In Other News - July 2008

On July 14, the Library of Congress reported the release of "International Study on the Impact of Copyright Law on Digital Preservation." "This study focuses on the copyright and related laws of Australia, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and the United States and the impact of those laws on digital preservation of copyrighted works. It also addresses proposals for legislative reform and efforts to develop non-legislative solutions to the challenges that copyright law presents for digital preservation."

More news from the Library of Congress: "Library of Congress, National Archives Form World Digital Library Partnership." "WDL will make available on the Internet significant primary materials from countries and cultures around the world. The project’s goal is to promote international understanding and to provide a resource for use by students, teachers, and general audiences."

Adobe Systems, which created the Portable Document Format, has handed over control of the format to the International Organisation for Standardization, which has released it as ISO 32000-1, Document management – Portable document format – Part 1: PDF 1.7.

Digital preservation of e-journals in 2008: Urgent Action revisited. Results from a Portico/Ithaka Survey of U.S. Library Directors finds that although librarians believe digital preservation is very important, survey responses "suggested that preservation of e-journals, while valued, has not yet become a strategic budgeting priority for many libraries in the face of other competing priorities."

On June 19, CrossRef announced the launch of CrossCheck, "a new initiative to aid publishers in verifying the originality of scholarly content."

The corrected June 12, 2008 version of the report by the Joint Committee on Quantitative Assessment of Research, Citation Statistics, notes, among other things, that "citation data provide only a limited and incomplete view of research quality, and the statistics derived from citation data are sometimes poorly understood and misused."