DigitalKoans

MIT’s Semantic Interoperability of Metadata and Information in unLike Environments (SIMILE) project is producing a variety of interesting open source software packages that will be of interest to librarians and others such as Piggy Bank, "a Firefox extension that turns your browser into a mashup platform, by allowing you to extract data from different web sites and mix them together."

Here is an overview of the SIMILE project from the About SIMILE page:

SIMILE is a joint project conducted by the MIT Libraries and MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. SIMILE seeks to enhance inter-operability among digital assets, schemata/vocabularies/ontologies, metadata, and services. A key challenge is that the collections which must inter-operate are often distributed across individual, community, and institutional stores. We seek to be able to provide end-user services by drawing upon the assets, schemata/vocabularies/ontologies, and metadata held in such stores.

SIMILE will leverage and extend DSpace, enhancing its support for arbitrary schemata and metadata, primarily though the application of RDF and semantic web techniques. The project also aims to implement a digital asset dissemination architecture based upon web standards. The dissemination architecture will provide a mechanism to add useful "views" to a particular digital artifact (i.e. asset, schema, or metadata instance), and bind those views to consuming services.

You can get a more detailed overview of the project from the SIMILE grant proposal and from other project documents.

There is a SIMILE blog and a Wiki. There are also three mailing lists.

In a previous posting, I discussed the Open Archives Initiative’s Object Reuse and Exchange (ORE) project. ORE is worth watching closely.

Two new documents were released this January:

• "Report of the January 2007 ORE-TC Meeting," which is: "A detailed report of the results of the meeting of OAI-ORE Technical Committee describing features and requirements of the ORE model and its context in the Web Architecture."
• "Open Repositories 2007," which is: "A presentation describing OAI-ORE and progress based on the January 2007 ORE Technical Committee Meeting."

A petition to the European Commission asking it to support the European Union’s "Study on the Economic and Technical Evolution of the Scientific Publication Markets of Europe" has been signed by more than 10,000 people.

From the press release:

Nobel laureates Harold Varmus and Rich Roberts are among the more than ten thousand concerned researchers, senior academics, lecturers, librarians, and citizens from across Europe and around the world who are signing an internet petition calling on the European Commission to adopt polices to guarantee free public access to research results and maximise the worldwide visibility of European research.

Organisations too are lending their support, with the most senior representatives from over 500 education, research and cultural organisations in the world adding their weight to the petition, including CERN, the UK’s Medical Research Council, the Wellcome Trust, the Italian Rector’s Conference, the Royal Netherlands Academy for Arts & Sciences (KNAW) and the Swiss Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences (SAGW), alongside the petition’s sponsors, SPARC Europe, JISC, the SURF Foundation, the German Research Foundation (DFG) and the Danish Electronic Research Library (DEFF).

From the petition

Research funding agencies have a central role in determining researchers’ publishing practices. Following the lead of the NIH and other institutions, they should promote and support the archiving of publications in open repositories, after a (possibly domain-specific) time period to be discussed with publishers. This archiving could become a condition for funding.

The following actions could be taken at the European level: (i) Establish a European policy mandating published articles arising from EC-funded research to be available after a given time period in open access archives, and (ii) Explore with Member States and with European research and academic associations whether and how such policies and open repositories could be implemented.

More signatures are needed, especially from EU organizations and individuals.

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and the British Library have signed an agreement to develop an portal to international science resources called Science.world.

From the press release:

Called ‘Science.world,’ the planned resource would be available for use by scientists in all nations and by anyone interested in science. The approach will capitalise on existing technology to search vast collections of science information distributed across the globe, enabling much-needed access to smaller, less well-known sources of highly valuable science. Following the model of Science.gov, the U.S. interagency science portal that relies on content published by each participating agency, ‘Science.world’ will rely on scientific resources published by each participating nation. Other countries have been invited to participate in this international effort. . . .

Objectives of the ‘Science.world’ initiative are to:

• Search dispersed, electronic collections in various science disciplines;
• Provide direct, seamless and free searching of open-source collections and portals;
• Build upon existing and already successful national models for searching;
• Complement existing information collections and systems; and
• Raise the visibility and usage of individual sources of quality science information.

The New Yorker has published an article about Google Book Search by Jeffrey Toobin in its February 5, 2007 issue ("Google’s Moon Shot: The Quest for the Universal Library").

Here’s a quote from the article:

Google asserts that its use of the copyrighted books is "transformative," that its database turns a book into essentially a new product. "A key part of the line between what’s fair use and what’s not is transformation," Drummond said. "Yes, we’re making a copy when we digitize. But surely the ability to find something because a term appears in a book is not the same thing as reading the book. That’s why Google Books is a different product from the book itself." In other words, Google says that being able to search books on its site—which it describes as the equivalent of a giant library card catalogue—is not the same as making the books themselves available. But the publishers cite another factor in fair-use analysis: the amount of the copyrighted work that is used in the creation of the new one. Google is copying entire books, which doesn’t sound "fair" to the plaintiff publishers and authors.

The Digital Library Federation’s Electronic Resource Management Initiative Phase II Steering Committee has released a draft white paper on the interoperability of ILS acquisition modules and electronic resource management systems.

Here is the introduction:

Electronic resource management systems are becoming an important tool in many libraries. Commercial ERMS development has been driven in part by the lack of accommodation within integrated library systems for elements specific to electronic resources. Financial aspects of acquiring e-resources, in particular, necessitate recording an array of data not suited to ILS acquisitions modules. Unlike other data recorded in an ERMS such as licensing and administrative terms, a moderate percentage of acquisitions data is redundant, being populated in ILS during the acquisitions process, while also being accommodated within ERMS in accordance with the data structure detailed in Electronic Resource Management: Report of the DLF Electronic Resource Management Initiative (Digital Library Federation, 2004). ERMS implementers are eager to automate the process by which acquisitions data move from their ILS into their ERMS. This interest has grown substantially over the past few months as the prospect of connecting financial data to usage statistics has been facilitated through the Standardized Usage Statistics Harvesting Initiative (SUSHI), a NISO draft standard.

This white paper describes workflows at four libraries; reports on conversations held with product managers and other relevant staff of the leading ERMS; summarizes common themes; and suggests next steps. The paper is a draft for comment; it is hoped that those with interest in this area will provide insight to further this investigation.

What was new and interesting during the week of 1/22/07? (Brief quotes follow article/Web page titles.)

• "@ MidemNet: MPAA, RIAA, CEA Execs Clash Over DRM & Hardware Controls"
  

  This conference on the digital music business got off to a bang here in Cannes this morning when the opening-session discussion broke into a tense and sometimes bitchy disagreement about DRM between representatives from music, movie and electronics industry associations. MPAA executive vice president Fritz Attaway and RIAA chairman Mitch Bainwol immediately set their stall against Consumer Electronics Association president Gary Shapiro.

• "Citizendium: The ‘Better’ Wikipedia Opens Doors"
  

  Citizendium is another attempt to create a better online encyclopedia, and it’s a direct competitor to the negusa negast of online reference, Wikipedia.

• "DSpace for Managing Digitized Collections"
  

  They felt like freaks at first, because DSpace was supposedly designed for preprints etc. How many using DSpace for digitized collections? (Maybe 1/4 of room.) And for born-digital? (Most of room.)

• "DSpace Governance Update"
  

  What’s wrong?

• "DSpace: The Next Generation"
  

  Why a new architecture?

• "E2006 Podcast: Creating and Using Social Bookmarking in a University Library"
  

  In this 45 minute recording from the 2006 EDUCAUSE Annual Conference Session, we’ll hear from Laurie Allen and Michael Winkler in a session entitled, "Penntags: Creating and Using Social Bookmarking in a University Library."

• "ERAMS"
  

  ERAMS is an attempt to name a category. What is the category? It is about managing published e-resources with a particular focus on the supporting knowledgebase. In the way it is presented here, ERAMS seems to include metasearch, knowledgebase, ERM, resolution, A-Z lists, and related reporting and management tools.

• "Feds: Details of ISP Snooping Haven’t Been Decided"
  

  The Bush administration hasn’t settled on what data it would like Internet service providers to retain about their subscribers or for how long, a U.S. Department of Justice attorney said Tuesday.

• "Google to Digitise University of Texas library"
  

  Among the items to be archived are parts of the university’s Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection featuring over 960,000 works from Mexico, South America, the Caribbean and Central America.

• "Google Turns a Page on Book Downloads"
  

  Google is reportedly working on a plan that would allow consumers to download books to their computers to be read online or on mobile devices like BlackBerrys.

• "Kahle v. Gonzales: A Review and a Request"
  

  So as noted by some, Kahle v. Gonzales was decided Monday. After the oral argument, the result was not a surprise. The reasoning of the opinion, however, is. (I’m going to restrict these comments to part I of the opinion).

• "Music Industry Divided over Digital Future"
  

  With global music sales down for a seventh straight year, the talk at an annual industry meeting in Cannes, France, has become heated over how to develop digital sales against competition from the dreaded F word—free.

• "Manakin-UI"
  

  New UI for DSpace.

• "Open Repositories Presentation: Building an IR Interface Using EJB3 and JBoss Seam"
  

  Below is the outline of the Ohio DRC presentation from today’s FEDORA session at Open Repositories conference.

• "Preserving Printed and Digital Heritage"
  

  Internet law professor Michael Geist discusses how governments can start building libraries which preserve both printed and digital publications

• "Privacy & Publicity"
  

  The September/October and November/December issues of WNYRLC Watch contained articles about copyright and copyright clearance in regards to a digitization program. This article is focused on two remaining concerns that are frequently overlooked: privacy and publicity.

• "Siege Mentality at the AAP"
  

  The author of Nail ‘Em! Confronting High-Profile Attacks on Celebrities and Businesses is not the kind of figure normally associated with the relatively sedate world of scientific publishing. . . . Now, Nature has learned, a group of big scientific publishers has hired the pit bull to take on the free-information movement, which campaigns for scientific results to be made freely available. Some traditional journals, which depend on subscription charges, say that open-access journals and public databases of scientific papers such as the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH’s) PubMed Central, threaten their livelihoods.

• "TechXtra Expands Its Cross-Search Coverage"
  

  TechXtra, the free service for finding material in engineering, mathematics and computing, has added a bundle of new sources to its cross-search. Now, it’s possible to search across 31 major collections (over 4 million items) for articles, eprints, technical reports, books, theses & dissertations, teaching & learning resources, the latest industry news and job announcements, and more!

• "Texas Court Says Deep-Linking Is Copyright Infringement"
  

  In an update to Xeni’s post last month, the US District Court for the Northern District of Texas found a website owner guilty of copyright infringement for linking to an another website’s audio file without permission.

• "Top Tech Trends Part 3"
  

  This is Clifford Lynch relating trends as he sees them . . .

• "Ubiquitious Computing from Beyond the Grave"
  

  In a development that has already spurred the next round of Microsoft jokes, the Redmond giant has filed a patent application for a technology for "immortal" data storage, allowing information to be saved for eons, even if the hard disk goes the way of the palimpsest.

• "A Vision for FEDORA’s Future, an Implementation Plan to Get There, and a Project Update"
  

  This morning, Sandy Payette of Cornell University and FEDORA project co-director, gave an update on the FEDORA project including a statement of a vision for FEDORA’s future, information about the emerging FEDORA Commons non-profit, and a status report/roadmap for the software itself. Below is a summary based on my notes of Sandy’s comments and slide content.

• "Vista Copy Protection Is Defended"
  

  Microsoft has defended the digital rights management systems integrated into its new Vista operating system.

• "Why ISPs Can Breathe Easier After a Porno Decision"
  

  Internet service providers naturally are concerned about circumstances under which they potentially could be held liable for content posted by users. But after a recent decision by a Texas federal judge, ISPs can breathe a collective sigh of relief.

• "Work from Bed with the Ergopod"
  

  The Ergopod 500 is a clever system for supporting a PC, mouse, keyboard and work-areas, intended for use by heavy computer users, particularly those with special physical needs. One of its many adjustable modes is a “work supine” and “work in bed” version that gives you everything you need in easy reach from the comfort of your own bed.

• "XM Fails in Bid to Kill Copyright Litigation"
  

  A federal judge in New York on Friday rejected XM Radio’s attempt to quash the copyright infringement lawsuit the record labels brought against the company’s products that allow customers to digitally record music.

Excerpt from the press release:

We live in an information-driven world—one in which access to good information defines success. OAIster’s growth to 10 million records takes us one step closer to that goal.

Developed at the University of Michigan’s Library, OAIster is a collection of digital scholarly resources. OAIster is also a service that continually gathers these digital resources to remain complete and fresh. As global digital repositories grow, so do OAIster’s holdings.

Popular search engines don’t have the holdings OAIster does. They crawl web pages and index the words on those pages. It’s an outstanding technique for fast, broad information from public websites. But scholarly information, the kind researchers use to enrich their work, is generally hidden from these search engines.

OAIster retrieves these otherwise elusive resources by tapping directly into the collections of a variety of institutions using harvesting technology based on the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) Protocol for Metadata Harvesting. These can be images, academic papers, movies and audio files, technical reports, books, as well as preprints (unpublished works that have not yet been peer reviewed). By aggregating these resources, OAIster makes it possible to search across all of them and return the results of a thorough investigation of complete, up-to-date resources. . . .

OAIster is good news for the digital archives that contribute material to open-access repositories. "[OAIster has demonstrated that]. . . OAI interoperability can scale. This is good news for the technology, since the proliferation is bound to continue and even accelerate," says Peter Suber, author of the SPARC Open Access Newsletter. As open-access repositories proliferate, they will be supported by a single, well-managed, comprehensive, and useful tool.

Scholars will find that searching in OAIster can provide better results than searching in web search engines. Roy Tennant, User Services Architect at the California Digital Library, offers an example: "In OAIster I searched ‘roma’ and ‘world war,’ then sorted by weighted relevance. The first hit nailed my topic—the persecution of the Roma in World War II. Trying ‘roma world war’ in Google fails miserably because Google apparently searches ‘Rome’ as well as ‘Roma.’ The ranking then makes anything about the Roma people drop significantly, and there is nothing in the first few screens of results that includes the word in the title, unlike the OAIster hit."

OAIster currently harvests 730 repositories from 49 countries on 6 continents. In three years, it has more than quadrupled in size and increased from 6.2 million to 10 million in the past year. OAIster is a project of the University of Michigan Digital Library Production Service.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has denied an appeal of Kahle v. Gonzales, leaving the legal status of orphan works unchanged. The plaintiffs’ attorneys were Jennifer Stisa Granick, Lawrence Lessig, and Christopher Sprigman.

Eric Auchard’s article "U.S. Court Upholds Copyright Law on ‘Orphan Works’" gives an overview of the Ninth’s decision.

The opinion is also available. Here is an excerpt:

Plaintiffs appeal from the district court’s dismissal of their complaint. They allege that the change from an "opt-in" to an "opt-out" copyright system altered a traditional contour of copyright and therefore requires First Amendment review under Eldred v. Ashcroft, 537 U.S. 186, 221 (2003). They also allege that the current copyright term violates the Copyright Clause’s "limited Times" prescription. . . .

Arguments similar to Plaintiffs’ were presented to the Supreme Court in Eldred, which affirmed the constitutionality of the Copyright Term Extension Act against those attacks. The Supreme Court has already effectively addressed and denied Plaintiffs’ arguments. . . .

In March 2004, Plaintiffs Brewster Kahle, Internet Archive, Richard Prelinger, and Prelinger Associates, Inc. filed an amended complaint seeking declaratory judgment and injunctive relief. Brewster Kahle and Internet Archive have built an "Internet library" that offers free access to digitized audio, books, films, websites, and software. Richard Prelinger and Prelinger Associates make digital versions of "ephemeral" films available for free on the internet. Each Plaintiff provides, or intends to provide, access to works that allegedly have little or no commercial value but remain under copyright protection. The difficulty and expense of obtaining permission to place those works on the Internet is overwhelming; ownership of these "orphan" works is often difficult, and sometimes impossible, to ascertain. . . .

Plaintiffs also argue that they should be allowed to present evidence that the present copyright term violates the Copyright Clause’s "limited Times" prescription as the Framers would have understood it. That claim was not directly at issue in Eldred, though Justice Breyer discussed it extensively in his dissent. See Eldred, 537 U.S. at 243. Plaintiffs assert all existing copyrights are effectively perpetual. . . .

Both of Plaintiffs’ main claims attempt to tangentially relitigate Eldred. However, they provide no compelling reason why we should depart from a recent Supreme Court decision.