A consideration of copyright for a national repository of humanities and social science data

In 2011 the Digital Repository of Ireland (DRI) began work on the development of an interactive national Trusted Digital Repository for contemporary and historical social and cultural data. Copyright and intellectual property rights were identified as essential areas which the DRI, as a content holder and data publisher, needed to investigate in order to develop workflows, policy and the Repository infrastructure. We established a Copyright and IP Task Force (CIPT) in January 2013 to capture and identify IP challenges from our stakeholder community and the DRI’s demonstrator collections. This report outlines the legislative context in which the CIPT worked, and how the CIPT addressed copyright challenges through the development of policies and a robust framework of legal documentation for the Repository. We also provide a case study on Orphan Works, detailing the process undertaken by the Clarke Stained Glass Studios Collection, one of DRI’s demonstrator projects, in preparing their content for online publication in the Repository

Moving Electronic Theses from ETD-db to EPrints : The Best of Both Worlds: A Project Briefing Presented at the CNI Spring 2010 Membership Meeting, Baltimore, MD, April 12, 2010

Caltech Library Services' first digital archive came online in April 2001 using EPrints software from the University of Southampton. We began collecting electronic theses early as well: voluntary deposit of Ph.D. theses began in 2001, and became mandatory in July 2002. The thesis collection was hosted on the ETD-db software platform developed at Virginia Tech. By 2008 it became clear that we needed to consolidate our repository platforms. We decided to move our electronic theses to EPrints Version 3, the platform in use for our institutional repository. We did not, however, want to lose the many unique features of the Virginia Tech ETD-db software, such as thesis-specific workflow, the ability for staff to communicate with thesis authors via email from within the ETD-db interface, and fine-grained, thesis-specific access controls. We also wanted to add new features that were not available in either platform, such as tracking the progress of a thesis through the complex local approval and release process, and the ability to store related documents, such as signed thesis forms and permissions letters, with the thesis but in a "dark" area of the record visible only to repository administrators. This briefing explains what was involved in the transition from ETD-db to EPrints for our thesis collection and how the Caltech Library took advantage of the flexibility of the EPrints platform to meet our requirements. It also suggests ways that other institutions may be able to adopt and build on what we've done, and why EPrints 3 may be a good electronic thesis repository solution for other institutions

Video as art: collecting artists’ moving image in academic art libraries

Video collections have been part of library holdings for several decades, but developing and managing these collections presents a number of challenges. This is the case particularly for artists’ film and video, and this article attempts to identify the issues involved and to offer some practical guidance, drawing on the experience of collection development and management at Chelsea College of Art and Design Library, and across the libraries of University of the Arts London and elsewhere

Video-Based Information Systems in Academic Library Media Centers

published or submitted for publicatio

BLEU is Not Suitable for the Evaluation of Text Simplification

BLEU is widely considered to be an informative metric for text-to-text generation, including Text Simplification (TS). TS includes both lexical and structural aspects. In this paper we show that BLEU is not suitable for the evaluation of sentence splitting, the major structural simplification operation. We manually compiled a sentence splitting gold standard corpus containing multiple structural paraphrases, and performed a correlation analysis with human judgments. We find low or no correlation between BLEU and the grammaticality and meaning preservation parameters where sentence splitting is involved. Moreover, BLEU often negatively correlates with simplicity, essentially penalizing simpler sentences.Comment: Accepted to EMNLP 2018 (Short papers

Legal and Policy Framework for Promoting Equitable Access to Documentary Heritage

The National Mission for Manuscripts of India, in association with UNESCO, completed a research study to assist in the development of legal and policy framework and protocols for promoting equitable access to documentary heritage, relevant to India and other South Asian countries. This study report seeks to accurately identify and critically examine the legal and policy framework for promoting equitable access to our documentary heritage. The National Mission for Manuscripts is the most important institution in India creating bibliographic databases of manuscripts and engaged in the conservation and preservation of valuable manuscripts. This report engages with the legal and policy framework which envelops the lifecycle of the Mission’s work: the process of access to manuscripts, digitization of manuscripts and the creation of databases. By critically examining the legal rules in the practical context of the Mission’s work, the research team has put together the first such review of any such initiative in the protection of traditional knowledge in the country. The conclusions of the report are in the form of draft legal agreements and policy recommendations located in the discussion on various parts of the Mission’s work. While this report does not set out to be the final word on these significant policy initiatives, the report definitely makes significant progress in the policy debate and legal literature in this field. This report illustrates working patterns of the Mission within the legal and policy framework in the Country. This report will be a valuable sourcebook for understanding South Asian legal and policy framework for accessing documentary heritage collections. The draft legal agreements and policy recommendations, presented in this report, will also be valuable intervention tools for South Asian countries that share similar legal and policy framework within the sub-region