All News

With 18 plenary speakers, 40+ user group presentations, and over 350 attendees, Open Repositories 2007 was a great success! The conference proceedings are available online at the conference website: http://openrepositories.org/2007/program/presentations. Plans have already been made for next year's conference, to be held in Southampton, UK, from April 1-4, 2008. More information is available at the OR08 website: http://openrepositories.org/2008/. If we missed you in January, be sure to make plans to attend next year! Posted on: 04 Apr 2007

Registration for The Texas Conference on Digital Libraries (TCDL) May 30 - June 1, 2007, in Austin is now available. The conference is free and open to anyone but space is limited; please visit http://www.tdl.org/tcdl for more information. Posted on: 04 Apr 2007

The second international conference on Open Repositories will be held the third week in January, 2007. Along with The University of Texas, and the Texas Digital Library, Texas A&M is a hosting institution. The accepted program -- both the open user group meetings for DSpace, Fedora and EPrints as well as the Plenary sessions -- look great; the presentations should be top-notch. Full information and registration info can be found at the OR07 website. See you there! Posted on: 12 Dec 2006

This time it's not from the publishers, though, but from a group concerned with the idea that Google would control so much of our cultural heritage: Already facing a legal challenge for alleged copyright infringement, Google's crusade to build a digital library has triggered a philosophical debate with an alternative project promising better online access to the world's books, art and historical documents. Read the full article on CNN.com. Posted on: 12 Dec 2006

The Texas Digital Library (TDL) has gone live! TDL's mission is to provide a digital infrastructure for the scholarly activities of Texas universities. On university campuses throughout Texas, an enormous amount of intellectual capital exists that is not readily available to faculty, staff, and students throughout the State. TDL will serve as the center of excellence for the creation, curation, and preservation of digital scholarly information for the State. The site is using the Manakin software developed at Texas A&M. Posted on: 04 Apr 2007

In the ongoing debate over the Google Print project, Google's CEO Eric Schmidt has fired the latest salvo in the form of a Wall Street Jounal editorial. The future he sees is certainly rosy: Imagine sitting at your computer and, in less than a second, searching the full text of every book ever written. Imagine an historian being able to instantly find every book that mentions the Battle of Algiers. ... Imagine one giant electronic card catalog that makes all the world's books discoverable with just a few keystrokes by anyone, anywhere, anytime. It's a compelling vision, indeeed; what remains to be seen is whether Google has the clout to resolve the political hurdles -- as I'm sure that the technical problems are only a matter of time. Posted on: 04 Apr 2007

Manakin is the second release of the XML UI project that weâ™ve been working on here at Digital Initiatives. The XML UI project implements an XML-based user interface to DSpace, an open source digital repository system used by many institutions worldwide. Manakin enables DSpace communities and collections to maintain their own distinct look-and-feel. We are pleased to release The Manakin Developerâ™s Guide describing Manakinâ™s design. We believe Manakin will meet DSpaceâ™s needs by bringing modularity & customizability to the repositoryâ™s interface. Posted on: 04 Apr 2007

The New York Times reports that Yahoo is following Google's lead in a book scanning project. One important difference is Yahoo will be adopting an opt-in approach as opposed to Google's opt-out approach. It will be interesting see if Yahoo's gain enough support to be useful and it will also be interesting to see if Google's approach holds up in a court of law. Posted on: 04 Apr 2007

In an op-ed peice in today's New York Times, Tim O'Reilly (of O'Reilly Media) says that the recent Authors Guild suit against the Google Library Project is poignantly wrongheaded. Posted on: 04 Apr 2007

From this story in ITWorld: The Authors Guild and three other writers filed a class action suit on Tuesday against Google Inc. over the Google Print program. The lawsuit charges Google with massive copyright infringement... Yet another entrenched industry that doesn't know how to respond to rapid technological change and simply resorts to lawsuits.

Posted on: 04 Apr 2007

The Chronicle of Higher Education reported on the TDL announcement today. Using the California Digital Library as a reference was only natural, as it is one of the few other projects of this magnitude to offer comparison.

Posted on: 04 Apr 2007