The following full text research paper was made available today via the arXiv database. It was first published in January, 2013.

Title

Investigating Deletion in Wikipedia

Author

Bluma Gelly
Polytechnic Institute of NYU

Source

arXiv

Abstract

Several hundred Wikipedia articles are deleted every day because they lack sufficient notability to be included in the encyclopedia. We collected a dataset of deleted articles and analyzed them to determine whether or not the deletions were justified. We find evidence to support the hypothesis that many deletions are carried out correctly, but also find that a large number were done very quickly. Based on our conclusions, we make some recommendations to reduce the number of nonnotable pages and simultaneously improve retention of new editors.

From the Conclusion/Recommendations

Direct to Full Text (12 pages; PDF)

We love this! Kudos Kristy!

From Gothamist:

A librarian at the New York Public Library‘s Webster Library branch on the Upper East Side is taking the Tilda approach to raise awareness about NYPL budget cuts. She has placed herself on display behind glass, but instead of doing this for Art, Kristy Raffensberger is in the display case “to create awareness of the recently proposed $47 million budget cut.

Raffensberger is a Children’s Librarian at NYPL with an MLS from the Pratt Institute.

Read the Complete Article, View Image of Raffensberger “In the Box”

See Also: Actress Tilda Swinton sleeps in glass box for NY museum performance (via Reuters)

From the Press Association (via Yahoo News UK):

The BBC has scrapped a multimillion-pound attempt to create an internal digital archive after director-general Tony Hall said the scheme had “wasted a huge amount of licence fee payers’ money”.

The Digital Media Initiative (DMI) has cost the corporation £98.4 million [$184.4 million/USD] since it was started in 2008.

Mr Hall said: “The DMI project has wasted a huge amount of licence fee payers’ money and I saw no reason to allow that to continue which is why I have closed it.

See Also: Official Notice About End of Project (via BBC Blog)

At the heart of DMI’s approach was the strategy to link new digital production tools with a central, digital archive that would allow BBC staff and partners to develop, create, share and manage content digitally, from a desktop. DMI’s digital archive system would help production teams find content from the BBC’s vast archive.  In addition, new digital production and desktop tools would help ensure future content and data could be captured, edited and made available at each step of the production process. (This, incidentally, is not to be confused with digitising the existing tape archive, which is a huge undertaking and not part of DMI.)

The contract to deliver the technology solution for DMI was originally awarded to Siemens, and was brought back in-house to the BBC by mutual agreement. In 2012, the first parts of DMI were rolled out across the BBC, including the Fabric Archive Database – a system to allow users to search and request access to the BBC’s archive of tapes and other media.  In addition, wide ranging technical infrastructure was installed to underpin the move to a digital, tapeless way of working for the future.

See Also: BBC abandons £100m digital project (via BBC News)

In a letter to Margaret Hodge, chair of the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee, the BBC Trust’s Anthony Fry revealed the project had generated “little or no assets”.

“It is of utmost concern to us that a project which had already failed to deliver value for money in its early stages has now spent so much more of licence fee payers’ money,” he said.

[Clip]

John Linwood, the BBC’s chief technology officer, has been suspended.

The following white paper was posted today on the Microsoft Research publications database.

Title

Linking Structured Data

Authors

Michael Hausenblas, DERI
Michael Kerrin, DERI
Michael Pizzo, Microsoft
Evelyne Viegas, Microsoft Research
Neil Wilson, The British Library

Source

via Microsoft Research Publications Database

Abstract

This whitepaper explores how OData can be used to expose data within an RDF triple store through an end-user oriented model, and consumed by a broad range of consumer-oriented tools and applications.

In order to better understand how RDF data could be exposed and consumed by OData clients in a real world example, we went from theory to practice by focusing on some scenarios from the British Library which publishes its metadata on the Web according to the Linked Data principles.

As of today there are not many common tools and consumer-oriented applications to browse, query, and analyze this RDF-based data. It is exactly this limitation that this paper tries to overcome by allowing rich and integrated development environments to directly import and/or access the RDF-based Linked Data.

Direct to the Full Text Paper (22 pages; PDF)

The document is formally titled, Annual Report of the Librarian of Congress FY 2012.

Direct to Document (92 pages; PDF) or Full Text Embedded Below

FY 2012 LC Fast Facts

See Also

Reports From FY 2000- FY 2012)

Annual Reports Prior to 2000 (via HathiTrust)

100 Years Ago: Annual Report of the Librarian of Congress For FY 1912

Annual Report of the Librarian of Congress FY2012

Vancouver, WA is a suburb of Portland, OR.

From The Oregonian:

Judging from the rate of circulation since the library reopened in March, other visitors like it, too. Patrons checked out a total of 18,484 items in April, compared to 23,715 in April of 2012, a sign that the small branch is quickly bouncing back from its three-month closure.

Library administrators were forced to make changes in the library after Westfield refurbished the mall and nearly doubled rental rates, says Nancy Tessman,  executive director of the Fort Vancouver Regional Library District, which has a $20 million operating budget this year.

[Clip]

They didn’t want the branch, an initial contact with the library system for many of the region’s newcomers, to leave the mall, says Tessman. So they cut the mall library space in half, holding the rent to $72,000 a year, about the same as last year. While cutting space, they also gave the interior a much-needed makeover.

Administrators also changed the name from the Vancouver Mall Library to the Mall Library Connection  to emphasize its importance in connecting the public to other branches in the system.

Although the mall library’s book collection dropped from 58,000 to 20,000 volumes , Tessman says the collection will stay fresh and renewed on a regular basis.

Read the Complete Article

Visit The Mall Library Connection Web Page

Here’s a recently released “Broadband Brief” from the National Telecommunications and Information Administration.

From a Summary Blog Post:

Since June 2010, broadband availability at all speed levels has increased and basic broadband service is nearly universal in urban areas. While there is still a gap in broadband availability between urban and rural areas, 91 percent of rural Americans have access to basic broadband service as of June 2012.

While basic broadband service – which we define as advertised speeds of 3 Mbps download and 768 kbps upload – is often adequate for sending and receiving email and other services, more of today’s applications such as video streaming require much faster speeds. Across the country, broadband availability at higher speed levels has increased significantly since 2010, with the greatest gains in urban areas. Our data show that 88 percent of urban areas and 41 percent of rural areas now have access to broadband speeds of 25 Mpbs. While they have yet to match the speeds available from wired services, access to wireless broadband services also has increased dramatically from 2010 to 2012,

Other highlights from the Broadband Brief include:

• Changes: Between June 2010 and June 2012, national broadband availability increased at all advertised speed levels. During both years, the greatest rates of change occurred in the higher speed tiers, beginning with the 25 Mbps or greater tier. The percentage of Americans with access to broadband with speeds of 25 Mbps or greater has grown from nearly 50 percent in 2010 to more than 78 percent in 2012.

• Technologies: Cable is the primary technology that providers use to offer services of at least 25 Mbps or greater but less than 1 Gbps. At 3/768, 87 percent of the population has access to broadband via cable, 74 percent get this type of broadband from DSL providers and 20 percent get this broadband from fiber deployments.

• Rural/Urban: Almost 100 percent of urban residents have access to download speeds of at least 6 Mbps, while 82 percent of rural communities can access these speeds.

• Counties: In almost 59 percent (1,896) of U.S. counties, at least 95 percent of the population has access to speeds of 3/768; and in just under 10 percent (317) of counties, at least 95 percent of the population has access at 25 Mbps.

The full “brief” is available direct from NTIA (16 pages; PDF) and also embedded below.

U.S. Broadband Brief NTIA

The open letter from the CARL (Canadian Association of Research Libraries) to Prime Minister Steven Harper asks that the government consult with the library and archival community when selecting a successor to Daniel Caron who resigned as the leader of Library and Archives Canada last week.

From the Letter:

The Librarian and Archivist of Canada plays an important dual leadership role within Library and Archives Canada (LAC) as well as for the wider library and archival community. The Librarian and Archivist is this community’s voice to the rest of the world and plays a crucial part in the preservation of, and access to, our national documentary heritage. Considering your government’s promotion of Canadian history, we believe that you will appreciate the crucial role played by Library and Archives Canada and its leadership.

We believe that a long career of broad engagement with the Canadian library or archival community is an important qualification. Someone that has demonstrated leadership in this community will be able to forge the necessary collaboration to assure LAC’s success in these difficult economic times.

The letter is signed by Thomas Hickerson, President of CARL.

A copy was sent to James Moore, Minister of Canadian Heritage.

Read the Complete Letter (1 page; PDF)

From the Data.gov Blog:

Data.gov is launching two innovations today to mark both the anniversary of the Digital Government Strategy and the fourth anniversary of Data.gov. First is a comprehensive listing of the application programming interfaces (APIs) that were released from across the federal government as part of the Digital Government Strategy.

[Clip]

Data.gov is also launching a new data catalog on an open source data management system called CKAN. The new catalog features a number of enhancements, such as an improved search that helps you find all the datasets for a particular location, better sorting and tagging of datasets, and more robust metadata. Data.gov now has one unified data catalog based on an open source standard that will make it easier to federate with other federal agency catalogs, as well as those of states, cities, and counties.

The new CKAN catalog will also enable the central implementation of the Open Data Policy, as it will easily harvest the data inventories that federal agencies will be creating under the policy. The result will be an easy-to-use, comprehensive catalog that will allow citizens, developers and others to fully take advantage of the vast array of federal data that affects the daily lives of citizens.

We also released new tools on Project Open Data that will help agencies easily meet the requirement of the policy, while laying the foundation for the new Data.gov infrastructure across government.

Direct to List of APIs

Direct to New Data Catalog

See Also: Navigating the Data.gov Catalog

See Also: U.S. government’s data portal Data.gov relaunched on CKAN (via CKAN Blog)

The update appears in a new post by Johan van der Knijff (National Library of the Netherlands) on the Open Planets Foundation blog.

From the Introduction:

Last year (2012) the KB released a report on the suitability of the EPUB format for archival preservation. A substantial number of EPUB-related developments have happened since then, and as a result some of the report’s findings and conclusions have become outdated. This applies in particular to the observations on EPUB 3, and the support of EPUB by characterisation tools. This blog post provides an update to those findings. It addresses the following topics in particular:

• Use of EPUB in scholarly publishing
• Adoption and use of EPUB 3
• EPUB 3 reader support
• Support of EPUB by characterisation tools

Read the Complete Blog Post