IRIS Photos

Kudos

Chris Campbell, Jinhee Roper, and Rebecca Sellen, in Library Accounting, have successfully completed the Cornell University Accounting Certification program. The program provides detailed training in the use of accounting tools at Cornell, financial policies and procedures, and opportunities to learn effective accounting practices used by other units. The program includes fourteen classes. Chris, Jinhee, and Becky completed an exam after each class to obtain certification. On completing the course work and exams, they received Cornell University Accounting certification and Continuing Education Unit credits.

Peter Hirtle’s short article, entitled “Digital Access to Archival Works: Could 108(b) Be the Solution?” has been published on the Stanford Fair Use Web site. It was an assigned reading in a library science class at San Jose State University, and Peter was invited to join in the student discussion of the paper.

Peter also spoke to a group of ninety archives students at the University of Maryland and gave copyright workshops at the National Library of Medicine and for the Capital District Library Council in Albany.

As CUL’s intellectual property officer, Peter was quoted in a news feature, “A Life Online,” published in the October 19 issue of the journal Nature. The feature reports on Darwin Online, an online archive of the complete works of Charles Darwin. Peter addressed the copyright issues associated with publishing the archives of twentieth-century figures: “You may own the physical letter, but the person that wrote it owns the copyright. In an archive with many correspondences, you have potentially hundreds and hundreds of copyright owners. Consequently, publishing outgoing and not incoming letters is the only practical option for many correspondence projects.”

E-Journal Archiving Metes and Bounds: A Survey of the Landscape, by Anne R. Kenney, Richard Entlich, Peter B. Hirtle, Nancy Y. McGovern, and Ellie L. Buckley, was just published in September. (120 pp. $30. ISBN 1-932326-26-X; ISBN 978-1-932326-26-0.) This report summarizes a review of twelve e-journal archiving programs from the perspective of concerns expressed by directors of academic libraries in North America. It uses a methodology comparable to the art of surveying land by metes and bounds in the era before precise measures and calibrated instruments were available. It argues that current license arrangements are inadequate to protect a library’s long-term interest in electronic journals, that individual libraries cannot address the preservation needs of e-journals on their own, that much scholarly e-literature is not covered by archiving arrangements, and that although e-journal archiving programs are becoming available, no comprehensive solution has emerged and large parts of e-literature go unprotected.

The following excerpt is from a message sent to the Lab of Ornithology staff by its director, John Fitzpatrick:

Congratulations and hats off to the entire Macaulay Library team, from curators and archivists to engineers, IT professionals, writers, producers, managers, and assistants. Yesterday the Lab and the Macaulay Library received an extraordinary honor, when Science magazine and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) announced the 2006 winners of their Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge. Jack Bradbury and the Macaulay Library IT team were awarded second place in the category Interactive Multimedia for their Web-based application allowing anyone to visualize the sounds archived in the Macaulay Library’s digital collection of natural sounds and bird videos. This application, developed in collaboration with the Lab’s Bioacoustics Research Program, provides spectrograms and wave forms in real time as the user listens to sound or video clips from our collection. Public announcement of this award coincides with the Lab’s first public release of Web access to our world-leading sound and video archives. Today, for the first time, 60,000 sound clips and 15,000 video clips are available to the world for online browsing!! This in itself is literally a “jaw-dropping” accomplishment that opens a new era of public engagement with the Lab and the Macaulay Library’s unique collection.

Explore the Macaulay Library Collection at it’s user-friendly Web site.

John Saylor, Kizer Walker, and Terry Ehling were accepted into the second ACRL/ARL Institute on Scholarly Communications, which will be held in Durham, North Carolina, December 6-8. The institute is “an immersive learning experience to prepare participants as local experts within their libraries and equip them with tools for developing campus outreach strategies. . . . Participants will work with experts in the field to understand how to better engage faculty at their institution around the crisis in the systems of scholarly communication.”

Leah Solla is a coauthor of the References chapter in the newly issued third edition of The ACS Style Guide: Effective Communication of Scientific Information. The guide is published by Oxford University Press for the American Chemical Society. For more information, see http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/
subject/Chemistry/?view=usa&ci=9780841239999.

Sarah Thomas was elected honorary lifetime member of the United States Agricultural Information Network (USAIN) at the recent conference here in Ithaca. She was presented with a big bouquet of flowers.