The Fascinator is "a simple interface to Fedora that uses a single technology [Apache Solr] to handle all browsing, searching and security". See the demo and the blog post by Peter Sefton.

Today the European Digital Library Foundation launched Europeana, the OA digital library of European literature, art, history, and culture.  From today's announcement: PS:  For background, see our past posts on Europeana.

The UK Serials Union CATalogue (SUNCAT) has added the DOAJ.

Last month Nature launched OA special on what the financial crisis will mean for science and today it launched another on Darwin at 200.

The presentations, in English and Russian, from the Open Access Awareness Raising Workshop in Armenia (Yerevan, Armenia, October 15-16, 2008) are now online.

The presentations from ARROW Repository Day (Brisbane, October 14, 2008) are now online.

An interview with Timo Hannay, Publishing Director, Nature.com, Knowledge Speak , November 12, 2008.

A group of OA-supporting researchers from 12 countries launched ENCES (European Network for Copyright in support of Education and Science) at the recent conference, Copyright Regulation in Europe – An Enabling or Disabling Factor for Science Communication (Berlin, November 13-15, 2008).  (Thanks to the Informationsplattform Open Access.) Read the founders' press release in German or Google's English.

Imagine scanning the barcode of a printed book with your cell phone and then running a search, from the phone, of a digital copy of the same book.  You can now do that with a Google Android phone --at least for books already scanned by Google and showing their barcodes.  See the Google Book Search blog for details. Comment .  Very cool.

SPARC's 2008 letter to members and three things we focused on this year, SPARC , November 4, 2008.

The Open Access Directory (OAD) just opened a list of Volunteer opportunities.  This is a place where volunteers can look for jobs that will help the cause, and where everyone can list the jobs they'd like to see someone do.  At the moment, many of the jobs listed are about building the OAD itself.  But it's not at all limited to OAD-building.