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ACM Digital Library Bulletin

ACM launched the next generation of its Digital Library platform in November 2010. ACM has received significant feedback related to the new platform from librarians and users around the world. The most significant feedback relates to the new search interface, which more heavily integrates the full-text database of the DL with the bibliographic database the Guide to Computing Literature. For many users, this integration was seamless resulting in a better overall experience, while for some of our users there has been some confusion related to what content is full-text and what is a bibliographic record from the Guide.

ACM is addressing this issue in several different ways, such as highlighting the ability to default search results to "Full-Text" or the "Guide" bibliography manually at the user-level. ACM is also offering the option for institutions to contact ACM directly and have ACM configure the default directly to "Full-text" for the entire institution, so that users will always see full-text results first when doing a basic search using the open search box on the main DL landing page. If they then wish to expand the search to include bibliographic records from the Guide, they may do this by clicking on the "Expand your search to the Guide to Computing Literature" link just above the "Refine Your Search" box on the top left of the search results page.

Other feedback and questions ACM has received relates to library tools and services, such as OpenURL, Counter III compliance, SUSHI statistics, and support for Shibboleth, Athens, and EZProxy authentication. Some of these will be addressed in this issue of the newsletter and all of these will be addressed on our librarians information site at http://librarians.acm.org.

The new platform lays the groundwork for the DL to become more than just the largest and most comprehensive database of content for the scholarly computing community but also to serve as a true research and analytical tool for those working in the field of computing. ACM's Author Profile Pages and the soon to be launched Institutional Profile Pages are the first major step in this direction by providing detailed and comprehensive biographical, bibliographical, and bibliometric information at the author level and institutional level covering the entire field.

More information about these new features of the DL will be provided on our librarians' information site and in upcoming issues of this newsletter but please do not hesitate to reach out to ACM with any questions or feedback you have related to the platform or your institution's license for the ACM DL at [log in to unmask] . Please enjoy this issue!

News From ACM

On April 3, 2011 ACM will be holding its International Library Advisory Board (LAB) Meeting in Harrogate, UK. The meeting will be held prior to the 2011 Annual UKSG Conference. ACM will hosts librarians from South America, Europe, Asia, India and the Middle East.

The goal of this LAB meeting is to better understand how the various trends in the library market effect libraries from around the world and seek advice from the board on how to best address them. Among the topics to be discussed are:

·  Open Access & institutional repositories in scholarly publishing

·  Federated search and information discovery technologies

·  Long term digital preservation of scholarly information

·  Intellectual property issues in scholarly publishing

·  The impact of social media on the library

·  Pricing and business models in today’s economic climate

·  The impact of consolidation in the academic library market

·  ACM Digital Library product development

·  ACM’s publications program – present and future

·  Changes to the ACM Digital Library Platform

This will be the first time ACM has held an international LAB meeting and the first time such a meeting will be held outside the United States. The International LAB meeting follows the successful Americas LAB held in New York in 2010. 

ACM’s current version of the Computing Classification System (CCS) was developed in 1982. It evolved from an earlier ACM Computing Classification Scheme that was introduced in 1964. It has become the de facto standard taxonomy for computer science. (See: http://portal.acm.org/ccs.cfm).

The 1982 ACM CCS was last updated in 1998. The field has certainly developed since then and the CCS is sorely in need of a major revision.

After evaluating how the CCS is deployed in the ACM Digital Library and hearing request for an update from parts of the community (especially those engaged with semantic web and data linking applications), as well as continued requests to use the ACM CCS in various applications, the CCS Update Project was unanimously approved by the ACM Publications Board.

In the scientific, technical and medical (STM) publishing domain, the taxonomy approach to semantic classification is booming – with publishers using taxonomy to allow users to cross-cut content topically, increasing application usage.

The CCS provides important functionality in the ACM Digital Library, much of it behind the scenes. The words and phrases of its categories are an index for general searches. The subject categories are also available for direct queries in Advanced Search. Other searches are launched behind the scenes to find other documents similar to ones the user has selected.

Also, in Author Profiles Pages and in the soon-to-be introduced Institutional Profiles Pages, the CCS is used to show an author’s areas of expertise and the strength of an institution’s various programs as measured by areas of greatest publishing productivity, visualized in new tag clouds. (See for example, http://portal.acm.org/event.cfm?id=RE224).

These functions will be greatly improved by a newly revised CCS and will be used to build out additional capabilities, such as a new People Search interface that will supplement the traditional Bibliographic Search we now have. The new CCS Taxonomy is expected to be complete by summer this year and will be accompanied by an expanded thesaurus. 

Submit your best Digital Library Video Tutorial to ACM at [log in to unmask] and enter for a chance to win a Free iPad!

Training and familiarizing end users on scholarly reference products isn’t always simple, and our Digital Library team is searching for the most resourceful and creative video tutorial demonstrating how you use the ACM Digital Library.

• How do you search and link to articles in the ACM DL?
• What Digital Library feature or functionality do you find most useful?
• What Advanced Search features are most effective when customizing your search?
• How do you utilize our newest Author Profiles Pages?

The contest is open to the general public worldwide, and you do not have to be a current subscriber to enter. All submissions should be 5-20 minutes in length and posted to YouTube where ACM will track the usage for all entries received.

Click here to read the complete contest rules.

ACM will announce two (2) winners in the following categories:

• Best English Language Video
• Best Foreign Language Video

The users that submit the winning tutorials will each receive a Free iPad and both videos will be posted on the ACM Digital Library information pages at http://librarians.acm.org.

Enter your best ACM DL Video Tutorial now through the March 15th, 2011 deadline, and help ACM train our users on the ultimate online resource for computing professionals and students.

Good luck and Happy Taping!

ACM has become a Founding Sponsor of ORCID (www.orcid.org), contributing at the highest level, as a Gold Sponsor. ACM has undertaken its own author name normalization to produce unique ACM Author Profiles in the ACM Digital Library. ORCID offers the potential to do this on a global, interdisciplinary, transnational basis, accurately connecting researchers with all their contributions, not just those known within a particular bibliographic space like the ACM DL. ACM recognizes this imperative and has therefore taken a leadership role in becoming a Founding Sponsor of this fledgling non-profit organization and a seat on the ORCID Board of Directors.

The central goal of ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID) is to solve the long-standing name ambiguity problem in scholarly communication. Accurate attribution is a fundamental pillar of the scholarly record. A global infrastructure exists for accurate identification of content but not for the producers of that content, creating challenges in establishing the precise identity of authors and other contributors and reliably linking them to their published works.

The core mission of ORCID is to rectify this by creating a central registry of unique identifiers for individual researchers and an open and transparent linking mechanism between ORCID and other current author identifier schemes. This registry will be a centralized identity system for collecting and managing information describing: i) contributors themselves and ii) relationships between contributors and their scholarly publications as well as various other types of academic output.

The VIVO Collaboration has recently awarded a grant to ORCID for their project “The VIVO platform and ORCID in the scholarly identity ecosystem.” The VIVO Collaborative Research Projects Program provides funding for people and institutions to develop tools that use VIVO data or code to positively impact scientists and science.

ORCID is an open organization http://orcid.org/principles with a very broad group of stakeholders (http://orcid.org/directory). Libraries are an important constituency and you are welcome to join (http://orcid.org/memberorg-form).

ACM has developed a beta version of its new Institutional Profile Pages that will launch in Q1 of 2011. The Institutional Profile Pages allow users of the ACM DL to understand the computer science research being done at a given academic, corporate or government organization. The Institutional Profile Pages were developed with the goal of better understanding the research output from a particular organization. This new tool will allow users to view bibliometric data of an organization based on its publication history, see how it ranks against and relates to other organizations, and learn who is doing research at these institutions and in what areas they are publishing.

The Institutional Profile Pages were developed following the success of the previously launched Author Profile Pages, which provides detailed biographic, bibliographic, and bibliometric information at the author-level for over 1,350,000 scholars in the field of computing. ACM is unique in its ability to develop both Author Profile Pages and Institutional Pages because the data used to power these tools comes from ACM’s Guide to Computing Literature Bibliography. The Guide, which ACM has been publishing for over 30 years, is the most comprehensive bibliographic database in existence today focused exclusively on the field of computing.

The ACM Digital Library sales and management team attend many conferences year round all over the world. We are always happy to meet with our consortia and agent partners at these events. Please see the list below for the events ACM will be attending in 2011. To schedule a meeting, or to request any other information, please email to [log in to unmask].

March 3rd, 2011
SCELC Vendor Day
Loyola Marymount University
Los Angeles, CA

March 30th - April 1st, 2011
Association for College & Research Libraries (ACRL)
Pennsylvania Convention Center - Exhibition Hall A
Booth: 350

April 4th - 6th, 2011
UKSG 34th Annual Conference and Exhibitions:Harrogate
Harogate International Center
King's Road, Harrogate, North Yorkshire HG1 5LA
Booth: 60

June 12th – 15th, 2011
SLA 2011 Annual Conferences & INFOR-EXPO
Pennsylvania Convention Center
110 Arch Street, Philadelphia, PA 19107
Booth:935

August 13th - 18th, 2011
IFLA 2011
Puerto Rico Convention Center
San Juan, Puerto Rico

October 12th – 16th, 2011
Frankfurt Bookfair
Messegelande
Ludwiq-Erhard-Anlage 1
60327 Frankfurt am Main Germany

ACM also sponsors hundreds of conferences and symposia each year, as part of our continuing mission to support computer science education and curricula reform. All scholarly material published for these events are made available in the Digital Library as well. For a complete calendar of ACM Sponsored Conferences and Symposia scheduled for 2011, please visit us at URL http://portal.acm.org/conferences.cfm .