES, Nov/Dec 2009

“Libraries throughout the world are increasingly involved in the production of scholarly publications. Much of this has been thanks to the growth of open access (OA) publishing in all its forms, from peer-reviewed “gold” journals to “green” self-archiving, and electronic theses and dissertation (ETD) repositories. As a result, more and more of the world’s scientific, medical, and scholarly research is freely available online. Libraries’ quickly evolving capacity as OA publishers holds great promise for students, teachers, and researchers—not to mention farmers, entrepreneurs, and civil society groups—in developing regions of the world. The vast majority of research is still produced and used in a handful of economically powerful countries. This disparity of access to knowledge is slowly being corrected, at least in some disciplines, thanks in no small part to the work and advocacy of librarians.”

Institutional Repository Partnership Webinar

The Potential of Partnerships: Dissolving Silos for a Successful IR Implementation
Presenter: Marilyn Billings
Wednesday, December 16, 2009, 2:00pm EST
 
“This webinar will use the University of Massachusetts’ institutional repository as a case study to explore how the new digital repository service has affected the way librarians envision our place in the future of the academy, how the academy is changing its view of the library’s role, new tools and skills that we are developing to fulfill this service, and new partnerships that we have created and fostered to exploit this new vision. We hope to foster discussion and provide insights and opportunities for further exploration of how the role of libraries as publishers enables us to be key partners in the creation, dissemination, and archiving of academic scholarship.,,
 
Marilyn Billings is the Scholarly Communication & Special Initiatives
Librarian at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.”
 
To register see:
http://www.ala.org/ala/mgrps/divs/alcts/confevents/upcoming/webinar/index.cfm