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Happy Public Domain Day!

What is Public Domain Day (PDD)?  Simply put, it is an annual celebration observed on the first of every year, marking the expiration of another year of copyrights, such that the affected works enter the public domain.  When works enter the public domain, they become widely available for a range of uses, including online access, […]

Invitation to Apply for CUL Fellowship (formerly Digital Scholarship Fellowship)

We are pleased to invite applications for the CUL Fellowship.  This year’s program builds on the Digital Scholarship Fellowship, which was hosted by the DSPS unit since 2012, by expanding it to all library programs. It aims to provide opportunities for CUL staff to expand their skills and experiences in developing, delivering, and assessing services and […]

A day in the life of the arXiv admin team

The arXiv administrator team handles the 500-600 new article submissions that come into arXiv every day (double that on Mondays). When a user sends a paper to arXiv it goes through a series of checks to detect technical issues with the paper and also to make sure it meets our moderation standards. The administrators shepherd […]

Meet the People Behind eCommons

We provided a short history of eCommons in a previous post. Now we’d like to introduce you to the staff who keep things running! I should note that we also get occasional help on special projects from other folks in Metadata Services, CUL-IT, and the UX group, but this is the core “all the time” team. […]

A Brief History of eCommons

A lot of eCommons history is ingrained in institutional memory, so I thought I would take a stab at documenting it a bit. Much of what follows was gleaned from a 2008 white paper by the CUL IR task force, whose members included Terry Ehling, Peter Hirtle, Eileen Keating, George Kozak, Mary Newhart, Joy Paulson, […]

Research Sharing and Profiling Platforms

In the past year, I’ve spoken with a couple of faculty groups about research sharing and profiling platforms: what they do, and some issues and alternatives to consider. Since there is a steady stream of news about these tools – most recently that ResearchGate has restricted access to 1.7 million articles, as well as plans […]

SCWG: eCommons and Unit Libraries (includes survey link)

One of the 2017 projects of the Scholarly Communication Working Group is gaining a better understanding and better supporting the efforts of unit libraries in recruiting content for deposit in eCommons. eCommons is Cornell’s general-purpose Institutional Repository (IR), available for the use of the entire Cornell community (more information about eCommons is available on the […]

Preserving one “Window on the Past” for the future

Cornell has recently deposited its Making of America (MOA) collection into HathiTrust.  Through this process, we have transitioned one of our oldest digital collections to contemporary architecture, improved the quality of both page images and optically recognized character (OCR) textflow, and made the content available to scholars using both traditional and computational methods.  Our experience […]

Exciting Times for arXiv: Grants from the Sloan Foundation and the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence Usher the Next-Gen arXiv Initiative

We are pleased to receive a $450,000 grant from the Sloan Foundation and $200,000 from the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2) to start establishing a new technical infrastructure for arXiv. The funds from the Sloan Foundation will initiate the design of a modern, scalable, cost-efficient, and reliable technical infrastructure for arXiv. The additional support […]

News from eCommons, CUL’s General Purpose Institutional Repository

On behalf of the eCommons team, I’d like to share some news on new services for eCommons users, and some other things we’ve been working on. My apologies for being slow to recognize the need and the opportunity to communicate news of this kind to you. For the most part, I’ll communicate eCommons news by forwarding […]

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