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SULAIR NEWS – April 8, 2009
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
- Extra SULAIR News Sent Last Night - System Glitch
- Archive of Recorded Sound Turns 50
- C-ACIS Annual Report to Faculty Senate
- Law Journals and Open Access: A Call to Action
- Saving the Broad Head Snake!
- *** Reference Question of the Week ***
1. Extra SULAIR News Sent Last Night - System Glitch
An extra version of SULAIR News was sent last night (April 7) around 9 p.m. (It was dated April 8 in the subject line of the email, but was actually last week's April 1 issue.) We think it was caused by a glitch in the SULAIR News submission system.
We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.
--submitted by Editorial Staff
2. Archive of Recorded Sound Turns 50
From the Stanford Report:
Composer Kurt Weill's Railroads on Parade was one of the most popular attractions at the 1939-40 World's Fair in New York City. It has never been performed since.
This shouldn't come as a surprise. The 70-minute pageant had a singing cast of 250, with horses, cattle, Pullman cars and 12 real steam locomotives onstage as part of the production. Not exactly the kind of show that can be revived even by the most ambitious university repertory company.
There's only one known recording, and Stanford has it. The 16-inch LPs are in the Stanford Archive of Recorded Sound, which celebrates its 50th anniversary this academic year. The archive contains about 350,000 sound recordings and 6,000 print and manuscript items, documenting all aspects of 20th- and 21st-century culture. It's one of the five largest sound archives in the United States.
For more information and additional links, see Stanford's 50-year-old archive celebrates sound.
--submitted by Chris Bourg
3. C-ACIS Annual Report to Faculty Senate
The Committee on Academic Computing and Information Systems (C-ACIS) is a Faculty Senate-appointed group that formulates University computing and information systems policies for faculty, students, and academic staff. It also reviews the implementation of those policies.
This year, the committee heard presentations on security tiers and data protection, IT Services' storage and backup direction, the Integrated Email and Calendaring project, and the Collaboration Tools topic.
C-ACIS, now broadened to include the head of IT from the Schools, is working to develop a campus-wide IT Strategic Plan. The committee is also developing some Guiding Principles for technology direction and development for campus. The final list of Guiding Principles is still pending; however, these items will be included:
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New technology implementations should include faculty representatives to confirm the viability of the project and to insure successful dissemination and acceptance.
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The committee gives strong support for the engagement of third party service providers to drive service costs down.
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Projects should start with a set of 'Use Cases' to insure the project results delivered meet real campus needs.
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To prioritize projects ask the question, "How does this project help with research or teaching?".
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Schools should work to share their internal applications to avoid redundant development and improve compliance.
The C-ACIS yearly final report (PDF) is available online.
Reprinted from April 1 issue of its in bits, IT Services' staff newsletter.
--submitted by Phil Reese
4. Law Journals and Open Access: A Call to Action
In November, I had the pleasure of attending a meeting of the so-called Gang of 10 law library directors (directors from some of the nation's top law schools) held at Duke Law School in Durham, North Carolina. One of the activities of this meeting was the drafting and signing of the "Durham Statement on Open Access to Legal Scholarship," which calls for all law schools to stop publishing their law journals in print format and to rely instead upon electronic publication, coupled with a commitment to keep the electronic versions available in stable, open, digital formats.
Each of the nation's 200+ law schools produce at least one student-edited law journal, containing scholarship and important policy pieces from law professors, judges, distinguished practitioners, and students. The bulk of legal scholarship is published in such law journals. Here at Stanford Law School we produce nine such journals. Right now the only way to access all of this significant content is through expensive databases such as HeinOnline, LexisNexis and Westlaw.
It would be a better legal information world if researchers could reliably turn to the host law school for any law journal from that school and find all of its articles, available for free in open and stable electronic formats.
It was especially fitting that this inspirational document was drafted and signed by us while at Duke. Duke is a leader in the open online repository movement, with the Duke Law Faculty Scholarship Repository created in 2005, and all Duke law journals made accessible online since 1997. The Duke Law Faculty Scholarship Repository is a full-text electronic archive of scholarly works written by the Duke Law faculty, as well as other scholarship produced at the law school. A scholarship repository and open access law journals go hand-in-hand.
The chief architect of the Durham Statement was John Palfrey, the new library director at Harvard Law School, who is also a leader and visionary in the open access movement. In May 2008, the Harvard Law School faculty unanimously voted to make each faculty member's scholarly articles available online for free.
The Durham Statement is our exercise in aspiration, with the hopes of getting more - eventually all - law schools on the open access bandwagon.
There are issues yet to be resolved. For one thing, especially during these difficult economic times, financial analysis is needed. Law schools receive royalties from the online databases that provide law journal access - some schools far more than others - so the cost-savings to the schools from ceasing print and to the schools' libraries from no longer having to buy, bind and shelve issues needs to be carefully weighed against any potential loss of revenue income. And there are additionally archival and standards issues to be debated and decided.
The Durham Statement seeks to move the analysis, debate, and discussion forward.
Durham Statement on Open Access to Legal Scholarship
http://legalresearchplus.com/2009/02/20/durham-statement-on-open-access-to-legal-scholarship/
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/publications/durhamstatement
--submitted by Paul Lomio, Director of the Law Library
5. Saving the Broad Head Snake!
Mindy Syfert, GIS Manager at Branner Library, spent time in Australia in March 2008 working as part of a research team studying the habitat of the endangered broad head snake. She worked with the research teams at Stanford and the University of Sydney to create classification schemes for land cover types and traveled with the group to Australia to field check their work.
The article has now been published in the Journal of Applied Ecology and is getting a lot of press in Australia. Check out a few of the links with great snake pictures, if you like that sort of thing! Well done, Mindy!
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/03/26/2526523.htm
http://ecoworldly.com/2009/03/24/bush-fires-may-actually-help-near-extinct-australian-snake/
--submitted by Julie Sweetkind-Singer
6. *** Reference Question of the Week ***
Question: What are the best resources for checking the holdings of archives and manuscript collections around the country?
Answer: There are a number of good databases for checking archives and manuscript collections in the United States. The basic one is the National Union Catalog of Manuscript Collections (NUCMC) done by the Library of Congress. It's freely available to all, without subscription. Here at Stanford University, the two most inclusive databases are ArchivesUSA, now known as Archive Finder, and ArchiveGrid.
There is a good description of the virtues and limitations of each of these databases on the Harvard Web site. As you can see from that detailed analysis, they approach archive and manuscript collections in very different ways, and in the level of detail given in the listings. As our History Curator Ben Stone said, "Even with online databases, locating relevant archival/manuscript collections is often a difficult endeavor." So one should use all the resources available. If you forget all this, you can simply type "archives" in the search box of the Databases list and these, as well as other indexes, will come up.
You can find more reference questions and answers at the Information Center Web site.
To contribute to the Reference Question of the Week feature of SULAIR News, submit your question
and answer through the SULAIR News online submission form.
--submitted by Editorial Staff
SULAIR News is an electronic publication of Stanford University
Libraries and Academic Information Resources issued weekly. Copy deadline is
12:00 NOON Friday for publication on the following Wednesday. Submit items for
publication via the online submission system.
Editor: Eleanor Brown, Eleanor.Brown@stanford.edu
