Newsletter No. 431

No. 431, 19.1.2014 3 to deposit their publications in their institution’s open- access repository, usually after an embargo period agreed upon with the publishers. Institutions need to ensure that their repository conforms to international standards and can be harvested by search engines such as Google so the materials can be easily found. The Library supports the spirit of expanded access to scholarly research and resources. Opening up a collection requires the prior approval of the publishers if material is still in copyright. It is a complicated issue and negotiations can take a long time. The Chinese Rare Book Collection was chosen as the first library digitization project to fully support open-access because there was no copyright concern with books written in the 16th or 17th century. Moreover, the collection’s uniqueness and the availability of a large corpus of texts also made it appropriate to be the pioneer. Digitization is also one approach to preserving rare books, as once digitized, manual handling can be minimized. Rare books are vulnerable to the elements and extremely fragile. They are stored in the Rare Book Room where the temperature, humidity, and lighting are carefully monitored. The Library outsourced the project to a professional firm. To avoid transporting the books outside the Library, the scanning machine was moved More About How did the open-access movement start? The idea of open-access began brewing in the late 1990s, at a time when the Internet became increasingly widely available. Various sectors including the academia, the publishing industry and the information technology industry advocated the promotion of research work and dissemination of knowledge through the Internet so society as a whole can benefit. In 2001, an international meeting was convened in Budapest by the Open Society Foundations to accelerate progress in the international effort to make research articles in all academic fields freely available on the Internet. It resulted in the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) released the year after which was a statement of principle, strategy and commitment. The initiative has been signed by a number of individuals and organizations from around the world who represent researchers, universities, laboratories, libraries, foundations, journals and publishers. In October 2003, the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities was drafted to promote the Internet as a functional instrument for a global scientific knowledge base and human reflection. It made more concrete suggestions to promote open-access such as encouraging researchers to publish their work according to the principles of the open-access paradigm, encouraging the holders of cultural heritage, such as libraries, to support open-access by providing their resources on the Internet. It was one of the milestones of the open-access movement. What is the definition of open-access? Open-access stands for free, immediate online access to scholarly literature with full re-use rights. Open-access materials can include original scientific research results, raw data, source materials, digital representations of pictorial and graphical materials and scholarly multimedia materials. According to BOAI, open-access means ‘free availability on the public Internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of those articles, arrange them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the Internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.’ What are the advantages of open-access? Open-access can make research work more accessible and accelerate the pace of innovation. Researchers can disseminate their works more widely and rapidly, and users can find texts and data easily and discover new research areas and knowledge. to the digitization centre inside the Library so the books could be scanned in situ. Ms. Jones said the Library made every effort to minimize the chance of damage to the ancient books during the process of digitization. Besides strictly monitoring the temperature and humidity of the digitization centre, the windows were blocked with black cardboard to prevent natural light from entering. The number of books transported to the centre was limited and books were returned to the Rare Book Room as soon as possible after scanning. Dust is harmful to books so the staff members handling the tomes were required to wear gloves. The scanning machine was also carefully chosen. The one selected had a V-shaped cradle which allowed the books to be opened only a little bit (thus forming a V-shape when viewed from the side), instead of having to be opened widely as conventional overhead scanners would have dictated. This minimizes strain on the spine. In 2014 the Library, in cooperation with the Graduate School, plans to launch another open-access collection. The target this time is the theses and dissertations of CUHK MPhil and PhD students dating back to 1963. It is estimated that there are over 12,000 items, involving over one million images being digitized as part of the project. 數碼中心內的書本掃描器 The scanning machine at the digitization centre