DigitalKoans

What was new and interesting during the week of 10/30/06? (Brief quotes follow article/Web page titles.)

• "Australia: Hold the CAB!"
  

  Since our recent post about the fast-tracking of the new Copyright Amendment Bill through Australian Parliament, we’ve had requests from Australian EFF members for an example letter upon which they can base their own message to MPs and Senators. We’ve now posted a sample on our Copyright Amendment Bill action page, together with fax and phone numbers for key Senators.

• "Dartmouth Biomedical Libraries October Conference—Keynote"
  

  Roy [Tennant] is discussing how what he has learned as a river guide applies to learning about technology and dealing with technological change. Each day, the river changes. There are different dangers each day, different things to avoid. Like in a river, the only constant in libraries is change. And we need to learn how to cope with change, rather than fighting it. We need to figure out what the flow is and put ourselves into it.

• "Drupalib"
  

  Among the interesting items is using Drupal for a Digital Library Content Management System, D-Space lite as it were.

• "Dublin Core and Social Tagging"
  

  The DCMI Social Tagging Community is for those who are interested in investigating how the increasingly common practice of informally tagging resources, known as a process of social tagging, can contribute to the goals of the DCMI.

• "Electronic Publishing Software for Libraries"
  

  This concurrent session covered the background, purpose, and evolution of the DPubS (Digital Publishing Systems) open source software project, based at Cornell University Library, as well as a case study based on Pennsylvania State University Libraries’ use of the package.

• "Ethan Ackerman Schools Us on DMCA and ISPs’ Obligations "
  

  Responding to BoingBoing posts (1, 2) about serial internet bully Michael Crook—and coverage on Wired’s 27BStroke6 security blog—Washington, DC attorney and tech law specialist Ethan Ackerman offers legal insight. He reminds us that the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA), not Crook, is the real bad guy here, and points out that ISPs and photo or video-hosting services have more options when sent a DMCA notice here than they may realize.

• "Google Sued by French Publishers"
  

  The French publishers union, Le Syndicat National de l’Edition (SNE), has joined book publisher Le Martinière Groupe in its copyright suit against Google.

• "International Net Domains ‘Risky’"
  

  Mr Cerf said creating a multi-lingual internet, using what are known as internationalised domain names (IDN), was "a huge technical challenge."

• "Internet Expands as Fast as Universe?"
  

  There are now more than 100 million Web sites on earth, according to Netcraft, which has been tracking the growth.

• "Is the DMCA Coming Down Under? New Copyright Bill on Fast-Track in Australia"
  

  As a result of a Free Trade Agreement between Australia and the U.S. that came into force in 2005, Australia is required to rewrite its current, relatively flexible, technological protection measure law by 1 January 2007, to make it more like the DMCA.

• "Low Threshold Strategies for Libraries to Support ‘Other’ Types of Digital Publishing"
  

  Robert H. McDonald and Shane Nackerud summarized two different aspects of low threshold digital publishing. Robert covered Florida State University’s program of various institutional repository tools, and Shane outlined the University of Minnesota’s UThink blogging platform.

• "Mass Digitization and the Collective Collection"
  

  The question that interests me most right now focuses on the rights and privileges that inhere in library-contributed content—have we collectively secured the rights necessary to ensuring that scholarly use of these collections will be possible?

• "Microsoft Makes Linux Pact with Novell"
  

  The companies said Thursday they will collaborate on development of specific technologies, for example to help Microsoft’s Windows, a proprietary operating system, work with Novell’s Suse Linux, which is based on open-source code.

• "MySpace "to Block Illegal Files’"
  

  Social networking site MySpace is to block users from uploading copyrighted music to its pages.

• "Not So Different After All—Creating Access to Diverse Objects in Digital Repositories"
  

  Jennifer O’Brien Roper then spoke about the University of Maryland’s Digital Repository, which uses Fedora for the underlying repository with customized interfaces for each collection. During the question and answer period, it became clear that this is totally separate from DRUM, the Digital Repository at the University of Maryland, which is a DSpace installation. As part of the development of this repository, UM also developed a rich metadata standard, University of Maryland Descriptive Metadata (UMDM), which combines elements from Dublin Core and VRA into a custom DTD.

• "A Science of the Web Begins"
  

  The Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Southampton in England today announced they would jointly start a new branch of science: the science of the Web.

• "Scoping Collective Collections"
  

  Over the next few years libraries will devote more attention to systemwide optimization of collections—within consortia, regions or countries. . . . In this post I present a list of publications on these topics. We are currently doing more work in this area, pulling together circulation data from several sources, doing further analyses of Worldcat, and other work.

• "‘Second Life’ Land Prices Get Hefty Hikes"
  

  Until now, anyone who wanted to buy a small private island of about 16 acres could do so by paying $1,250 and a monthly maintenance fee of $195. But as of Wednesday, the company plans to bump those fees to $1,675 and $295, respectively, for all new sales.

• "Using Digital Images in Teaching and Learning: Perspectives from Liberal Arts Institutions"
  

  The study focuses on the pedagogical implications of the widespread use of the digital format. However, while changes in the teaching-learning dynamic and the teacher-student relationship were at the core of the study, related issues concerning supply, support and infrastructure rapidly became part of its fabric. These topics include the quality of image resources, image functionality, management, deployment and the skills required for optimum use (digital and image "literacies").

• "Version 3.0—Revised License Drafts"
  

  New license drafts for version 3.0 for the CC [Creative Commons] US license and the new generic/unported license have been posted. There have been several new amendments to the licenses—mainly as a result of the discussions on the cc-licenses list, but some as a result of discussions internally and amongst CC’s international affiliates.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 3rd, 2006 at 9:12 am and is filed under Flashback: Weekly News. Comments closed here. Read and add comments at http://www.digital-scholarship.org/digitalkoans/.