This report looks at how staff at eight academic institutions gained new insight about how students and faculty use their libraries, and how the staff are using these findings to improve library technologies, space, and services. Participatory design is a relatively recent approach to understanding library user behavior. It is based on techniques used in anthropological and ethnographic observation. The report is based on a series of presentations at the second CLIR Seminar on Participatory Design of Academic Libraries, held at the University of Rochester’s River Campus June 5-7, 2013. Chapters focus on projects at the University of Colorado, Boulder; Colby College; University of Connecticut; Columbia University; Rush University Medical Center; Purdue University; Northwestern University; and the University of Rochester. David Lindahl, of the University of Missouri-Kansas City, provided the keynote.

The Guidelines for Digital Newspaper Preservation Readiness address a specific set of preservation challenges faced by libraries, archives, historical societies, and other organizations that curate substantial collections of digital newspaper content. The Guidelines are intended to inform curators and collection managers at libraries, archives, historical societies, and other such memory organizations about various practical readiness activities that they can take. They provide links to technical resources that curators can either implement themselves or work with their technical staff to implement. The Guidelines (Version 1.0) only deal with digital newspapers at this point, not broadcast or other forms of digital news.

In 2011, a research team led by the University of North Texas, the Educopia Institute/MetaArchive Cooperative, and the worldwide Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD), began studying the production, dissemination, and preservation of Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs). The original intent was to develop and disseminate documentation for academic libraries that would help curators better understand and address the preservation challenges presented by these new digital collections. As researchers from the libraries of University of North Texas, Virginia Tech, Rice University, Boston College, Indiana State University, Penn State, and the University of Arizona began to grapple with ETD lifecycle management issues, they quickly realized that librarians were but one of many academic stakeholder groups that work collaboratively to produce and maintain ETD collections. Studying the library role in isolation was neither feasible nor helpful. The scope of our work increased to encompass the roles and responsibilities of core stakeholders in the ETD lifecycle: students, faculty, administrators, technologists, commercial vendors, and librarians. The resulting Guidance Documents address areas of interest to ETD program planners, managers, and curators. They will help this extended set of stakeholders understand, document, and address the administrative, legal, and technical challenges presented by ETDs—from submission …

The essay discusses specific concerns of digital humanists in hopes of bridging the gap between how library directors and digital humanities researchers think. It suggests many ways to respond to the needs of digital humanists, and creating a Digital Humanities center is appropriate in relatively few circumstances. The essay recommends that a “Digital Humanities-friendly” environment may be more effective than a Digital Humanities Center but that library culture may need to evolve in order for librarians to be seen as effective Digital Humanities partners. The authors conclude that what we call “The Digital Humanities” today will soon be considered “The Humanities.” Supporting Digital Humanities scholarship is not much different than supporting digital scholarship in any discipline. Increasingly, digital scholarship is simply scholarship.

The Vann Victorian Collection is a treasure of the University of North Texas Libraries and an exceptional resource for the study of Victorian literature. This exhibit showcases some pieces from the collection, including rare first editions, part-issue editions, and association copies. Dr. J. Don Vann, Professor Emeritus at UNT, curated this exhibit. Don and Dolores Vann began collecting Victorian books in 1962, when they acquired a first edition of Dickens’s Bleak House. They spent the summer of 1965 in London, conducting research in the British Library and buying first editions of works by Charles Dickens and William Makepeace Thackeray. During their subsequent trips to London, the Vanns came to know many of the city’s booksellers and were offered first editions they kept hidden from all but their most favorite customers. In 2004 Don and Dolores established the Vann Victorian Endowment to provide a permanent fund to purchase Victorian books for the Vann Victorian Collection in Special Collections at the University of North Texas Libraries. Since 2004 the Vanns have made additional contributions to the collection, most recently in 2014.

Family histories and biographical information (including photographs, records, and other materials) compiled as part of a personal genealogical project. The book is grouped into five sections: Bennett Allen Nance Family History; Archie Carlisle Lebus Family History; Nance Family Group Sheets; LeBus Family Group Sheets; and Simple Register Report - Descendants of Bennett and Archie LeBus Nance. Index starts on page 284.

This book is an introduction to intellectual property law, the set of private legal rights that allows individuals and corporations to control intangible creations and marks—from logos to novels to drug formulae—and the exceptions and limitations that define those rights. It focuses on the three graphmain forms of US federal intellectual property—trademark, copyright and patent—but many of the ideas discussed here apply far beyond those legal areas and far beyond the law of the United States. The book is intended to be a textbook for the basic Intellectual Property class, but because it is an open coursebook, which can be freely edited and customized, it is also suitable for an undergraduate class, or for a business, library studies, communications or other graduate school class. Each chapter contains cases and secondary readings and a set of problems or role-playing exercises involving the material. The problems range from a video of the Napster oral argument to counseling clients about search engines and trademarks, applying the First Amendment to digital rights management and copyright or commenting on the Supreme Court’s new rulings on gene patents.

The essay discusses specific concerns of digital humanists in hopes of bridging the gap between how library directors and digital humanities researchers think. It suggests many ways to respond to the needs of digital humanists, and creating a Digital Humanities center is appropriate in relatively few circumstances. The essay recommends that a “Digital Humanities-friendly” environment may be more effective than a Digital Humanities Center but that library culture may need to evolve in order for librarians to be seen as effective Digital Humanities partners. The authors conclude that what we call “The Digital Humanities” today will soon be considered “The Humanities.” Supporting Digital Humanities scholarship is not much different than supporting digital scholarship in any discipline. Increasingly, digital scholarship is simply scholarship.

The Open Planets Foundation (OPF) has suggested the need for digital preservation repositories to perform periodic “health checks” as a routine part of their preservation activities. In the same way that doctors monitor basic health properties of their patients to spot indications of infirmity, repositories should monitor a set of properties associated with “preservation health” to provide an early warning of potential threats to the ongoing security of the archived digital objects in their care. The Preservation Health Check (PHC) project, undertaken as a joint effort by OPF and OCLC Research, aims to evaluate the usefulness of the preservation metadata created and maintained by operational repositories for assessing basic preservation properties. The PHC project seeks to develop an implementable logic to support preservation health checks of this kind, and to test this logic against the store of preservation metadata maintained by an operational preservation repository. The Bibliothèque Nationale de France has agreed to share their preservation metadata in support of this project. The authors aim is to advance the use of preservation metadata as an evidence base for conducting preservation health checks according to a standardized, widely-applicable protocol. Doing so opens up possibilities for internal or third-party threat assessment services …

As more and more scholars experiment with digital methods and with building digital collections, what measures are in place to make sure that the fruits of these labors are kept vital for the long term? Library directors and chief information officers sense that there is interest on the part of faculty, but does this mean they need to invest in a digital humanities center and hire new staff or just reconfigure the people and resources they already have? First and foremost, what does university leadership seek to gain from such an investment? This study seeks to address the fate of digital research resources - whether they be digital collections of scholarly or other materials, portals, encyclopedias, mapping tools, crowdsourced transcription projects, visualization tools, or other original and innovative projects that may be created by professors, library, or IT staff. Such projects have the potential to provide valuable tools and information to an international audience of learners. Without careful planning and execution, however, they can also all too easily slip between the cracks and quickly become obsolete.

Text outlining major events in the Pacific Theater throughout World War II, organized by date. It also includes text for the Instrument of Surrender, appendices containing military and war data, a bibliography, and list of related Web sites.

The scholarly record is evolving into a corpus of material vastly different from its previous print-based version. While in the past the scholarly record was largely defined by the formally published monographic and journal literatures, its boundaries are now both expanding and blurring, driven by changes in research practices, as well as changing perceptions of the long-term value of certain forms of scholarly materials. Understanding the nature, scope, and evolutionary trends of the scholarly record is an important concern in many quarters—for libraries, for publishers, for funders, and of course for scholars themselves. This report presents a framework to help organize and drive discussions about the evolving scholarly record. The framework provides a high-level view of the categories of material the scholarly record potentially encompasses, as well as the key stakeholder roles associated with the creation, management, and use of the scholarly record.

This book aims to enable the reader to quickly acquire a Python foundation. The material particularly feel quite comfortable to anyone with background in an object-oriented programming (OOP) language such as C++ or Java. Even if ones lack this background, they will still be able to read these sections, but will probably need to go through them more slowly than those who do know OOP. Some Linux knowledge would also be helpful, but it certainly is not required. Python is used on Windows and Macintosh platforms too, not just Linux. So, most statements here made for the Linux context will also apply to Macs as well. The author acknowledged that programming is a personal, creative activity, so everyone has his/her own view.

Children's book detailing the adventures of an independent cat.

Children's non-fiction book about penguins. Several types of penguins are described with their eating habits, natural habitats, physical desriptions, and family structure.

Illustrated children's book about a sloth trying to find a place to sleep.