Library Technology Guides

Harvard Library endorses new action plan for Diamond Open Access. Harvard Library is pleased to be among the first university libraries to endorse the Action Plan for Diamond Open Access published last week. Some open access journals cover their expenses through author-side fees called article processing charges, which function as barriers to authors who cannot find funding. Diamond OA journals do not charge APCs, and are as open on the author side as they are the reader side. Because they exclude no authors on economic grounds, they are an essential part of a more inclusive and equitable system of scholarly communication. [Full Announcement].

Research Collections and Preservation Consortium (ReCAP) Expands Scope and Membership. ReCAP, the Research Collections and Preservation Consortium, founded by Columbia University, The New York Public Library, and Princeton University in 2000 to preserve and make accessible the collections of its members, has expanded its scope and membership, transforming its original mission from serving as a shared physical repository to becoming a model for shared collection building and management. [Full Announcement].

Harvard Library goes live with Ex Libris Alma library services platform and Leganto resource list solution. Ex Libris announced that Harvard Library has gone live with the Ex Libris Alma library services platform and the Leganto course resource list solution. The Alma platform will support new workflows and processes that make sure that Harvard Library’s patrons always receive the service they need, while Leganto resource lists will be central to Harvard Library’s strategy of providing comprehensive support for courses throughout the university. [Full Announcement].

Harvard's Perma.cc receives grant to expand its tools for saving sources on the Web. The Institute of Museum and Library Services has awarded a major grant to the Harvard Law School Library Innovation Lab to further develop its Perma.cc tool to combat link rot. The IMLS grant awards over $700,000 to the Harvard Law School Library Innovation Lab, in cooperation with the Berkman Center for Internet & Society and more than 130 partner libraries, to sustainably scale Perma.cc to combat link rot in all scholarly fields. [Full Announcement].

Priority Update: Enhanced Discovery and Delivery Systems. The first half of the fiscal year brought intense focus on and completion of the Library-wide goal of enabling more effective access to knowledge and data through intuitive discovery via two projects: HOLLIS+ implementation and LibraryCloud. HOLLIS+ is now fully operational as the default search and discovery platform for library resources. Following a beta launch in the summer, additional content from print and digital collections was integrated into the platform throughout the fall. Now, HOLLIS+ users can discover books, articles, images, manuscripts, data, sound recordings and much more in a single search, creating a scholarly alternative that mirrors the function of common general-interest search engines. [Full Announcement].

Sarah Thomas of University of Oxford Appointed Vice President for the Harvard Library. Harvard University Provost Alan M. Garber announced today that Sarah Thomas of the University of Oxford has been named vice president for the Harvard Library. [Full Announcement].

Millions of Harvard Library catalog records publicly available. The Harvard Library announced it is making more than 12 million catalog records from Harvard’s 73 libraries publicly available. The records contain bibliographic information about books, videos, audio recordings, images, manuscripts, maps, and more. The Harvard Library is making these records available in accordance with its Open Metadata Policy and under a Creative Commons 0 (CC0) public domain license. In addition, the Harvard Library announced its open distribution of metadata from its Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard (DASH) scholarly article repository under a similar CC0 license. [Full Announcement].

Harvard's DASH for Open Access. Harvard's leadership in open access to scholarship took a significant step forward this week with the public launch of DASH—or Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard—a University-wide, open-access repository. More than 350 members of the Harvard research community, including over a third of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, have jointly deposited hundreds of scholarly works in DASH. [Full Announcement].

Virtual Data Center released. The Virtual Data Center (VDC) is an OSS digital library system "in a box"for numeric data. [Full Announcement].

Harvard University Library and key publishers join forces for electronic journal archive. The Harvard University Library and three major publishers of scholarly journals - Blackwell Publishing, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., and the University of Chicago Press - have agreed to work together on a plan to develop an experimental archive for electronic journals. The preservation and the archiving of electronic journals - which are increasingly “born digital” and for which, in many cases, no paper copies exist - present unique, long-term challenges to librarians, publishers, and, ultimately, to the scholars and researchers who will seek to access to them over time. [Full Announcement].