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Center for Innovative Publishing. DLIT is pleased to announce the christening of the new Center for Innovative Publishing (CIP). For the past year or so we have been discussing the selection of an appropriate name for our electronic publishing program. This venture has expanded significantly beyond Project Euclid, and we wanted a more-generous descriptor that would capture the contemporary and prospective focus of the program. The center will be a field station for the design, deployment, and effective management of online publishing projects from Cornell, as well as other academic communities, university presses, and scholarly societies.

CIP will support the following scholarly communications initiatives and publishing services:

  • Production and delivery of journals, monographs, grey literature, and mixed-format publications, whether born-digital or converted from paper or other electronic media
  • Evaluation and repurposing of existing digital collections within the library environment
  • Development of new content types that will benefit from the unique services that an academic library has to offer and
  • Design and implementation of a broad-based information repository that will include pre- as well as postprint content

We hope that ultimately the center will anchor an overarching initiative to link the disparate content communities within and outside Cornell. This “Cornell scholars network” will provide a framework for extant content projects, such as Project Euclid and the arXiv, and encourage the conceptualization and incubation of new publishing initiatives

Fine Arts Library Web Site. After an eighteen-month development process, the Fine Arts Library has launched its new Web site. The site has been designed to be as user-friendly and informative as possible, and staff hope to update the images on a regular basis. In particular, Jenn Colt-Demaree and Matt Klein were instrumental in getting the site ready for the public.

ILR Press and the DigitalCommons@ILR. ILR Press was for many years an imprint of the School of Industrial and Labor Relations. For the last ten years it has been an imprint of Cornell University Press, but the school’s faculty continue to serve as a resource to the ILR Press editor in determining the suitability of manuscripts for publication. Cornell University Press has granted permission to include the table of contents and the first twenty-five pages of ILR Press books in Catherwood’s digital repository, DigitalCommons@ILR. All rights are reserved to and by Cornell University Press.

ITSO CUL. ITSO (integrated tool for selection and ordering) made a big splash with an article in the Summer issue of Library Journal: “ Many Vendors, One Face.” The authors, Rick Lugg and Ruth Fischer, called ITSO “acquisitions’ new wave” in their interview with CUL’s development team, Adam Chandler, Scott Wicks, and Peter Hoyt. The Library’s next step isto see what level of demand there would be in the market before undertaking enhancements and offering it outside Cornell, so this supportive article gives a boost to CUL’s efforts.

Mellon Foundation Grant. The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded a $400,000 grant to CUL to partner with the Historically Black College and Universities (HBCU) Library Alliance in a production initiative that will lay the foundation for a future HBCU digital library. CUL librarians, led by principal investigator Peter Hirtle, will train selected HBCU librarians and archivists in techniques of digital imaging and will assist them in planning management strategies and policies for the development of a collaborative digital library. HBCU participants, with the assistance of project manager Ira Revels, will then implement their training by digitizing and making available on institutional Web sites a wide variety of records reflecting the history of HBCUs. Other partners in the project are the Southeastern Library Network and the Robert W. Woodruff Library of the Atlanta University Center.

Transcript digitized. In a cooperative venture between the Kheel Center, Catherwood Library, and the New York County Lawyers’ Association, the three extant volumes of the four-volume transcript of the criminal trial resulting from the tragic Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire of 1911 have been digitized and scanned over the past year using OCR software. The transcripts will be mounted in ILR’s Digital Commons by September and accessible through a link on the well-known Kheel Center Triangle Fire Web Exhibit page. The Kheel Center has for some time held a partial copy of one transcript and notes on another donated by Leon Stein, the author of the 1962 history of the fire. Two additional transcript volumes had been preserved in the library of the New York County Lawyers’ Association, where they were part of the papers of Max D. Steuer, who was counsel for the defense in the trial. David Von Drehle, a Washington Post journalist and author, discovered the transcripts, long thought lost, during his research for Triangle: The Fire that Changed America, and brought the documents to the attention of the Kheel Center’s staff during a research visit. Because of the importance of the testimony to the history of the fire, and its limited availability up to now, it was decided to make this resource more readily available to scholars via the Triangle site.

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