Announcing: The Information and Knowledge Professional's Career Handbook: Define and Create Your Success

In 2009, Ulla de Stricker and I had an idea for a book of career advice.  We both had fielded enough questions from students and practitioners to know that a book would be well-received...and we felt that we were the correct people to write it.  What began as an idea is now a reality!  (Let the happy dance begin!)

Description: Information Professionals and Knowledge Managers deal with significant challenges in building successful careers for a number of reasons associated with common misperceptions of their expertise and roles. In environments where they must often justify their work and value over and over again, those already in the profession need a boost and those just entering need to be prepared for a reality that may differ quite a bit from their expectations. The book is intended to give readers a set of tools and techniques with which to secure a strong career, build an effective brand, and succeed as professionals.

The book includes advice and words of wisdom from 15 amazing colleagues in North America and Europe, who work in a variety of information environments.

More Information & Where You Can Buy It:

• A complete table of contents is available on the Woodhead Publishing web site (our wonderful publisher). The book can be ordered through Woodhead, which may be convenient for those in Europe.
• In the U.S., the book is available through Neal Schuman.
• It is also available through Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble (online), and may show up through other booksellers. (Both are currently offering pre-publication deals.)
  

A Note to MSLIS Programs & iSchools:  While this book contains valuable information for those in the middle of their career, it is highly valuable to those that are just starting out.  Please consider ordering a copy to review, then consider asking your bookstore to carry the book (or telling your students where to purchase it). 

Promoting the Book:  A number of things are in the works:

• If you're on Facebook, there is a Fan Page for the book.  Feel free to "like" it and leave comments as well as ask questions. Ulla and I want to know what you think of the book, and are definitely interested in opening up an ongoing conversation on creating career success.
• We hope to do book signings with Woodhead Publishing and Neal Schuman.
• We would like to talk about creating career success with groups - especially students - either face-to-face or via phone/video conference.  Our thinking is that if you commit to a bulk order of the book and help us with the arrangements (travel costs or telecom connections), one of us (or both of us) will speak to your group. 

A Word of Thanks:  Thanks to all of those who walked with us through our writing process, etc.  Thanks especially to our colleagues who contributed to the book.  Your contributions were extremely important.  And thanks to the Internet for providing a way of Ulla and I to work collaboratively while living in two different countries!  

---

FTC Disclaimer: Digitization 101 is an Amazon affiliate and receives a small commission if you purchase a product or service from an Digitization 101 Amazon link. (Trust me, I'm not getting rich off of Amazon.)

Watching Egypt & wondering about all of its antiquities

In 1988, I had the pleasure of going to Egypt for a few days with a tour group.  We visited the pyramids, sailed on the Nile, walked through Luxor and Karnak, and even wandered the streets of Cairo.  Like millions of others who have visited Egypt, we went to the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities, known commonly as the Egyptian Museum.  Two images remain with me of the museum. First, it wasn't as comfortable as museums I had visited in the U.S.  This wasn't a museum where you sat to contemplate the items in the collection.  Second, I remember that in one room (I believe the room with items from King Tut's tomb), we were not allowed to stand still; we have to keep moving.  Why?  Likely for security reasons as well as to ensure that everyone had a chance to view everything.

And I always remembered returning to our hotel one afternoon and seeing an increased security (military) presence.  We were told that President Mubarak had been there for lunch and was still on the grounds.  As we walked through the complex, we could see a group of men gathered near the pool.  I have no idea if Mubarak was among them, since it seemed unwise to stop and stare.

In 1988, Muhammad Hosni Sayyid Mubarak had already been president for seven years.  Now he has been president for over 29 years.  The events occurring in Egypt aim to impact how long he remains president.

However, this is not a political blog, but one about digitization and so let me wonder about the preservation of Egypt's antiquities.  The news media has reported vandalism at the Egyptian Museum.  Items have been smashed.  Heads reportedly ripped off of mummies. Are there images of all of the items that staff can use to guide them in their repairs (or piecing back together)?  If an item cannot be repaired, are their images that can serve as their surrogates?  Given the current state of Egypt, are their copies of those photos, videos, x-rays, etc., in other countries?  Have they been digitized?  Depending on the future of Egypt, could a virtual Egyptian Museum be launched that showed how it used to look and what it used to contains?

I can imagine that museums and other collections around the world are beginning to think about how they can help the Egyptian Museum and other collections in Egypt.  Egypt will need to stabilize before work on restoring the collections can begin.  Between now and then, let's hope that the collections are not further damaged. I doubt that the people of Egypt really want to lose those items from its past.

---

Addendum (1/31/2011):  People have already documented some of the damage as well as formed a human chain around the Egyptian Museum in order to prevent further destruction.

• Looters break into Cairo museum (video)
• Statues of Tutankhamun damaged/stolen from the Egyptian Museum
• Human chain around the Egyptian Museum (photo)

Also fixed the typo in the title to this post. (oops!)[10:33 a.m.]

Article: Can Your Camera Phone Turn You Into a Pirate?

This is a fast read...and an article that is worth reading.  Many of us have camera phones.  Are we using our camera phones to be pirates?  Do we recognize that we're pirates?

Digital Curation and Preservation Bibliography, Version 2

Received via email from Charles W. Bailey, Jr., who continues to compile interesting bibliographies.

---

Version 2 of the Digital Curation and Preservation Bibliography is now available from Digital Scholarship as an XHTML website with live links to many included works.  This selective bibliography includes over 500 articles, books, and technical reports  that are useful in understanding digital curation and preservation.  All included works are in English.  It is available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.

Table of Contents:

1 General Works about Digital Curation and Preservation
2 Digital Preservation Copyright Issues
3 Digital Preservation of Formats and Materials
   3.1 General Works
   3.2 Digital Data
   3.3 Digital Media
   3.4 E-journals
   3.5 Other Digital Formats and Materials
   3.6 World-Wide Web
4 Digital Preservation Metadata
5 Digital Preservation Models and Policies
6 Digital Preservation National and International Efforts
7 Digital Preservation Projects and Institutional
Implementations
8 Digital Preservation Research
9 Digital Preservation Services
   9.1 JSTOR
   9.2 LOCKSS
   9.3 Portico
10 Digital Preservation Strategies
11 Digital Repository Digital Preservation Issues
Appendix A. Related Bibliographies
Appendix B. About the Author

Event: European Conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries (ECDL)

As received in email.

---

The European Conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries (ECDL) has been the leading European scientific forum on digital libraries for 14 years. For the 15th year the conference was renamed into:
International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries

The conference will continue to bring together researchers, developers, content providers and users in the field of digital libraries. TPDL 2011 is organised by the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (Berlin School of Library and Information Science, the Computer and Media Services and the Department of Computer Science).

SCOPE/OBJECTIVES
----------------
Over the last years, Digital Libraries have taken over a central role in our society. The process of acquiring, creating, processing, retrieving, disseminating, and using knowledge, information, data and metadata has undergone and still continues to undergo significant changes. This includes an ever increasing public access to on-line resources, an evolution in the amount and diversity of resources that are available through this channel, a social shift in the paradigm of how to experience information towards interactive, globally collaborative and personalized approaches, and many more.
In this spirit, TPDL 2011 aims at providing a forum for researchers, developers, content providers and practitioners for presenting and discussing novel results from innovative research and systems development on Digital Libraries.

TOPICS OF INTEREST
------------------
Authors are invited to submit research papers describing original, unpublished research that is not (and will not be) simultaneously under consideration for publication elsewhere.

TPDL 2011 solicits the submission of full (12 pages max.) and short (8 pages max.) research papers. General areas of interests include, but are not limited to, the following topics, organized in four areas:

Foundations: Technology and Methodologies
- Digital libraries: architectures and infrastructures
- Metadata standards and protocols in digital library systems
- Interoperability in digital libraries, data and information integration
- Distributed and collaborative information spaces
- Systems, algorithms, and models for digital preservation
- Personalization in digital libraries
- Information access: retrieval and browsing
- Information organization
- Information visualization
- Multimedia information management and retrieval
- Multilinguality in digital libraries
- Knowledge organization and ontologies in digital libraries

Digital Humanities
- Digital libraries in cultural heritage
- Computational linguistics: text mining and retrieval
- Organizational aspects of digital preservation
- Information policy and legal aspects (e.g., copyright laws)
- Social networks and networked information
- Human factors in networked information
- Scholarly primitives

Research Data
- Architectures for large-scale data management (e.g., Grids, Clouds)
- Cyberinfrastructures: architectures, operation and evolution
- Collaborative information environments
- Data mining and extraction of structure from networked information
- Scientific data curation
- Metadata for scientific data, data provenance
- Services and workflows for scientific data
- Data and knowledge management in virtual organizations

Applications and User Experience
- Multi-national digital library federations (e.g., Europeana)
- Digital Libraries in eGovernment, elearning, eHealth, eScience, ePublishing
- Semantic Web and Linked Data
- User studies for and evaluation of digital library systems and applications
- Personal information management and personal digital libraries
- Enterprise-scale knowledge and information management
- User behaviour and modelling
- User mobility and context awareness in information access
- User interfaces for digital libraries

PAPER SUBMISSION
----------------
All research papers must be written in English and follow the formatting guidelines of Springer’s Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS).
Research papers must be up to 12 pages of length for long papers, up to 8 pages for short papers, and must be submitted via the conference submission system. All papers will be reviewed by at least 3 members of the programme committee. Paper acceptance can be as long paper, short paper or poster.
The size of the poster should not exceed ISO A0 (portrait) size – maximum height of 1189mm (46.81 inches) and maximum width of 841mm (33.11 inches).
The proceedings will be published as a volume of Springer’s Lecture Notes on Computer Science (LNCS) series.
All papers need to be submitted via the EasyChair conference submission system:
http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=tpdl2011

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CALL FOR DEMOS 1st International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries 2011
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Demos provide researchers with an opportunity to present their work in an informal and interactive manner, and obtain direct feedback about their work from a wide audience.
Demos showcase innovative digital libraries technology and applications, ranging from research prototypes to operational systems, allowing you to share your work directly with your colleagues in a high-visibility setting.

We invite the submission of demos on all topics mentioned in the Call for Research Papers.

- Demo submissions consist of a 4-page paper, which must be formatted according to Springer’s LNCS guidelines, and submitted via the conference submission system.
- Accepted demos will be allocated up to 4 pages for the written paper in the TPDL 2011 proceedings. The proceedings will be published as a volume of Springer’s Lecture Notes on Computer Science (LNCS) series.
- Accepted demos will be presented at a plenary poster and demo session during the TPDL 2011 conference.
- For demos, authors will be required to bring laptop computers or other appropriate equipment, as no equipment will be provided.

All abstracts for demos need to be submitted via the EasyChair conference submission system:
http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=tpdl2011

-------------------
DOCTORAL CONSORTIUM
-------------------

Continuing a tradition, the TPDL 2011 Doctoral Consortium (DC) serves as a forum for PhD students to share ideas about the development and use of Digital Libraries, compare approaches, discuss future research problems and receive feedback from the international Digital Library community. The Doctoral Consortium aims to:

- provide PhD students with a friendly and lively atmosphere for presenting their research ideas, exchange experiences with peers, and receive constructive feedback on their work from the international research community;
- help students and doctoral candidates formulate research questions and organise their research;
- help forge new relationships and collaborations within the International Digital Library community, promoting collaborative research; and
- support a new generation of researchers with information and advice on academic, research, industrial, and non-traditional career paths.

The TPDL 2011 DC invites PhD students whose doctoral research is related to digital libraries and at a stage of progress where feedback from the international community might be of value, to submit extended abstracts of up to 10 pages describing their work. It is expected that students who submit extended abstracts, will have finished the first part of their research (one-two years of their studies) and be still in the middle of their research work.

A panel of prominent researchers participating in the TPDL Programme Committee will conduct the workshop. They will review all the submissions and comment on the content of the work as well as on the presentation. Students will have 20 minutes to present their research, focusing on the main theme of their thesis, what they have achieved so far and how they plan to continue their work. Another 20 minutes are reserved for discussion and feedback from the panel of reviewers. The Doctoral Consortium will take place on a single full day. Up to 12 students will have the opportunity to participate.

Submissions should be related to one or more of the conference themes as stated in the Call for Papers. Moreover, they should be presented in a way that demonstrates the link to the chosen conferences theme(s), and they should contain:

- a clear formulation of the research topic and research hypotheses;
- an outline of the significant problems in the field and their current solutions;
- a description of the proposed approach and its expected contributions;
- a discussion of preliminary results; and
- an evaluation (-plan) of the research.

All papers must be written in English and follow Springer's LNCS guidelines. Please send your submission directly by email to the doctoral consortium chair Milena Dobreva (milena.dobreva@strath.ac.uk). Abstracts of the papers will be published in the conference proceedings.


IMPORTANT DATES
---------------
Abstract submission deadline (full and short papers): March 21, 2011
Research paper submission: March 28, 2011 (midnight HAST, GMT -10hrs)
Demo submission: March 28, 2011
Doctoral consortium submission: March 28, 2011
Notification of acceptance (research paper, poster, demo, doctoral consortium): May 23, 2011

Workshop proposal submission: February 14, 2011
Tutorial proposal submission: February 14, 2011
Panel proposal submission: February 14, 2011
Notification of acceptance (workshop, tutorial, panel): March 14, 2011

Submission of final version (research paper, abstract for poster, demo, workshop, tutorial, panel and doctoral consortium): June 6, 2011

All information can also be found on the website: http://www.tpdl2011.org

--------------------------------------------------------
Conference Officers
General Chair:
Stefan Gradmann, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany

Programme Co-Chairs:
Carlo Meghini, ISTI-CNR, Italy
Heiko Schuldt, University of Basel, Switzerland

Programme Committee
tba

Notes from the SLA Leadership Summit

The theme for the 2011 Leadership Summit (Jan. 17-22) was "Future Ready: Building Community", although I think it might be better stated as "we are family". Information professionals and librarians from several countries gathered in Washington, DC to understand their roles as leaders in SLA, to get updated on what's happening with the Association, and to connect with their colleagues. A quick list of highlights:

• The Board of Directors meet  on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday in both open and closed sessions.  More than a dozen Association members attended the open session on Wednesday morning.  Reports from a number of committees and councils were received.  In the time for open comments, members asked questions and made suggestions.
• From Wednesday through Friday, 200+ SLA leaders met during the actual Summit led by the Chapter Cabinet Chair (Liz Blankson-Hemans) and Division Cabinet Chair (Mary Ellen Bates). 
• At the business meeting in June 2010, members heard about the state of the Association.  The economy had affected SLA as it has the organizations we all work for.  Members heard about the balanced budget and expectations for 2011 from Dan Trefethen, SLA's treasurer.  
• SLA's president, Cindy Romaine rolled out her theme for the year - Future Ready - and invited all of us to contribute to the Future Ready 365 blog.  (You can contribute, too.)
• Daniel Lee introduced us to Operation Vitality, which will give SLA units a new web hosting service and a newly designed theme using WordPress.
• Susan Robertson from ASAE gave an information-packed keynote on why members join and volunteer in any organization.  Her slides, along with slides from other presenters, will be made available to SLA members.
• People brainstormed ideas for units programs, ways of engaging more members, and methods for doing outreach to non-members during sessions and while networking.

That short list may not make you realize how full the days were...but...yes, very, very full!

We are Family:  Families find ways of pulling together, sharing responsibilities, and supporting each other.  During the Leadership Summit, units looked at each other and wondered how they could do the same. There were also conversations about how the units could support the Association.  Any support that a unit gives the Association helps the entire organization (including that unit and its members).  Discussions on that are continuing.

The theme of family could also be seen in the evening as people banded together for dinner and libations.  Everyone was welcomed at the table to continue the day's topics (or whatever the topic of the moment was) and to build stronger connections.  (In networking, strong connections or bonds give the relationship the ability to endure.)   It was great to see that some connections had started through social media, leading to  "hey...I know you..." moments.  (Like @Batty_Towers and @iBraryGuy)

A Beginning: The Leadership Summit occurs at the beginning of the terms of service for SLA leaders.  Thus it is a time for new leaders to understand what their responsibilities are and to turn to each other for support.  It was wonderful to see leaders reach across and lend a helping hand.  The next gathering of SLA leaders will occur in Philadelphia as part of the SLA Annual Conference in June.

My First Board Meeting: At the right is a photo of the entire current Board of Directors (save one).  We are a diverse group from two continents and with a wide variety of backgrounds, job titles, professional responsibilities, etc.  We are the people that have been entrusted by the membership to lead the Association and we all take that very seriously.

This was my first board meeting since joining the Board on Jan. 1.  We'll meet face-to-face again at the Annual Conference and in between we will meet on monthly conference calls to keep the information flowing and to make any needed decisions.  This is definitely a "working board".

Thanks to the Washington, DC chapter for their hospitality and for all of the vendors who participated in the tabletop displays or as sponsors.  Yes, we do see you as partners. (Addendum 1/25/2011: The sponsor and exhibitors at the Summit were: Dow Jones & Company, Proquest Dialog, Springer, Wolters Kluwer Health-Ovid, ASTM, Basch Subscriptions & Prenax Inc., The Reference Shelf, and Reprints Desk.)

I didn't have much free time, so it having time to visit with Henrik de Gyor, who does the DAM blog and podcast, was a luxury.  It was nice to visit with someone who is also observes and comments on topics related to digital assets.

---

Taken by SLA staff, in the photo above are (back row from left) Liz Blankson-Hemans, Mary Ellen Bates, Richard Huffine, Ruth Wolfish, Jill Hurst-Wahl, Ann Sweeney, Sara Tompson, Nettie Seaberry, Dan Trefethen, and Daniel Lee; (front row from left) Anne Caputo, Cindy Romaine, Brent Mai and Janice Lachance.  Not shown: Ulla de Stricker.

Workshop: Deciding to Digitize

The Center for Intellectual Property would like to remind everyone that the registration deadline is February 4th for the online workshop on the legal, ethical, and copyright considerations of digitizing content. For more information and to register see the links below:

DECIDING TO DIGITIZE: Legal, Ethical, and Copyright Considerations (4 weeks). http://www.cipcommunity.org/advanced-digitization.

Dates: February 14 - March 11, 2011 (Reg by February 4).

Instructor & guest speakers include:

       ~ Peggy Hoon, J.D. (Instructor).
       ~ Kevin Cherry, Senior Program Officer, Institute of Museum and Library Services.
       ~ Peter B. Hirtle, Senior Policy Advisor, Cornell University Library.

Description: Living in a digitally dominated world raises numerous critical and important questions, particularly for copyright holders and for those who face the decisions of what, when, and how to digitize.

This course, which assumes a working knowledge of copyright basics, will address the legal and ethical issues and copyright considerations underpinning the formation of a responsible and balanced digitization practice, policy, procedure or workflow.

Fee: $480/600 (member/non-member)

REGISTRATION.
https://secure.imodules.com/s/1039/index.aspx?sid=1039&gid=1&pgid=516&cid=1769.

SEE FULL COURSE LISTING: http://www.cipcommunity.org/educationprogram/.

AVAILABLE DISCOUNTS:
~ Membership. Use your individual or institutional membership to save 20% today and on future courses along with a wealth of additional member benefits. http://www.cipcommunity.org/membership/.

~ Certification. Register for a certification program and save up to %12 off individual course fees as a non member. Members save more. http://www.cipcommunity.org/certification/.

Wayback Wednesday: Digitizations systems geared for patrons/users

I just answered a question about this and, since I had to dig through old blog posts for part of the answer, this seems like a good topic for a Wayback Wednesday.

I have blog posts in 2005 and 2007 that talk about digitization kiosks for patrons.  These kiosks allow for the digitization of microforms or hardcopy materials. The kiosks may allow for the images to be printed as well as saved to disc/USB drive or even emailed.  This means that the equipment is to replace conventional microform readers as well as other copiers.

More companies are now offering kiosks.  Last fall, I saw a kiosk that is sold by the DRS Group, who is offering the book2net products.  Other companies that have products in this space include (and are not limited to):

• Digital Library Systems Group / Image Access
• Indus USA
• S-T Imaging
• eImageData
• nextScan 
• Konica Minolta 

While you could create your own DIY system for your patrons, you may be better off purchasing a system that comes with support and a user-base.  It is up to you to decide which way to go.  Yes, some of the prices may seem high, which means you'll need to think about how much the equipment will be used (cost/use), etc.

Given the number of companies in this space it is likely that (1) you can view a system at regional/national library conference and (2) someone in your region has one that could be demoed for you.

Want to dig into the archives yourself?  Use the "popular labels" on the right side of the blog OR use your favorite Internet search engine to search this site (e.g, site:hurstassociates.blogspot.com plus whatever terms are relevant to you).

Mock-up of a really, really cheap book scanner

From the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) comes news of a very cheap book scanner from the company Ion Audio. (Yes, an audio company is getting into book scanning.)  Before you get all excited, the Book Saver Book Scanner at CES was a mock-up and didn't work.  And it looks like this is something geared for end-users, not organizations that are doing a high number of pages per hour.  This may be a case of what you see is indeed what you get.  (Or what you pay for is what you get.)

Here is the company's press release about the scanner.  Photos of it are here.

Notes from Clifford Lynch's short keynote at HICSS

My colleague, Kevin Crowston, is attending the Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS).  He has given me permission to share some of his notes from the short keynote address that Clifford Lynch gave for the Digital Media track.

In speaking about "digital media", Lynch "discussed how different kinds of media were evolving as they went digital. He noted that eBooks were still basically books, down to page flips. Journals are also digital, but journal articles look nearly the same. He suggested that the most truly digital medium was the video game, but that there was a lot of resistance to considering video games as the future form of literature. He noted that business documents had really gone virtual: e.g., the shift from a paper airline ticket to an entry in a database that doesn't even necessarily get printed out. He suggested that a real shift is the prevalence of personal libraries--people can carry around basically all of their music, books, papers, photos, and it's not clear how they are managing those." (quoting Crowston's notes.  Emphasis added.)

Crowston said that Lynch "then changed gear to discuss problems of preservation of the culture record. He noted that library special collections are important as a record of how a person worked and ideas were developed. [This is] Increasingly problematic as boxes of obsolete diskettes and obsolete word processing files show up. Digital forensics increasingly is about seeing how a machine has interacted with the rest of the world, vs. finding files. Similarly, a person's personal record is now scattered across multiple services."

It is interesting that we continue to create digital versions/environments (e.g., the ebook) that mimic what we have done for decades without the use of computers.  Perhaps it is that we haven't lived in the digital age long enough to understand how to take advantage of the technology in a way that is different than what we've done previously.  Maybe we're still too tied to the old ways, to imagine how to do things differently.  Could it take several generations of digital natives before changes occur?

Materials from the International Digital Curation Conference are online (Dec. 2010)

Materials from the December 2010 International Digital Curation Conference are now available online, including presentation materials and 19 videos.  Among the videos are videos of the keynotes and other sessions, as well as informal interviews.

3:34 p.m. - Link is fixed.

Free books for that ebook reader you recently received

The Internet Archive's Ebook and Texts Archive currently contains more than 2.6 million items and growing.  If you received an ebook reader over the winter holidays, you should check the Internet Archive for books that you could be reading for free.

In the archive are 71,000+ books from the Cornell University Library.  As the site says:

These books, the originals of which are in the Cornell University Library, were digitized in 2008 with funding by Microsoft Corporation. Scanning was performed by Kirtas Technologies; OCR was performed by, and derivative formats created by, the Internet Archive.

There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the texts. More information on rights issues associated with public domain texts can be found at http://cdl.library.cornell.edu/guidelines.html.

Nice to know that this cancelled project from Microsoft did create a lasting, positive legacy.

The books are available in a variety of file formats including PDF, EPUB, Kindle, Daisy, JiVU and others.
 

Celebrating Public Domain Day (Jan. 1)

January 1 is celebrated a Public Domain Day because that is when works pass into the public domain if they are eligilbe. In the U.S., works by authors that died in 1940 are now in the public domain (list).  Peter Hirtle notes, "That means that those of you with never-published letters and manuscripts from, for example, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Nathanael West, Paul Klee, and Walter Benjamin can now do whatever you want with them." (email)

While we celebrate what has entered the public domain in the United States, we should also note what hasn't yet passed into the public domain.  According the Center for the Study of the Public Domain at Duke Law School, prior to the U.S. Copyright Law being changed in 1978, works passed into the public domain after 56 years.  Therefore works published in 1954 would be entering the public domain today, if the law had not been changed.  Those works include: 

• The first two volumes of J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of Rings trilogy: The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers
• Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot (his own translation/adaptation of the original version in French, En attendant Godot, published in 1952)
• Kingsley Amis' Lucky Jim
• Aldous Huxley's The Doors of Perception
• Dr. Seuss' Horton Hears a Who!
• Pauline Réage's Histoire d'O
• Fredric Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent, subtitled “The influence of comic books on today's youth"
• Tennessee Williams' Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
• Mac Hyman’s No Time for Sergeants
• Alan Le May’s The Searchers
• C.S. Lewis’ The Horse and His Boy, the fifth volume of The Chronicles of Narnia
• Alice B. Toklas’ The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook

 A long list is available here.

Thanks to Peter Kurilecz and Peter Hirtle  for their emails on the Archives & Archivists (A&A) List
list about this.