Series of websites created by Texas state government agencies (within the .state.tx.us domain) including the "Portal of Texas" list of resources and information. It also includes an interactive Texas Records and Information Locator (TRAIL) search service compiled by the Texas State Library and Archives Commission (TSLAC), providing access to state government information available digitally.

The National Science Communication Institute (nSCI) hosted a conference in late 2013 to explore the broad issue related to scholarly publishing. The Open Science Initiative (OSI) is a working group convened by the National Science Communication Institute (nSCI) in October 2014 to discuss the issues regarding improving open access for the betterment of science and to recommend possible solutions. The following document summarizes the wide range of issues, perspectives and recommendations from this group’s online conversation during November and December 2014 and January 2015. The 112 participants who signed up to participate in this conversation were drawn mostly from the academic, research, and library communities. Most of these 112 were not active in this conversation, but a healthy diversity of key perspectives was still represented. Individual participants may not agree with all of the viewpoints described herein, but participants agree that this document reflects the spirit and content of the conversation.

Between the two fundamental digital preservation strategies, migration has been strongly favored. Recent developments in emulation frameworks make it possible to deliver emulations to readers via the Web in ways that make them appear as normal components of Web pages. This removes what was the major barrier to deployment of emulation as a preservation strategy. Barriers remain, the two most important are that the tools for creating preserved system images are inadequate, and that the legal basis for delivering emulations is unclear, and where it is clear it is highly restrictive. Both of these raise the cost of building and providing access to a substantial, well curated collection of emulated digital artefacts beyond reach. This book advocates that if the above mentioned barriers can be addressed, emulation will play a much greater role in digital preservation in the coming years. It will provide access to artefacts that migration cannot, and even assist in migration where necessary by allowing the original software to perform it. The evolution of digital artefacts means that current artefacts are more difficult and expensive to collect and preserve than those from the past, and less suitable for migration. This trend is expected to continue. Emulation is …

In "Taking Stock: Sharing Responsibility for Print Preservation," Roger Schonfeld surveys the progress made in the past decade, and warns against the conflation of collaborative print management and improved access to collections with preservation. This issue brief was presented at Preserving America's Print Resources II: A North American Summit in Berkeley, California, on June 25, 2015. The full conference program is available at http://www.crl.edu/events/preserving-americas-print-resources-ii-north-american-summit.

The phrase “scholarly communication” appears often in the description of library roles and responsibilities, but the function is still new enough that it takes different forms in different institutions. There is no common understanding of where it fits into the library’s organizational structure. This landscape review of offices of scholarly communication grows out of research originally conducted by Ithaka S+R for the Harvard Library. The project was designed to undertake a review of how academic institutions support the scholarly communication function in their libraries and to gather basic information about the issues at some of the largest research intensive university libraries. It finds categorical differences in the vision for the scholarly communications unit and its organizational placement, as well as associated differences in staffing and budget.

In 1942, Colonel Curtis E. LeMay and his 305th Bomb Group left Syracuse, New York, bound for England, where they joined the Eighth Air Force and Royal Air Force in war against Germany and her allies. Over the next three years LeMay led American air forces in Europe, India, China, and the Pacific against the Axis powers. His efforts yielded advancement through the chain of command to the rank of Major General in command of the XXIst Bomber Command, the most effective strategic bombing force of the war. LeMay’s activities in World War II are well-documented, but his personal history is less thoroughly recorded. Throughout the war he wrote hundreds of letters to his wife, Helen, and daughter, Jane. They are published for the first time in this volume, weaved together with meticulously researched narrative essays buttressed by both official and unofficial sources and supplemented with extensive footnotes. History remembers “LeMay, the Commander” well. From Wright Field, Ohio, to Hokkaido, Japan, will yield a better understanding of “LeMay, the Man.”

The selected Horse Photos in this book represent samples images produced by the two most prolific equine photographers, Ray Bankston and Don Shugart between 1962 and 2000. While Ray Bankston and Don Shugart traveled extensively, many of their clients, including prominent ranches and prestigious performance horse events, were located in Texas, home of the American Quarter Horse Association, the National Cutting Horse Association, and the American Paint Horse Association. In addition to formal portraits of famous horses and their owners and riders, their photo collections also contain never-before-published informal shots of riders and horse-show exhibitors, as well as those of farms, ranches, rodeo arenas, and performance rings of a bygone era. Where available, the dates when horses were photographed are noted, as well as the names of their owners, riders, trainers, and the ranches and farms that represent them.

Since 2011, OCLC researchers have been experimenting with Schema.org as a vehicle for exposing library metadata to Web search engines in a format they seek and understand. Schema.org is sponsored by Bing, Google, Yahoo! and Yandex as a common vocabulary for creating structured data markup on Web pages. OCLC’s experiments led to the 2012 publication of Schema.org metadata elements expressed as linked data on 300 million catalog records accessible from WorldCat.org.1 In 2011, BIBFRAME was launched by the Library of Congress (LC) as an initiative to develop a linked data alternative to MARC, building on the Library’s experience providing linked data access to its authority files. In the past year and a half, OCLC has focused on the tasks related to the use of Schema.org: refining the technical infrastructure and data architecture for at-scale publication of linked data for library resources in the broader Web, and investigating the promise of Schema.org as a common ground between the language of the information-seeking public and professional stewards of bibliographic description. BIBFRAME has focused on publishing additional vocabulary and facilitating implementation and testing. These new developments prompt the need to re-examine the relationship between the LC and OCLC models for library linked data. …

Due to advances in resuscitation and defibrillation practices over the past decades, people are returning from the brink of death in numbers unprecedented in human history. Of the millions of people who survive drowning each year, about 20% report a near-death experience (NDE): a reported memory of profound psychological events that contain certain paranormal, transcendental, and mystical features. NDEs are usually hyperreal and lucid experiences dominated by pleasurable feelings and more rarely dominated by distressed feelings. This book presents a summary of 40 years of research on NDEs. It contains 22 drowning NDE accounts and recommendations for how water safety professionals can use NDE-related information in their work with people they successfully resuscitate.