At her Book of Tragool blog, Dorothea Salo makes the job easier with a useful and concise summary of all these terms. So if you need help distinguishing your open data from your open-source software, it’s a great resource.

And here are a couple of other useful resources on open access specifically:

• Peter Suber’s Open Access Overview
• SPARC’s Open Access pages

Congratulations to the UNT Digital Projects Unit on the release earlier this year of the UNT Digital Library, an exciting entity that centralizes all of the library’s digital collections in a unified repository.

The UNT Digital Library builds on work done by the Digital Projects Unit in creating a rapid development framework for digital libraries that was used in the development of the updated Portal to Texas History, released in 2009. This project uses the same framework and applies it to the libraries’ other collections, creating a unified space for providing access to content.

Among the institutional groups hosting content within the UNT Digital Library are the UNT Press, the UNT Music Library, and the UNT Libraries. The repository holds everything from electronic theses and dissertations to original performances and artwork, as well historical posters, rare books, and journals.

The UNT Digital Library was built using all open-source components and open, standards-based protocols, and most of its contents are freely available to the public.

Visit the UNT Digital Library for more information about the project.

The articles, “Fending Off Digital Decay, Bit by Bit,” focuses on Emory University’s Salman Rushdie collection and the digital materials included in it. (TDL member UT Austin’s Harry Ransom Center also gets a mention.)

An excerpt from the article:

Electronically produced drafts, correspondence and editorial comments, sweated over by contemporary poets, novelists and nonfiction authors, are ultimately just a series of digits — 0’s and 1’s — written on floppy disks, CDs and hard drives, all of which degrade much faster than old-fashioned acid-free paper. Even if those storage media do survive, the relentless march of technology can mean that the older equipment and software that can make sense of all those 0’s and 1’s simply don’t exist anymore.

Imagine having a record but no record player.

All of which means that archivists are finding themselves trying to fend off digital extinction at the same time that they are puzzling through questions about what to save, how to save it and how to make that material accessible.

From the press release:

Addressing one of the most urgent societal challenges of the Information Age – ensuring that valued digital information will be accessible not just today, but in the future – requires solutions that are at least as much economic and social as technical, according to a new report by a Blue Ribbon Task Force.

The Final Report from the Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access, called “Sustainable Economics for a Digital Planet: Ensuring Long-term Access to Digital Information”, is the result of a two-year effort focusing on  the critical economic challenges of  preserving an ever-increasing amount of information in a world gone digital.

Last month, the Texas Digital Library (TDL) embarked on a new collaborative project in partnership with several prominent water researchers in the state. With these partners, the TDL is developing a resource for sharing Texas water data  called the Texas Water Digital Library (TWDL). The TWDL will federate water research currently stored in dispersed databases and websites at various Texas universities. It will electronically harvest these resources from cooperating institutions (using OAI-ORE technology) and deposit them in a TDL-hosted DSpace repository, creating a single place for researchers to search for water data from every part of the state.

The Texas Water Digital Library serves as a model for the kind of cooperative efforts that the Texas Digital Library facilitates. The mission of the TDL is to provide services to faculty members at member institutions that will facilitate collaboration with their peers as they conduct and disseminate their research. The TWDL uses two of the services – a digital repository and the OJS peer-reviewed journaling system – provided by TDL and represents the kind of collaboration that TDL intends to foster and support.

The creation of the TWDL involves cooperation among key researchers at several Texas universities, including Dr. David Maidment, the director of the Center for Research in Water Resources at UT Austin; Dr. B. L. Harris, Director of the Texas Water Resources Institute at Texas A&M; and Dr. Ken Rainwater, Director of the Texas Tech University Water Resources Center.

Participants in the project met on February 17 to begin discussions about how best to provide resources.  Future meetings to advance the project are in the works, and the TWDL planners will provide an update on the project at the Texas Conference on Digital Libraries, to be held at UT Austin in May.

Both classes will be held at Baylor University, in the Dutton Avenue Office and Parking Facility. The registration fee for each class is $50.

Please visit the TDL training page for more information about the courses.

ETD Management with Vireo

In this course, students receive an overview of Vireo, the system created by the Texas Digital Library for handling the online submission and management of electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs). Students will gain hands-on experience using Vireo to shepherd a thesis or dissertation through the entire ETD workflow.

Among the topics covered in the course are the following:

• Thesis submission using the student submittal interface
• Processing and approval of the document using the staff administrative interface
• Configuring the staff administrative interface

Recommended audiences for this course include support staff for Thesis Offices and Offices of Graduate Studies, as well as DSpace management staff.

Online Conference Management with OCS

In this course, participants will learn how to manage an academic conference online using open-source Open Conference Systems software. Students will learn via instruction from an expert user and hands-on activities.

The Texas Digital Library hosts OCS for its members, so no installation or software maintenance is required for those wishing to use OCS. Go here for more about the TDL’s Online Conference Management offering.

Among the topics covered in the course will be:

• setting up a conference Web site
• determining a conference timeline
• managing registrations
• handling conference submissions and the peer review process
• publishing conference proceedings

McFarland traveled to the conference, held at the Colorado Convention Center, to showcase Vireo, the TDL’s submission and management system for electronic theses and dissertations. He discussed the system at a project demonstration session on Thursday, March 4.

The WebWise Conference is an annual event that “brings together representatives of museums, libraries, archives, systems science, education, and other fields interested in the future of high quality online content for inquiry and learning.” It is sponsored by the Institute of Museum and Library Services, which provided the TDL with grant funding for the development of Vireo. (IMLS Grant #: LG-05-07-0095-07)

The theme is of the 2010 WebWise Conference was “Imagining the Digital Future.”

In addition to McFarland, other TDL members and friends attended WebWise 2010, including John Hawthorne of the University of Texas at Brownsville/Texas Southmost College and Michele Reilly of the University of Houston.

For more information about Vireo, view a brief introductory presentation or read about it on the TDL website. You can also learn more about the IMLS grant that funded the development of Vireo and the TDL’s Federated Statewide ETD Repository.

A description from the editors:

In this special edition on virtual-world goods and trade, we are pleased to present articles from a global cohort of contributors covering a wide range of issues. Some of our writers, such Edward Castronova, Julian Dibbell or KZero’s Nic Mitham will be well known to you as distinguished leaders in the field, but it is equally our pleasure to introduce exciting new voices. Here you will find pieces written by academics, practitioners, journalists, a documentary filmmaker and perhaps the youngest contributor to JVWR yet, Eli Kosminksy, who attends high school in upstate New York. We would also point out that this issue extends its format to include Anthony Gilmore’s pictorial story, Julian Dibbell’s audio interview, and Lori Landay’s machinima. In real life, most contributors live in the US, the UK and Europe, and we, the editors, are based in Australia and France.

The Journal of Virtual Worlds Research uses Open Journal Systems (OJS)  journal-management software and is hosted by the Texas Digital Library as part of the TDL Electronic Press. Find out more about OJS and TDL Electronic Journal-hosting by visiting the TDL website.

The course will take place at Baylor University from 9:00 AM to 4:00 PM. Cost for the course is $50.

Those interested in taking the March 11 course should contact the TDL at info@tdl.org.

Once again, TDL member institution Baylor University is managing attendee registration for the event. To register for the conference, please visit https://www.baylor.edu/lib/index.php?id=61797. The registration fee is $50.

For more information about TCDL 2010, please visit the conference website, and also be sure to join us on the TCDL 2010 Crowdvine network and follow us on Twitter to receive important updates about the event. (Username: TCDL2010, Official hashtag: #TCDL10).

About TCDL 2010

The 2010 Texas Conference on Digital Libraries will take place May 17-18 at the AT&T Executive Education and Conference Center located on the UT Austin campus.

The theme of TCDL 2010 is Collaboration, and presentations will focus on issues of partnership and cooperation in the service of advancing scholarly communications. We are developing a program packed with expert speakers, and we are excited about providing a rich and informative experience for those who attend. To learn about ways to participate in this year’s conference, please see the Call for Participation located on the conference website.

In its fourth year, the Texas Conference on Digital Libraries will move to the AT&T Executive Education & Conference Center, a full-service conference, dining, and hotel facility that provides a more convenient location, greater flexibility, and the latest communications technology for presenters and participants.

To cover the costs of this move and to offer a more enjoyable overall conference experience, TCDL will charge a nominal registration fee of $50. This fee will cover all conference materials, an evening reception on the first day of the conference, and breakfast and snacks both days. Attendees will also have the opportunity to stay at the conference center hotel at the state rate.