New Institutional Repository Software: Digital Commons @

From ProQuest.

Federal Depository Library Program "Broken"

"The Federal Depository Library Program has fallen behind in cataloging and preserving access to government documents published only on the Web. As a result, public access to those publications is spotty at best." [More]

Interview with Tim Brody on Digitometrics

Sara Kjellberg interviews Tim Brody on Digitometrics, which combines the results from citation analysis with web logs to rate individual articles. Brody is the creator of Citebase Search, which enhances OAI-harvested metadata with linked references harvested from the full-text [in this case, from arXiv, the physics subject archive] to provide a web service for citation navigation and research impact analysis. Citebase is an experimental service which grew out of the Open Citation Project. [More]

Novell, RedHat to Bundle Real Client With Their Linux Distros

Novell and RedHat will begin shipping the Helix media player with their Linux distributions, and will bundle and support RealPlayer 10 once it becomes available for Linux later this year. [More]

Tiger iChat AV Features Multiple Connections, MPEG4

The new version of iChat AV shipping with OSX Tiger will utilize H264/AVC (aka MPEG4 Part 10) and will allow up to four clients to videoconference at a time or ten clients for audio only. [Press Release]

Of related interest, iChat AV was recently used to videoconference between Cupertino and a Lufthansa flight from Munich to San Francisco.

DVD Forum Ratifies H.264 for Next Generation High Definition (HD) DVDs

Here's the press release.

No Crisis in American Education

"Fifty years hence we may well conclude that there was no 'crisis of American education' in the closing years of the twentieth century — there was only a growing incongruence between the way twentieth-century schools taught and the way late-twentieth century children learned."
     Peter Drucker

Ten Tips and Tricks for the Online Student

From Mark Evans:

1. Read everything twice. Read everything twice.
2. Wait... to reply.
3. Reference it. Perhaps Print it.
4. Talking in class.
5. A place for everything and everything in its place.
6. Getting personal.
7. Make your message meaningful.
8. Better safe than sorry.
9. Be your own guide.
10. Ready, set, go. Maintain an accurate calendar and schedule.

PostGIS

"PostGIS adds support for geographic objects to the PostgreSQL object-relational database. In effect, PostGIS 'spatially enables' the PostgreSQL server, allowing it to be used as a backend spatial database for geographic information systems (GIS), much like ESRI's SDE or Oracle's Spatial extension." Released under the GNU General Public License.

Elsevier Allows Open Access Self-Archiving

"In a move that has stunned both the publishing community and the academic world, major journal publisher Elsevier is going to permit Open Access self-archiving for almost all of its journal titles. Under the new policy it will permit authors to self-archive their materials. This move will not change Elsevier’s subscription model for funding.

"'An author may post his version of the final paper on his personal Web site and on his institution's Web site (including its institutional repository). Each posting should include the article's citation and a link to the journal's home page (or the article's DOI),' stated Karen Hunter, Elsevier vice president for strategy. 'The author does not need our permission to do this, but any other posting (e.g., to a repository elsewhere) would require our permission. By his version we are referring to his Word or Tex file, not a PDF or HTML downloaded from ScienceDirect—but the author can update his version to reflect changes made during the refereeing and editing process.'"