News

According to recent European Commision (EC) report there at least 3 million orphan books in Europe. Oprhan works are works which are still in copyright but rigth holders cannot be traced. EC gathered responses from 22 cultural institutions which are involved in digitisation work, including national libraries, archives, and national films collections. From Poland the study participants were the National Library and the National Digital Archive.

Since this issue PIONIER magazine will be available in electronic form. For now, the network can only find the latest edition of the magazine, but soon there will also be archived issues.

Since a couple of days information about Poznań Supercomputing and Networking Center’s activity can be found also on Facebook social networking site.

It appeared that in May 2010 Internet users from the UK visited social networks more frequently than search engines. According to Hitwise, in May 2010 social networks accounted for 11.88% of UK Internet visits and search engines accounted for 11.33%. It means that May was the first month ever in which popularity of social networks was greater than popularity of search engines.

Poznań’s e-government, which was created jointly by Poznań Supercomputing and Networking Center and Poznań City Hall, was awarded “the Golden @ “. According to the jury, the capital of Greatpoland has built the most people-friendly administration on the Internet.

In a recently published “Aggregators Handbook”, prepared by the Europeana v1.0 project for metadata aggregators willing to cooperate with Europeana, a case study showing the way for aggregator to start such cooperation has been included. The basis for this study were the experiences of the Polish Digital Libraries Federation. The text of this case study is also available at the information pages for potential Europeana partners.

Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center was considered the best Polish institution which carries out European research projects. National Contact Point for EU Research Programmes awarded PSNC with the Crystal Brussels Prize. The award was received by Dr. Norbert Meyer, the Head of the Supercomputing Department, at the hands of the Minister for Science and Higher Education – Prof. Barbara Kudrycka and European Parliament President – Prof. Jerzy Buzek. The prize giving ceremony was held at the Second European Congress on Economic in Katowice.

On the 24th of May, 2010 around 10:20 AM the total number of publications in Polish digital libraries connected to the PIONIER DLF reached 400 000.

Previous week brought an interesting announcement of the social portal Twitter and Library of Congress stating that each public message sent on the Twitter portal, starting from 2006, will be digitally archived. According to representatives of Library of Congress such a huge amount of data will not only present our current style of living in the future, but it also will be a very interesting data for investigation by contemporaty scientists.

At the beggining of February 2010 PSNC joined European IMPACT (Improving Access To Text) project. PSNC Digital Libraries Team is responsible for the works assigned to PSNC within the IMPACT project.

Year 2009 appeared to be the record year in terms of the number of newly started digital libraries. Yesterday on dLibra project home page, 16th entry concerning 2009 has been added to the list of dLibra installations. It means that in 2009 there were started 4 more digital libraries than in 2008 (see http://dlibra.psnc.pl/biblioteki/). Moreover, from the information that we receive it appears that 2009 is not finally “closed” – there is still a chance to increase the number of newly started digital libraries in 2009 by several entries.

On the 16th of February 2010 in the ROARMAP registry a policy of the Institute of Biochemistry and Biophysics PAS regarding the compulsory archiving of all published manuscripts in the IBB PAS institutional repository was registered. It is a 145th entry in this database and the first entry from Poland. Congratulations!