Variants of the 1620 Mayflower Compact frequently excluded the names of the forty-one signatories of that accord, yet for those instruments that furnished this list, the spellings were anything but consistent. This variance was also evident in the few references to the appellations of the Mayflower participants found in the 1621 Conference and Agreement Between Plymouth Colony and Massasoit, Wampanoag Sachem. In particular, Levenshtein edit distance analyses assessed these Compact name disparities and the texts of that manifesto, and examined the provenance of its later renditions. A strong correlation between observed pairs of text and signatory list errors was also found.

We welcome your comments, as well as your error reports. The URL for this resource is http://treatiesportal.unl.edu/mayflower/

Attached below, as Additional Files, are 6 tables (Excel files) presenting the data characteristics and correlation data for the Mayflower Compact text and signatories.

The chatbot answers questions from a variety of users from around the world. It has attracted an unexpected number of social chatters, which required some additional metadata to accommodate personal chatting and to guide questions back to the intent of the project. The majority of questions are directional or factual questions that Pixel can handle. The database proved to be practical to build and revise as library resources and personnel changed.

The chatbot provides a 24 hour, seven day a week service that is consistent, can be enhanced as resources, services, or staff change, and provides a playful interface that engages users. It replaces complicated navigation systems and scrolling through search results with more targeted answers, and has the ability to refer questions to librarians.

But I find now that these efforts failed to meet the standards of the open access advocates as represented by (among others) SPARC, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, a library membership organization formed and sponsored by the Association of Research Libraries. As was made excruciatingly clear at the March 2012 SPARC meeting in Kansas City, providing unlimited free access to materials is not enough to constitute “open access:” one must also supply unrestricted rights to re-use the materials. I left the convention in a huff, feeling that those of us who operate institutional repositories under the present ground rules had just been thrown under the bus.

On the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Cedar Point Biological Station, Habitats Web page (available at http://cedarpoint.unl.edu/research/habitats/index.shtml), Arapaho Prairie is described: “Arapaho Prairie [is] home to numerous experiments that have shaped our understanding of nature. … Arapaho Prairie, owned by the Nature Conservancy, is two square miles of ungrazed sandhills prairie in Arthur County. It is managed by Cedar Point and was purchased expressly for our researchers and courses. There is a prep building and automated weather station on the prairie.”

Topographic and soil maps of Arapaho Prairie are available at http://go.nebraska.edu/arapaho and http://cedarpoint.unl.edu/images/facilities/arapaho_soil_map.jpg, respectively.

Table I and Table II (Excel spreadsheets) are attached (below).