LISNews: Librarian News

Good News!

Librarians at McGill are proud to announce their support of the open access movement. McGill librarians are granting the McGill University Library a nonexclusive, irrevocable, worldwide license to exercise any and all rights under copyright relating to their scholarly articles, in any medium, and to authorize others to do the same, provided that the works are properly attributed to the authors and not sold for a profit.

Specifically, each librarian grants a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported license for each of his or her scholarly articles. The license will apply to all scholarly articles written while the person is affiliated with the Library except for any articles accepted for publication before the adoption of this policy and any articles for which the librarian entered into an incompatible licensing or assignment agreement before the adoption of this policy.

All such work by McGill librarians will be deposited in the institutional repository, making it freely available online.

The library also supports open access by making available all theses & dissertations through its institutional repository, eScholarship@McGill by digitizing rare and unique titles and making them available to the world through its digital collections, and by supporting the publication of open access journals including CuiZine, and the McGill Journal of Education.

David Hirsch of the Middle East Librarians Association (http://mela.us/) is the subject of an interesting article in UCLC Today.

"His tenacity and love for his work have allowed Hirsch to help build some of the finest collections in the country. The library’s 500,000-plus volumes on the Middle East, North Africa, Anatolia and Central Asia constitute one of the most significant Middle Eastern research collections in the U.S. and the largest on the West Coast. Holdings are particularly strong in Arabic, Persian, Hebrew, Armenian, Ottoman, Modern Turkish, Kurdish, Assyrian and several Central Asian languages. The collection of materials from Yemen and the Persian Gulf countries is considered the most comprehensive in the U.S. The Middle Eastern manuscript holdings are the second largest in North America, with more than 10,000 items in Arabic, Armenian, Hebrew, Assyrian, Ottoman Turkish and Persian."

See: http://today.ucla.edu/portal/ut/david-hirsch-239778.aspx

For decades, “X-Men” author Chris Claremont kept handwritten notes about characters such as Wolverine and Magneto in dozens of boxes in the closet and basement of his Brooklyn apartment – as well as his mother-in-law’s house.

Perhaps not many outside of the comics fanboy community would consider this ephemera worthy of preservation, since even Mr. Claremont’s wife wanted to “get the crap out of the house,” he said. But Columbia University’s libraries deemed the journals, fan mail and correspondence important enough to be part of its archives.

[Thanks Andrew!]

Google launched an open source course building web application for the growing list of K-12 and big-name universities developing online classes. The barebones website is a lightweight way to bring course material online, track student engagement (with web traffic and surveys), and evaluate performance. “We want to use this launch to show that Google believes it can contribute to technology in education,” says Google’s Director of Research, Peter Norvig.