News
ALPSP announces 2010 awards
Richard Gedye of Oxford University Press (left) was presented with the Award for Contribution to Scholarly Publishing by ALPSP CEO Ian Russell at the ALPSP conference
The best journal launched in the last one to three years was BMJ Case Reports, according to judges at this year’s ALPSP awards, who commented that ‘a successful and innovative publishing model has been created by exploiting material traditionally avoided by mainstream journals.’ Also in the awards, ChemSpider, from the Royal Society of Chemistry, picked up the award for publishing innovation, and CRC Press (Taylor & Francis) received the award for best ebook platform for CRCnetBASE.
Richard Gedye of Oxford University Press received the organisation’s Award for
IBM and EU expand digitisation collaboration
IBM and the EU have expanded their research collaboration to provide new technology that they say will enable highly-accurate digitisation of rare and culturally significant historical texts on a massive scale. The collaboration now includes more than two dozen national libraries, research institutes, universities, and companies across Europe. According to IBM,
Janet O’Flaherty and Dean Jenkins of BMJ Group received the Award for Best New Journal from Billy McNamara of DHL Global Mail
Contribution to Scholarly Publishing. ‘Throughout his long and distinguished career, he has made an enormous contribution to industry bodies including ALPSP, UKSG and the Counter project,’ said the selection committee.
The awards were announced at the ALPSP International Conference held in September.
Library community mourns CILIP chief executive
CILIP chief executive Bob McKee died in August in Sweden. He was attending the World Library and Information Congress as a member of the governing board and executive committee of the International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA). A statement on IFLA’s website described McKee as an active, friendly and committed member of IFLA for many years. ‘His contribution to
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the IFLA governing board, his membership of the FAIFE committee and his expertise in the management of library associations earned him the respect of his fellow professionals. He was also, as all those who met him would testify, a deeply intelligent man whose quick wit and sense of humour made him many friends in the library world and beyond,’ continued the statement.
IMPACT (IMProving ACcess to Text) will offer new tools and best practices to institutions across Europe. This will enable them to efficiently and accurately produce quality digital replicas of historically significant texts and make them widely available, editable and searchable online. Funded by the EU,
IMPACT’s research combines the power of web-enabled adaptive optical character recognition (OCR) software
with crowd computing technology. The latter fast- growing concept is designed around individuals, or ‘crowds,’ enhancing a process or product by sharing their knowledge and expertise to improve its quality and efficiency. Combined, these technologies will allow institutions to adapt digitisation to the idiosyncrasies of old fonts, anomalies and even vocabularies, while reducing error rates by 35 per cent and substitution by 75 per cent. ‘IMPACT is remarkable in that it not only allows these prominent centres of culture to ultimately bring people closer to perhaps never before seen historically significant texts of heritage - but because it actually allows these people to become part of the preservation process,’ said Tal Drory, manager of the document processing group at IBM Research in Haifa.
WLIC delegates learn of impact of Haiti earthquake on libraries
Delegates at IFLA’s recent World Library and Information Congress were shown security camera pictures from the country’s national library that captured the Haiti earthquake in January.
The director of the National Library of Haiti, Françoise Thybulle, and Elisabeth Pierre-Louis, library programme director of FOKAL, described the situation. The national library, which was the least badly hit of Haiti’s three major libraries, is due to reopen soon. However, of the other two, one needs to be repaired and the
other was totally destroyed in the earthquake. The conference also heard about the recent visit to Haiti of IFLA’s president, Ellen Tise and Ingrid Parent, IFLA’s president- elect. Tise and Parent spoke about how impressed they were to see the dedication of the Haitian people in rebuilding destroyed buildings. During the visit, Tise, representing ICBS, co-signed an agreement with the Haitian Government to support restoration and initiatives for temporary library services and improving of professional skills in Haiti.
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