Library News

Smart Search will be down starting a midnight tonight and should be back up by 7am tomorrow morning.

Tim Shipe, assistant to the director for collections and scholarly communications, has been selected to receive the 2010 Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) Western European Studies Section (WESS) Coutts Nijhoff International West European Specialist Study Grant, for his proposal, “The Franco-Romanian Literary Avant-garde in Bucharest Libraries.”

Sponsored by Coutts Information Services, the grant provides $3,000 to support a trip to Europe. The primary criterion for awarding the grant is the significance and utility of the proposed project as a contribution to the study of the acquisition, organization or use of library materials from or relating to Western Europe. Shipe will receive his award during the 2010 ALA Annual Conference in Washington D.C.

Congratulations Tim!

Read the full announcement from the American Library Association.

Due to construction taking place on Hardin Library’s 1st floor, the Psychology Collection will be unavailable beginning Monday, Feb. 8 through Friday, Feb. 12.  If you require materials from the Psychology Collection during that time, please stop by the 3rd floor desk at Hardin to discuss your options.

We apologize for any inconvenience this causes.

The University Libraries is seeking nominations for the Arthur Benton Excellence in Reference Services Professional Development Award. Funded by a generous endowment and presented in alternating years, this prestigious award recognizes a member of the Libraries’ professional staff who provides exemplary reference services for the University community. The recipient of the award receives $1,000 to be used for professional development activities.

Criteria for the award and the nomination form are available at:   http://www.lib.uiowa.edu/admin/bentonaward/

Please forward this message to faculty and graduate assistants in your department and encourage them to submit nominations. Thank you for your assistance. 

*The University Libraries includes the Main Library, Hardin Library for the Health Sciences, and the Art, Biological Sciences, Business, Engineering, Geosciences, Music and Physics libraries. (Professional staff in the Law Library, Curriculum Lab, and other campus departmental library staff are not eligible.)

Mr. Katsufumi Shintaku will describe his experience as a Hiroshima atomic bomb survivor at a presentation from 7 to 9 p.m. Tuesday, Feb. 9, in Meeting Room A at the Iowa City Public Library.

On Aug. 6, 1945, Shintaku just returned from his night shift at Toyo Kogyo (currently Mazda Motor Corporation) when the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. His house was 1.5 kilometers from the epicenter.

Shintaku will speak to audiences in Iowa City and at Drake University for this Web conference presentation. Steven Leeper, chairman of the Hiroshima Peace Culture Foundation, will also talk about the proliferation of nuclear weapons and the call for disarmament. He is a well-known peace activist and the first American to head the foundation.

This program is sponsored by the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum and the University of Iowa Libraries. For more information, contact Chiaki Sakai at chiaki-sakai@uiowa.edu or 319-335-5030.

RefWorks will be unavailable at 9:30 p.m.  for up to 2 hours on January 30, 2010 for scheduled maintenance.

While we anticipate that RefWorks will be unavailable for up to 2 hours, we hope that this disruption will affect as few users as possible over this weekend.

Arts and humanities researchers interested in collaborating with campus technologists and librarians to develop innovative technology project proposals for the upcoming Arts & Humanities Initiative (AHI) grant cycle are encouraged to attend one of two workshops. While project consultations are geared toward AHI applicants, any researcher interested in getting a digital project off the ground is encouraged to attend.

Thursday, Jan. 21—1:30-2:15 at the Information Arcade, Main Library
Friday, Jan. 29—1:30-2:15 at the Information Arcade, Main Library

Please register for a workshop at http://survey.uiowa.edu/wsb.dll/848/ahiwkshp.htm

Digital specialists from the Libraries, ITS, and past AHI winners will discuss digital scholar-ship and examine how researchers, centers, and collaborative projects elsewhere are using technology to enhance their research, and how local scholars might leverage emerging digital humanities tools and resources locally.

The 45-minute workshops will be followed by individual project consultations.

AHI grants are awarded to projects that make a significant impact on scholarship in the proposed field. Proposals for digital arts and humanities projects and projects for which the applicant will seek external grant support are especially encouraged. Application deadline is February 9, 2010.

For more details, see http://research.uiowa.edu/ifi//index.php?get=ahi

For more information about the upcoming workshops, please contact Digital Library Services at 335-6465.

January 2010
Issue 1.10

Welcome to the winter issue of Transitions.

The purpose of this irregular electronic newsletter is to bring to readers’ attention some of the many new projects and developments informnig the current system of scholarly communication, with emphasis on new products and programs, the open access movement, and other alternative publishing models. Scholarly communication refers to the full range of formal and informal means by which scholars and researchers communicate, from email discussion lists to peer-reviewed publication. In general, authors are seeking to document and share new discoveries with their colleagues, while readers–researchers, students, librarians and others–want access to all the literature relevant to their work.

While the system of scholarly communication exists for the benefit of the world’s research and educational community and the public at large, it faces a multitude of challenges and is undergoing rapid change brought on by technology. To help interested members of the UI community keep up on these challenges and changes we plan to put out 4 issues per year of this newsletter.  Please visit our web site, Transforming Scholarly Communication, to find out more about this topic.

This newsletter is designed to reflect the interests of its readers so please forward comments, suggestions and entries to include to karen-fischer@uiowa.edu.

Visit our newsletter to read the articles:

Public Access to Federally Funded Research – Public input
University Press survival… through open access
Compact for Open Access Publication Equity (COPE)
PLoS One to be indexed by Web of Science
Optical Society of America – a pioneer in scholarly publishing innovation
Nobel Prize-winning scientists urge Congress to act
Open Access Encyclopedias
Who will pay for Arxiv?
Studies on Access – a review
Medical Schools Quizzed on Ghostwriting
Scholarly and Research Communication, a new OA journal
Wellcome Trust calls for greater transparency

The Psychology Library closed December 18, 2009, and by January 13, 2010, all materials were moved.  The collection was divided among the Biological Sciences Library, Hardin Library for the Health Sciences, and the Library Annex.  Except as noted below, the Psychology Library materials have been moved to the Hardin Library for the Health Sciences, where they are located on the first floor.

Is there a librarian for Psychology and Education students and faculty? Yes.  Dottie Persson will have offices in Seashore Hall (E201 SSH, 335-3080) and the Lindquist Center (N426 LC, 335-5232) to serve the Psychology Department and the College of Education.  As a result of closing some branch libraries, the library system is joining other academic institutions in moving to the concept of an embedded librarian, a librarian who performs research consultations, reference, user instruction and collection management in an electronic environment and who responds to faculty, student and staff who report library related technical or service problems.

What materials formerly housed in the Psychology Library will be housed in the Biological Sciences Library? Selected reference materials from the current reference collection, multimedia and some journals with call numbers, from the Psychology Library, along with the reserve collection for the Psychology Department.  (Older reference materials were sent to the Library Annex.)  The Biological Sciences Library will also receive new multimedia and reference books purchased from the Psychology collection fund.

What materials went to the Library Annex?  Little used books, published before 1995, older reference materials, microforms, and journals that are available electronically, pre-1980, or little used were sent to the Library Annex.  It will take several months for location changes to be made in the online catalog.  During this time, Interlibrary Loan staff will obtain needed items for library users.  Once all location codes have been updated, library users will be able to request items from the Annex for check-out.  

What about reserve materials? Starting second semester, the College of Education and Sociology Department instructors will submit their reserve requests to Main Library Circulation, Reserve and Media Department.  The Psychology Department instructors will submit their reserve requests to Dottie Persson; their reserve will be housed at the Biological Sciences Library.

Where are the Psychology Department Honors Theses?  These honors theses have been transferred to the Library Annex.  The Psychology Department will be responsible for psychology honors theses that are completed this academic year forward.

Where is the Psychology Library Test Collection?  The Psychology Department started the test collection with a donation to the Psychology Library years ago and has continued to donate to it.  At the department’s request, this collection was returned to the department for departmental use.  The American Psychological Association is currently developing an electronic test file and a licensing agreement.  Dottie Persson hopes to be able to fund access to this new database when it becomes available in the next 1-2 years.

Where will newly purchased materials be located?  Except for multimedia and reference books, paper materials purchased from the Education or Psychology collection funds or education and psychology gifts will be cataloged for the Hardin Library for the Health Sciences.  For multimedia, items purchased from the Education collection fund will go to the Main Library Circulation, Reserve and Media Department.  Multimedia items purchased from the Psychology collection fund will go to the Biological Sciences Library. For reference books, items purchased from the Education collection fund will go to the Reference and Library Instruction Department.  Reference items purchased from the Psychology collection fund will go to the Biological Sciences Library.

If you have tried unsuccessfully to find a book or journal volume in the library stacks, it is possible that it may have been sent to the Library Annex in late summer of 2009.  InfoHawk records are being updated to indicate which books are in that facility and a retrieval service will enable you to have them brought back to campus for your use.  While we are in the process of updating InfoHawk, it may be necessary to use our Interlibrary Loan services to get access to some needed titles until this work has been completed. 

This situation came about through a series of events resulting from 2008 flood and the recent economic downturn.   The flood of 2008 required us to move the Music and Art Libraries temporarily into the already overcrowded Main Library.  To make matters worse, the recent economic downturn deferred indefinitely the construction of a planned collection storage facility.  To help alleviated the added overcrowding in the meantime, the University decided to lease a warehouse in the Iowa City area to house the lesser used collection overflow.  FEMA agreed to cover some of the leasing costs and the cost of moving and shelving, but all the work had to be completed by August 20, just weeks after a warehouse was found and leased.  As a result, several hundred thousand volumes were moved in about two weeks, leaving no time for a truly organized relocation.  While criteria were used to identify volumes for transfer based on low usage, availability of electronic versions, and age, the planned review of individual titles by library liaisons and faculty could not be completed in time for the FEMA deadline.

Library staff have been working continuously this fall to organize the materials at the leased facility and to change the location records in InfoHawk.  This is an enormous task that will require many weeks to complete.  We are also aware that a few books may have been sent to the Annex which should have remained in the stacks. If you think a volume may have been sent in error, send a note with as much bibliographic information as possible and the reason for your request to Edward Shreeves, Associate University Librarian and Director of Collections & Scholarly Communication.

Moving of the Math Library into Main Library began today, Monday, December 28.  The Math Collection will be shelved in the northeast portion of 2nd floor. 

The movers will be using Elevator B throughout the process. Please be alert for fast moving book carts (both empty and full) in the northern portion of first and second floors of the library. Also, the north fire doors will have to be open for periods of time to accommodate the move which will make the areas near the north entrance colder than usual.

The Biographical Dictionary of Iowa, ed. by David Hudson, Marvin Bergman, and Loren Horton.  Internet Resource. Reviewed in 2010 January CHOICE.

This collaboration between the University of Iowa Press and University Libraries is based on a print title that the university published in 2009 for the State Historical Society of Iowa. The print book and PDF e-book are available from the press for $45 each. The editors worked with some 150 contributors. The dictionary focuses on persons born in Iowa, living 20 years in Iowa, or making a significant contribution to Iowa. Those who died after December 31, 2000, are excluded. Biographees include athletes, writers, activists, scientists, and more, as well as Iowa governors and US senators/Supreme Court justices from Iowa. Not all are famous. The editors have chosen people who made significant contributions to the state, nation, or world, particularly those whose base was distinctly Iowan. The merely famous, the introduction points out, can be found on the Des Moines Register’s Famous Iowans Web page .

The Biographical Dictionary site is simple and attractive with tabs for the home page, introduction, and four browse functions. Users may browse 424 names, eight date ranges, contributor names, or 38 broad topics such as Indian Leaders, Mining, Settlement, and Women’s Rights, or use keywords to search the full text of the entries. The charming graphics come from a 1934 US Post Office mural–a Treasury Department art project. Entries vary in length but average about 750 words. They begin with birth/death dates and a very nice feature–an abstract of biographical highlights. In a lively but not unscholarly mode, entries cover personal and professional details, significant contributions, and long-term impact. Brief source lists complete the entries. For audiences of all ages and backgrounds, this site compiles useful and elusive information in an attractive, functional format. Photographs and better highlighting of keyword search terms would enhance the entries.

Summing Up: Recommended. All levels. — J. Drueke, University of Nebraska–Lincoln

Reprinted with permission from CHOICE http://www.cro2.org/, copyright by the American Library Association.

This year marks the 125th anniversary of the partnership between the University of Iowa Libraries and the Government Printing Office (GPO).

To celebrate this anniversary, Federal Documents Librarian Marianne Mason has developed a digital exhibit

http://www.lib.uiowa.edu/exhibits/govpubs/

Professor Linda K. Kerber, the May Brodbeck Professor in the Liberal Arts and Sciences, was inducted into the Iowa Women’s Hall of Fame in Des Moines on August 29, 2009.  Please join us as we celebrate Professor Kerber, who has devoted her life and career to the empowerment of women through a better understanding of women’s history. 

Thursday, December 10, 2009
4:00-5:30 p.m. (program at 4:30 p.m.)
Iowa Women’s Archives, 3rd floor, Main Library

Since joining the History Department faculty in 1971 Professor Kerber has inspired and mentored generations of students.  Her creative intellect, influential leadership, and invigorating teaching place her at the top of her field.  She is a champion of the humanities and a steadfast supporter of archives. She has achieved international distinction for her contributions to our understanding of gender, citizenship, and the legal and political status of women.

Iowa Women’s Hall of Fame:  http://www.women.iowa.gov/about_women/HOF/index.html

The Iowa Memorial Union and UI Main Library will be open all night to support students in their efforts to prepare for the end of the semester.

Twenty-four hour study at the IMU will begin Thursday, December 10th and end Friday December 18th at 10pm. Main Library 24-hour study will begin Sunday, December 13 at 11 am and will also end Friday, December 18th at 10pm.

“The Library and the IMU have been working hard to provide students with adequate study space, given the issues caused by the flood. Both facilities lost considerable student space and the IMU will re-purpose meeting and ballrooms to facilitate additional quiet and group study spaces during finals week,” David Grady, Associate Vice President and Dean of Students.

Promotion of the extended hours will be partly funded by UISG. “With the end of the semester approaching, it is crucial to support our students and offer places to study at all hours,” Michael Currie, President UISG.

The IMU will be extending River Room hours until 11pm on December 13, 15th and 16th, and will be offering students a midnight breakfast in the River Room on December 14th from 11pm-1am. Additional group and quiet study space will be set up in the building, and a game room will be open all night in River Room 1, IMU.

In the Main Library, computers in the ITC on the second floor will be available all night; research assistance will be available at the first floor information desk until 9 pm. Hardin Library for the Health Sciences has an unstaffed after hours study area. The Pomerantz Business Library will be open Sunday, December 13 – Thursday, December 17 until Midnight each night.

Nite Ride has also extended hours over finals week, so if you need a ride home just give them a call (319-384-1111).

CAB and the IMU are also offering massage chairs on December 10, 13, 14, and 15 from 9pm-midnight.  Free coffee will be provided at the Main Library December 13-15 at 10pm and at the IMU from 12am-6am all week.

Through the Libraries, you now have full text (PDF) access to over 1 million titles in the ProQuest Dissertations and Theses database.  For more information:  http://guides.lib.uiowa.edu/dissertations.

The exhibition committee (Chiaki Sakai, Japanese Studies Librarian; Marianne Mason, Federal Documents Librarian and Duncan Stewart, Cataloging Librarian) will be hosting paper crane making session on Thursday, December 3 from 2-4 p.m. in Main Library, North Exhibition Hall, with the goal of sending a thousand paper cranes to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum.

Japanese legend promises that anyone who folds a thousand origami cranes will be granted a wish. In modern times the thousand origami cranes has become a symbol of world peace. After they are donated to temples or other peace organizations, the cranes often are left exposed to the elements, slowly dissolving and becoming tattered as the wish is released.

Sakai will be providing demonstrations of origami paper crane folding, but you can watch a video online http://www.metacafe.com/watch/387698/how_to_fold_an_origami_paper_crane_orizuru/ .

At 8:15 a.m. on August 6, 1945, the world changed. An atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan. A second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki three days later. These two cities witnessed first-hand how devastating the effects of nuclear weaponry would be. The cities were destroyed instantly and many lives were lost.

The current exhibit in the Main Library Exhibition Hall, Material Witness: Remembering Hiroshima and Nagasaki, features a Hiroshima-Nagasaki poster collection donated to the Libraries by the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum. The exhibit covers the history of the atomic bombings in Japan up to present day peace activism.

The Hiroshima Peace Foundation organized a U.S. national poster exhibition tour of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki from September 2007 through December 2008. The purpose of the traveling exhibition was to convey the reality of the damages and horrors of those events, as well as extend the Foundation’s efforts for the abolition of nuclear weapons and calls for peace. Organizers from 103 cities in 44 states hosted the same exhibition and now the UI Libraries is joining them.

The exhibition was organized by Chiaki Sakai, Japanese Studies Librarian; Marianne Mason, Federal Documents Librarian and Duncan Stewart, Cataloging Librarian.

To learn more about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the exhibition committee put together an online resource guide at http://guides.lib.uiowa.edu/Hiroshima-Nagasaki.

The exhibit will be on display in the North Exhibition Hall of the UI Main Library through February 28, 2010. If you would like to schedule a tour of the exhibit for your group, please contact Kristi Bontrager (kristi-r-bontrager@uiowa.edu or 319-335-5960) to make arrangements.

A brown-bag lunch discussion of the short story “The Yellow Wall-Paper” will take place from noon to 1 p.m. Wednesday, Dec. 2, in Room 2032 of the University of Iowa Main Library.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, a 19th century writer, was discouraged from pursuing a career to preserve her health and wrote the story as a challenge to the medical profession and the relationship between science and society.

Mary Trachsel, associate professor of rhetoric, will lead the free, public discussion.

In addition, a related National Library of Medicine exhibit, “The Literature of Prescription: Charlotte Perkins Gilman and ‘The Yellow Wall-Paper,’” is on display Nov. 30 to Jan. 9 at the Hardin Library for the Health Sciences.

Copies of the short story are available on reserve at the Main Library and Hardin Library. The story also is online at http://www.nlm.nih.gov/exhibition/literatureofprescription/exhibitionAssets/digitalDocs/The-Yellow-Wall-Paper.pdf.

For more information, contact Ed Holtum at 319-335-9154 or edwin-holtum@uiowa.edu, or Kären Mason at 319-335-5068 or karen-mason@uiowa.edu.

The University of Iowa Libraries will offer the workshop “Google U: Using Google for Academic Research” on two dates this fall.

Wednesday, Dec. 2 and Thursday, Dec. 3, noon-1:30 pm.
Information Arcade Classroom 1 at the Main Library

This workshop is geared to the experienced Web searcher and will be especially useful for graduate students. Emphasis will be on using the Google family of search products, particularly Google Books and Google Scholar, for scholarly research. Time will be provided for practice searches and advice on particular research needs.

No registration is required but seating is limited.

The UI Libraries welcome National History Day students from across Eastern Iowa to a research workshop. These students prepare projects around a theme and present them at an annual competition.

Reference, Special Collections and Iowa Women’s Archives library staff put together a special library guide webpage for these students: http://guides.lib.uiowa.edu/nhd .

Students will be visiting the Main Library on Thursday, November 19. If you have any questions, please contact Janalyn Moss, Reference & Instruction Librarian, 335-5698.

The History of Medicine Society has invited Matt Schaefer, Archivist at the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library to speak on the topic, “Iowa Doctors and the Germ Theory of Disease.”  

Wednesday, November 18
5:30 – 6:30 p.m.
Main Library, Second Floor Conference Room (2032)

The widely accepted notion that microorganisms are the cause of many diseases was very controversial when first proposed and doctors and scientists from different schools of thought and different countries reacted to the notion with varying degrees of skepticism.  Matt will examine the reception received by the germ theory in the Hawkeye State.

As always, light refreshments will be served.  Contact Ed Holtum for more information.

The University of Iowa Libraries will offer the workshop “Google U: Using Google for Academic Research” on two dates this fall.

Wednesday, Dec. 2 and Thursday, Dec. 3, noon-1:30 pm.
Information Arcade Classroom 1 at the Main Library

This workshop is geared to the experienced Web searcher and will be especially useful for graduate students. Emphasis will be on using the Google family of search products, particularly Google Books and Google Scholar, for scholarly research. Time will be provided for practice searches and advice on particular research needs.

No registration is required but seating is limited.

“Memories of a Hiroshima Atomic Bomb Survivor” screening with introduction by Prof. Stephen Vlastos
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
3:30-5:00 pm
Main Library 2nd Floor Conference Room

Ms. Yoshiko Kajimoto was a student directed to work in an airplane parts factory 2.3 kilometers from the epicenter of where the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. She toured across the Midwest as part of the Hiroshima Peace Culture Foundation’s goal to warn about the future destructive use of nuclear weapons in September, 2008.

Ms. Kajimoto came to UI campus to speak about her A-bomb experience and we received more than 200 attendees both from the university and Iowa City community at the event. We heard from people that her story was the one of most powerful A-bomb stories they have ever heard. If you have missed the opportunity, UITV recording of the event will be shown again at the Main Library 2nd Floor Conference Room on November 17th with introduction by Prof. Stephen Vlastos from the Department of History.

RefWorks is  web-based citation management tool to help you keep track of your research.  There’s no software to install.  Use RefWorks to organize and share citations, format bibliographies, and more.  See RefWorks tutorials for more information.

You can use the Libraries’ anonymous IM service to ask quick question about your research. 

Library staff can suggest appropriate databases and search strategies to get you started.  For more complete discussion of your project, you can request a research consultation with a librarian.

Iowa Research Online (IRO) preserves and provides open access to the scholarly and creative work of the University of Iowa. 

We are pleased to announce that over 1500 records for items found in the IRO are now available in Smart Search.  Additional records will be added to Smart Search on a monthly basis.

Between October 1943 and March 1944 the German Embassy in Ankara had access to documents from the British Embassy. These included documents relating to the Teheran, Cairo and Casablanca conferences, at which Allied strategies were discussed, including Operation Overlord and the disposition of Europe after the war in the event of an Allied victory.

The German Embassy received this information from a very unlikely source: not a trained spy but an unscrupulous Albanian servant with a chip on his shoulder. This exhibit, “The Singing Spy,” examines some of resources at the University of Iowa relating to this incident, drawing from almost every department in the Library (Special Collections, Media Services, Maps, Government Documents, and online collections) and provides a glimpse into this “notorious affair.”

Librarians frequently are asked by teachers at all levels of education – from kindergarten to college – about the permissibility of showing films in the classroom. For once, the Copyright Act actually provides a straightforward answer: the Act contains a specific exception for the performance of works such as films in the classroom. If librarians and instructors take advantage of existing law, they can engage in a range of classroom-based video and film performance activities (e.g,. the showing of a film) without having to secure any additional license or permissions.

Above is an excerpt from the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and the American Library Association (ALA) recently released a statement, “Performance of or Showing Films in the Classroom.” This statement provides guidance on the digital delivery of content to the “physical” classroom.

When the Technology, Education and Copyright Harmonization (TEACH) Act was enacted in 2002, librarians hoped that it would provide some clarity on copyright exceptions for the digital delivery of content for distance education. In reality, understanding what is permitted under the TEACH Act in combination with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and existing exceptions like fair use have become more confusing to many practioners.

The statement was written by Jonathan Band legal counsel to ALA and ARL, Peter Jaszi, Professor of Law, Faculty Director of the Glushko-Samuelson Intellectual Property Clinic at American University Washington College of Law and Kenneth D. Crews, Director of the Copyright Advisory Office at Columbia University.

The full statement is available at http://www.arl.org/pp/ppcopyright/webdigitalpsa.shtml.

The Iowa City Book Festival, a celebration of books, reading and writing presented by the University of Iowa Libraries, will be held on Saturday, July 17, 2010. Hosted in Gibson Square outside the Main Library’s south entrance on the University campus, the Festival will be a mix of booksellers, a small music stage, children’s activities, food vendors, book arts demonstrations, and readings and panel discussions.

The planning committee has already begun work on next summer’s festivities. Members of the committee include: Kristi Bontrager and Greg Prickman from the UI Libraries as ICBF Co-Directors; Tim Barrett, UI Center for the Book, hands-on activities; Chris Clark, UI Libraries, music coordinator; Debb Green, Iowa City Public Library, kids’ programming; Jim McCoy, UI Press, book vendors and programming; Lisa McDaniels, UI Libraries, food vendors and programming; Allison Means, UI Press, public relations and marketing; Jan Weissmiller, Prairie Lights Book Store, programming.

Again this year, the Libraries will host a pre-festival Author Dinner on Friday, July 16 in the North Exhibition Hall of the Main Library. Authors participating in the Festival will be attending.

To see photos from the 2009 Iowa City Book Festival and keep up-to-date on planning for the upcoming festival, please check our website www.iowacitybookfestival.org.

The School of Library and Information Science and Professor Padmini Srinivasan have invited Dr. Edward Fox from Virginia Tech University to speak about the future of electronic theses and dissertation. Also on

Thursday, October 29
2:00-3:15 p.m.
Second Floor Conference Room 2032, Main Library

Dr. Edward A. Fox holds a Ph.D. and M.S. in Computer Science from Cornell University, and a B.S. from M.I.T. Since 1983 he has been at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (VPI&SU or Virginia Tech), where he serves as Professor of Computer Science. He directs the Digital Library Research Laboratory and the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations. He has been (co)PI on over 100 research and development projects. In addition to his courses at Virginia Tech, Dr. Fox has taught over 72 tutorials in more than 25 countries. He has given more than 60 keynote/banquet/international invited/distinguished speaker presentations, about 145 refereed conference/workshop papers, and over 250 additional presentations.

In the 1980s he was project director for the Virginia Disc series of CD-ROMs as well as for VPI&SU work on interactive digital video. He was editor for the Morgan Kaufmann Publishers book series on Multimedia Information and Systems. He also serves on the editorial boards of Information Processing and Management, Journal of Educational Multimedia and Hypermedia, Journal of Universal Computer Science, and Multimedia Tools and Applications. He served as Chairman of the IEEE-CS Technical Committee on Digital Libraries. He has co-authored/edited 13 books, 95 journal/magazine articles, 41 book chapters, and many reports. These are in the areas of digital libraries, information storage and retrieval, hypertext/hypermedia/multimedia, computing education, computational linguistics, CD-ROM and optical disc technology, electronic publishing, and expert systems.

Professor Fox’s visit is supported by a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services to the School of Library and Information Sciences to train digital librarians for the 21st Century.  If you have questions please contact Vicki MacLeod at 335-5707.

 Editor’s note: Throughout Open Access Week (Oct 19-23), the UI Libraries will be sharing the views of our UI colleagues on the topic of open access.

by Peter Likarish, Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Computer Science and Bridget Draxler, Ph.d Candidate, Department of English

Nicholas Carr’s “The Big Switch” argues that the internet, and computing in general, will behave increasingly like a utility: providing near universal access at a low-cost that most customers will pay without thinking. We already see the trend to no-/low-cost business models for services such as email, web hosting, data storage and etc.

With regard to Open Access, Google Scholar (and similar services) have fundamentally changed the way academics search for new and related research. The service is free, and indexes not only articles at journals and digital archives that require a subscription, but also the PDF files hosted on individual author’s websites. As with other types of digital media, there is no doubt entrenched interests will oppose Open Access but, as their customers become increasingly accustomed to thinking of online services as a utility, journals and other archives may be hard-pressed to defend the current system of charging huge fees to provide access on an institution-by-institution basis when there is no tangible cost to copying and disseminating digital information.

Editor’s note: Throughout Open Access Week (Oct 19-23), the UI Libraries will be sharing the views of our UI colleagues on the topic of open access.

by Edward Miner, Ph.D., International Studies Bibliographer

Although Open Access movements are unfolding within the legal frameworks of individual countries, their most dramatic potential benefits are really global in scale. One critical aspect of the North-South divide is structural inequality in access to current scientific and scholarly research. This disparity in access existed under the traditional (print) publishing system, and was actually exacerbated by the advent of electronic publishing technologies as not-for-profit scholarly societies in the developed world sold or outsourced their journals to for-profit commercial publishers. Scientists and scholars create and disseminate knowledge to advance their disciplines and serve the public good, and those values transcend national boundaries. Indeed, much scientific and applied social scientific research is specifically intended to combat poverty and social inequality – so the increased inaccessibility of such research to resource-poor universities and scholars in the Global South is a most grim irony.

Scholars who are concerned about the role of new knowledge in driving socioeconomic and political development have a duty to retain the rights they need to make their peer-reviewed research freely available on the Internet, either in open access journals or institutional/disciplinary repositories. But given that affordable Internet access is out of reach for many of the most resource-poor institutions and scholars in the poorest countries, open access on the Internet doesn’t go far enough. To really maximize the potential of new digital publishing technologies to level the playing field in access to current research, scholars need to disseminate their work through mechanisms like the eGranary, an offline digital library of scholarly information produced by the University of Iowa’s WiderNet Project. Through donations of content from copyright holders, the eGranary Digital Library moves a massive assortment of scholarly content onto the local area networks of institutions in Africa and elsewhere, saving significant amounts of money for institutions that have an Internet connection and providing an Internet surrogate for those institutions that have no Internet connection at all.

Professor Ted Striphas (University of Indiana, Department of Communication and Culture) will be visiting the UI campus next week.  He will present a public lecture titled “The Abuses of Literacy: Amazon Kindle and the Right to Read” at 4 pm on October 22nd in Adler E105.

Professor Striphas will also meet with a graduate seminar to discuss his book, The Late Age of Print, on October 23 from 9:30 am-12:00 p.m. in 106 BCSB.  If you would like to attend the seminar, please feel free to drop in for part or all of the class.

If you would like to read all or parts of his book, it is available for download for free at http://www.thelateageofprint.org/download/ .  

Striphas’ visit is co-sponsored by the Departments of American Studies,Communication Studies, English, Journalism and Mass Communication, as well as the Center for the Book.

Editor’s note: Throughout Open Access Week (Oct 19-23), the UI Libraries will be sharing the views of our UI colleagues on the topic of open access.

by Dr. Christopher Squier, Professor, College of Dentistry and Christine White, Librarian, College of Dentistry

Traditionally, the cost of publishing articles in print journals has been borne (apart from page charges for lengthy articles or colored illustrations) by the publisher, based on income, from subscriptions from readers or libraries. This is reasonable considering the high cost of supporting the scholarship that forms the basis of a publication. With open access articles, however, there is now a movement towards freely providing the material to the reader but shifting the cost of publication on the scholar. Fees, which may range from $500 to $3000, are requested from the author, although in a few situations, voluntary donations are solicited to help support a journal (e.g., Edward H. Angle Society of Orthodontists / Angle Orthodontist), or the publication may be subsidized by a publisher’s other journals, as acknowledged by PLoS. Other mechanisms include support from advertisers, such as the Journal of Chemical Education, which notes that “advertising in the Journal plays a significant role in helping to keep your subscription affordable,” or sponsored by an open access individual/institutional membership fee, which provides discounts to authors based on the number of articles submitted for publication (e.g., Bentham Open: http://bentham.org/open/).

There are good reasons to resist moving the costs of publication from the publisher to the author, even when there may be grant or institutional funding to support this. The major objection is the temptation to base publication on the ability to pay rather than on the quality of work, as determined by peers. When costs are passed onto grants or academic institutions, the sponsor is, in effect, paying twice: once for the cost of doing the research and again to publish it, and the support available for new research is reduced. Of course, it could be argued that the institution pays when it purchases subscriptions, but because a large number of academic and industrial organizations all do this, the cost is spread over a large pool.

Should the reader be allowed free access as well as open access? Should the traditional balance be kept between authors, institutions and publishers? These are questions that we must continue to discuss.

Editor’s Note: Throughout Open Access Week (Oct 19-23), the UI Libraries will be sharing the views of our UI colleagues on the topic of open access.

by Dr. William Sivitz, Professor of Internal Medicine

I recently published an article in PlosOne (Mitochondrial Targeted Coenzyme Q, Superoxide, and Fuel Selectivity in Endothelial Cells by Brian D. Fink, Yunxia O’Malley, Brian L. Dake, Nicolette C. Ross, Thomas E. Prisinzano, and William I. Sivitz). I found the process straightforward and faster than most other journals. The peer review was thorough but fair. I hope to see this used more frequently.

by Dr. Michael Knudson, Association Professor of Pathology

We published in Plos One and found it a very satisfying experience.  Quick, insightful reviews, no charge for color figures and no copyright forms to sign.

The journal allows readers to provide feedback and ratings of each article.  I would recommend Open Access to all.

Today in Molly Kleinman’s talk about Open Access, she discussed the importance of scholars/authors keeping some of their rights to their own work.

The UI Author’s Addendum (pdf) enables authors to continue using their publications in their academic work and to deposit them into any discipline-based research repository (including PubMed Central, the National Library of Medicine’s database for NIH-funded manuscripts).

Editor’s Note: Throughout Open Access Week (Oct 19-23), the UI Libraries will be sharing the views of our UI colleagues on the topic of open access.        

by Raymond Riezman, Ph.D., Henry B. Tippie Research Professor of Economics

The Economics Bulletin is an open-access letters journal founded in 2001 with the mission of providing free and extremely rapid scientific communication across the entire community of research economists. EB publishes original notes, comments, and preliminary results. We are especially interested in publishing manuscripts that keep the profession informed about on-going research programs.

Our publication standard is that a manuscript be original, correct and of interest to a specialist. Submissions in these categories are refereed and our objective is to make a decision within two months. Accepted papers are published immediately in contrast to traditional journals that can take anywhere from 2-5 years from submission to publication. I have been involved with EB since its inception and have enjoyed being able to evaluate papers quickly and see them published immediately upon acceptance.

Welcome to Open Access Week 2009, from SPARC from Jennifer McLennan on Vimeo.

SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition of the Association of Research Library, of which the University of Iowa Libraries is a member) is a proud co-organizer of Open Access Week 2009 and is pleased to offer this welcome to the global celebrations, to be held October 19 – 23, 2009. See openaccessweek.org for details. In addition to a welcome and thanks to organizers, partners, and participants, SPARC principals cast the Week in the context of the international movement toward free, open, online, and immediate access to the results of scholarly research. Ideal way to open your week or your session, or to spread the word by email.

(c) Subject to a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License

Editor’s Note: Throughout Open Access Week (Oct 19-23), the UI Libraries will be sharing the views of our UI colleagues on the topic of open access.

In November 2005 Creative Commons published the following conversation with UI Associate Professor, Kembrew McLeod. At the time he had recently published his book “Freedom of Expression®” under a Creative Commons License. 

by Kembrew McLeod, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Communications Studies

Creative Commons (”CC”): How did you come to decide to release your book “Freedom of Expression®” online under a Creative Commons license? How did your publisher respond to your decision?

Kembrew McLeod (”KM”): While working on “Freedom of Expression®”, I always knew I would vigorously try to convince Doubleday/Random House to release a PDF file version of my book under a Creative Commons license although I suspected that Doubleday/Random House’s response would be “no way.” After all, the parent company of Random House is Bertelsmann, the media giant that also owns one of the major labels that is suing downloaders, so I didn’t think they would exactly jump for joy at my proposal.

Then Larry Lessig released his book “Free Culture”, that was published by Penguin books (another media giant publisher) online under a Creative Commons license; it made the news, and eventually it filtered back to my editor, Gerry Howard, who is a truly extraordinary person, and a really cool rock ‘n’ roll dude (not to mention a legend in the editing world). Gerry deserves the credit for getting Random House and its lawyers to go along with the idea. However, I don’t think I ever would have gotten any traction if Larry hadn’t convinced already another major press of the merits of a Creative Commons license.

CC: Have you had any reaction or comments from members of the public about your online release of the book under a Creative Commons license?

KM: It has been a truly gratifying experience to have the PDF version freely available, especially because (with the exception of Japan, where it is being translated for publication), my book “Freedom of Expression®” has no overseas distribution. I have heard from someone at a UN office in Switzerland, who shares my research interests, as well as others from various European, Asian, and African countries. Not coincidentally, soon after the book was released I was invited to speak at a really interesting event to be held this October 14-15, 2005, in Budapest, Hungary, called: “RE:activism: Re-drawing the boundaries of activism in a new media environment.”

CC: You have been selling hardcopies of your book as well. Do you feel that the online release of your book under a Creative Commons license has had any impact on the hardcopy sales?

KM: When I placed the Creative Commons-licensed PDF version online a week after it had been released, Larry Lessig endorsed my book on his blog — providing links to both the free PDF version on my website, and to Amazon. After that, my Amazon ranking (of course, not the most scientific indicator of sales, but an indicator nonetheless) shot way, way up after he posted his recommendation. Honestly, I think I got more publicity from that event than anything else surrounding the release of the book. After all, my book did not receive even a millionth of the promotion muscle of, say, Harry Potter, so the Creative Commons-prompted publicity definitely helped. It also seemed to be a positive karmic act of good faith, given the nature of what I argue in the book.

CC: You are in the process of making a documentary about the second chapter of your book – “Copyright Criminals: This is a Sampling Sport“. You used the Creative Commons ccPublisher tool to upload the video for free hosting at Internet Archive. What was your experience of using the ccPublisher tool?

KM: It was really simple and easy! It took me less than one minute to do it, and I’ve recommended this tool to everyone who has asked about Creative Commons licenses. My co-producer, Ben Franzen, and I had already placed our 10-minute work-in-progress version of Copyright Criminals under a Creative Commons license. But when we remembered that there is free hosting on the Internet Archive for Creative Commons-licensed works, we quickly uploaded it there after we blew through our bandwidth in only 24 hours.

CC: You also had an interesting experience with our ccMixter site and a remix involving your “Copyright Criminals” documentary. Can you tell us about it?

KM: Straight after we made this early version of “Copyright Criminals” available, someone (Pat Chilla the Beat Gorilla) placed an a capella rap on the ccMixter site that starts out, “It’s the copyright criminals/hit you with a blast from the past… .”

Shortly after this track was uploaded, many different remixes appeared that reworked this a capella. To date, there are 9 different remixes. Next time we do another Creative Commons-licensed cut of our work-in-progress (the feature length version won’t be finished until sometime in 2006), we are intending to use Ashwan’s “Chilla Illa Tha Cilla Killa” during the credit sequence.

This is an example of one of those gratifying creative feedback loops that makes Creative Commons so attractive for so many different kinds of people. I am glad it happened.