Elias Tzoc blog!

Yesterday was the last day of this year’s Open Access (OA) Week.  A very nice “summary” of the history of OA by Tom Olijhoek is available on the http://www.openaccessweek.org site.  As a five years old initiative, I think it was great to hear about the number of activities -from conferences, workshops to twitter entries- that took place in hundreds of institutions from dozens of countries in the past seven days … perhaps one of the most significant (related) events is the upcoming 9th Berlin Open Access conference –to be held for the first time in America.

This year the Scholarly Communication working group at Miami also held an active awareness campaign which highlighted a pop-up image on the library’s homepage with the traditional OA Lock and the message “What if you had no access to the library?” Other activities included five blog posts on OA on the library’s News & Notes section, as well was the distribution of flyers on campus with links to the Scholarly Commons and the Scholars at Miami sites.

A quick look at the Directory of Open Access Journals, it appears that the top 20 countries remain to be almost the same as to what it was last year.  A couple of interesting changes include: Egypt was one of the only three countries that added/registered more than 100 journals in 2011; Iran is now in slot # 17 with a total of 113 journals; and (too bad) now there are only 5 Spanish speaking countries in the top list.

http://www.doaj.org/

Last but not least, as part of an upcoming “project” … in the last couple of weeks, I’ve reading some tutorials about Open Journal Systems  -which seems to be one of the most popular options out there –especially for “peer-reviewed” journals.  But just as I finish with this post, a new alternative has been published in the Code4Lib Journal Open Access Publishing with Drupal … anyway, I guess different choices for different needs

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Today is the day to “raise awareness of digital archives among both users and managers … archivists, digital humanists, programmers, or anyone else creating, using, or managing digital archives are asked to devote some of their social media output to describing their work with digital archives … by collectively documenting what we do, we will be answering questions like: What are digital archives? Who uses them? How are they created and managed? Why are they important?”
http://dayofdigitalarchives.blogspot.com/

As someone working in an academic library, I’m always interested in the intersection between digital archives and academic libraries. For a recent presentation proposal, I found that one of the 2010 Top 10 Trends in Academic Libraries was “Digitization of unique library collections will increase and require a larger share of resources.” This trend, along with the current development in digital technologies are definitely creating new opportunities for increasing access and value to unique and rare collections housed in libraries, archives, and museums. One of the challenges, however, in creating a digital collection or archive is dealing with a number of factors that can affect the decision-making process … examples of those factors are presented in the article The Collection Management Perspective by Linda M. Matthews.

Once a digital archive is online, another activity that also deserves special attention is maintenance, which often requires processes such as migration or web redesign. Here -at Miami University Libraries- we’re exactly in that process of moving our local digital archive into a statewide repository … just today, I’ve learned that our most recent ticket has been closed and a DSpace theme is correctly installed on our production instance available at: http://digitalcollections.lib.muohio.edu/ … where the two first collections will be about Civil War Diaries.

Ok, that’s it for today … oh and as a side note on the Day of Digital Archives, this morning I was surprised by an email (inquiry) on a customization work done a couple of years ago … it’s always rewarding to know that whatever has worked for us … can also work for others

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