DigitalKoans

DigitalKoans postings will resume the week of 5/21/07.

The next SEPW posting will be on 5/23/07.

If you thought the era of big iron was dead, think again.

According to the New York Times, IBM is rolling out a "gameframe" that is "capable of permitting hundreds of thousands of computer users to interact in a three-dimensional simulated on-screen world described as a ‘metaverse.’"

Meanwhile, Sun is rolling out a video server that is "potentially powerful enough to transmit different standard video streams simultaneously to everyone watching TV in a city the size of New York."

Source: Markoff, John. "Sun and I.B.M. to Offer New Class of High-End Servers." The New York Times, 26 April 2006, C10.

The Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography archive file has been updated to include version 67. SEPB was redesigned in version 67 using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). The ZIP archive file is about 37 MB in size.

What was new and interesting during the week of 4/23/07? (Brief quotes follow article/Web page titles.)

• "Announcing TAPoR version 1.0"
  

  We have just updated the Text Analysis Portal for Research (TAPoR) to version 1.0 and invite you to try it out.

• "CCi Affiliate Scholarship Campaign Launches Today"
  

  This year’s iSummit (taking place in Dubrovnik, Croatia from June 15th through 17th) will bring together more than 250 key players for two days of intense discussion and debate about our digital freedoms and the future of the Internet. It is critical to assure that a truly global legal perspective is represented at this important conference. . . . In order for Creative Commons to provide affiliates with scholarships to attend this critical conference, we need your help in raising $50,000 within the next two weeks. This is a daunting task, but we strongly believe that you, our community, will help us reach this goal.

• "Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes"
  

  On a personal level, I [Roy Tennant] am leaving the California Digital Library for OCLC.

• "DC Collections Profile Reviewed"
  

  One of the items on the UB agenda was to review an updated version of the Dublin Core Collections Application Profile prepared by the Collection Description Application Profile Task Group, and I’m pleased to note that—as Ann Apps reports here—the UB approved the profile as "conforming" to their current criteria for a DC application profile (DCAP): essentially, it’s compatible with the DCMI Abstract Model (DCAM); it’s internally consistent; and the documentation conforms to current guidelines.

• "Dell Will Once Again Offer XP on Home PC and Notebook Models"
  

  Dell will again offer the Windows XP operating system due to high customer demand on the company’s community feedback forum, IdeaStorm. Dell, like most major PC manufacturers stopped selling Windows XP licenses with its PCs after the launch of Windows Vista.

• "European Digital Library Suggests Model License to Cover Orphan Works"
  

  A European Union "High Level Expert Group on Digital Libraries," including stakeholders from the British Library, the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek, the Federation of European Publishers, and Google, has prepared an advisory report suggesting a voluntary license scheme to deal with copyright issues hampering the progress of library digitization efforts.

• "European Science Foundation Report Examines Peer Review Issues"
  

  The European Science Foundation (ESF), France, has published a report which reveals some concern on the shortcomings of peer review and outlines some possible measures to cope with them.

• "European Travels and the ICA-AtoM Roadmap"
  

  ICA-AtoM is an open source archival description application. The name is an acronym for "International Council on Archives—Access to Memory."

• "Head of MPAA Calls for DRM That Allows for ‘Managed Copying’"
  

  Most of Glickman’s comments focused specifically on allowing "managed copying"—the ability for consumers to move content from disc to PCs and portable devices—for high-definition DVDs, which he said he expects will happen later this year. But some of his comments make clear that some sort of "managed copying" is the goal for content delivered in any digital format, including online downloads and streams.

• "‘Ignore the US Copyright Bullies’"
  

  Internet law professor Michael Geist says countries should resist US bullying tactics over copyright and intellectual property.

• "IPRED2 Slips Through, Fight to Continue"
  

  The European Parliament has just voted to pass the Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive (IPRED2) without substantive amendment, despite growing public opposition from across the European Union.

• "Judge Denies RIAA Request to Reconsider Attorneys’ Fees Award"
  

  A federal judge has denied the RIAA’s motion for reconsideration of his attorneys’ fees award in Capitol v. Foster.

• "Killed By DRM: e-Books"
  

  After years of hype, e-books may yet be the next big thing. Even with decent handsets (like the Sony’s Reader, pictured) and stabler standards, however, it’s a technology tainted by a history of aggressive DRM.

• "Knowledge Beyond Authority Interview with Michael Hemment"
  

  Michael Hemment is Research Librarian and Head of Scholarly Research Initiatives at Widener Library, here at Harvard University. Recently, MediaBerkman producer Colin Rhinesmith sat down with Michael to discuss a number of pressing issues in the research field.

• "Lawmakers Propose Reversal of Net Radio Fee Increases"
  

  A bill introduced in Congress Thursday aims to overturn a controversial royalty fee increase that Internet radio advocates say threatens to cripple their services.

• "LC Launches Blog"
  

  The Library of Congress turned 207 years old yesterday, and for the anniversary launched its first-ever blog, which is either proof that blogging has become indispensable or maybe just that blogging has jumped the shark.

• "Meet More Digitization Pioneers: The LOCKSS Team, Vicky Reich & David Rosenthal"
  

  History is so important but often overlooked when it comes to online info retrieval and digitization. That’s why a big kudos goes to the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program at the Library of Congress with their new series honoring digitization pioneers.

• "Net Neutrality Advocates Thank AT&T CEO for Shooting Off His Mouth"
  

  Senator Byron Dorgan (D-ND), one of the driving forces behind the Senate’s Dorgan/Snowe Net neutrality bill, joined the call to offer his thoughts on why a bill is needed. He recalled reading a quote last year from Ed Whitacre in BusinessWeek in which Whitacre complained about companies that used "his pipes" and did so "for free."

• "OCLC’s WorldCat Local: A Promising Development for Library Patrons"
  

  The core of the service consists of a triple-tiered display of catalog search results from the local library, then from any consortia, and finally from the whole WorldCat. Relying on the expanding content collection in OCLC’s WorldCat.org (www.worldcat.org), the new service even reaches millions of periodical articles, plus government reports, medical scholarship, and educational material.

• "Ohio University Restricts All P2P File Sharing Software"
  

  Citing the burdens of responding to the RIAA’s flood of pre-litigation letters, Ohio University has decided to monitor its network in order to block all use of P2P file sharing software. Students caught using the software will have their network access disabled.

• "Siva Vaidhyanathan Questions Google Book Search"
  

  Friday at the Drexel University Libraries’ Scholarly Communication Symposium, Siva Vaidhyanathan raised some serious questions about the partnership between libraries and Google in a powerful and provocative analysis of Google Book Search.

• "Thomson Reports 1st Q"
  

  Thomson reported an 11% top line gain and an 8% operating profit gain to start off the year.

• "Wiley Threatens Scientists with Copyright Law—UPDATED"
  

  "We [Society of Chemical Industry] apologise for any misunderstanding. In this situation the publisher would typically grant permission on request in order to ensure that figures and extracts are properly credited. We do not think there is any need to pursue this matter further."

• "YouTube Is Not a Crime: EFF and Viacom Settle Up"
  

  The EFF has dismissed its lawsuit against Viacom. The suit was originally filed last month on behalf of MoveOn and Brave New Films after Viacom sent a massive number of DMCA takedown notices to YouTube which resulted in the removal of content that was in no way related to Viacom.

There is quite a buzz in blogosphere about John Wiley & Sons indicating that it would take legal action against Shelley Batts over the use of (in her words) "a panel a figure, and a chart" from a Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture article in her posting "Antioxidants in Berries Increased by Ethanol (but Are Daiquiris Healthy?)." After she redid the figures in Excel, Wiley was apparently satisfied. Batts is a Neuroscience doctoral student at the University of Michigan.

Fair use or not? You can read more about it in "When Fair Use Isn’t Fair."

Led by UKOLN, The JISC SWORD (Simple Web-service Offering Repository Deposit) Project is developing "a prototype ’smart deposit’ tool" to "facilitate easier and more effective population of repositories."

Here’s an excerpt from the project plan:

The effective and efficient population of repositories is a key concern for the repositories community. Deposit is a crucial step in the repository workflow; without it a repository has no content and can fulfill no further function. Currently most repositories exist in a fairly linear context, accepting deposits from a single interface and putting them into a single repository. Further deployment of repositories, encouraged by JISC and other funders, means that this situation is changing and we are beginning to see an increasingly complex and dynamic ecology of interactions between repositories and other services and systems. By and large developers are not creating repository systems and software from scratch, rather they are considering how repositories interface with other applications within institutions and the wider information landscape. A single repository, or multiple repositories, might interact with other components, such as VLEs, authoring tools, packaging tools, name authority services, classification services and research systems. In terms of content, resources may be deposited in a repository by both human and software agents, e.g. packaging tools that push content into repositories or a drag-and-drop desktop tool. The type of resource being deposited will also influence the choice of deposit mechanism. If the resources are complex packaged objects then a web service will need to support the ingest of multiple packaging standards.

There is currently no standard mechanism for accepting content into repositories, yet there already exists a stable and widely implemented service for harvesting metadata from repositories (OAI-PMH—Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting). This project will implement a similarly open protocol or specification for deposit. By taking a similar approach, the project and the resulting protocol and implementations will gain easier acceptance by a community already familiar with the OAI-PMH.

This project aims to develop a Simple Web-service Offering Repository Deposit (SWORD)—a lightweight deposit protocol that will be implemented as a simple web service within EPrints, DSpace, Fedora and IntraLibrary and tested against a prototype ’smart deposit’ tool. The project plans to take forward the lightweight protocol originally formulated by a small group working within the Digital Repositories Programme (the ‘Deposit API’ work) . The project is aligned with the Object Reuse and Exchange (ORE) Mellon-funded two-year project by the Open Archives Initiative, which commenced in October 2006. Members of the SWORD project team are represented on its Technical and Liaison Committees. . . . . The SWORD project is not attempting to duplicate work being done being done by ORE, but seeks to build on existing work to support UK-specific requirements whilst feeding into the ongoing ORE project.

Several individuals, including John Unsworth, have issued a call for the formation of a network of digital humanities centers.

Here’s an excerpt from the call:

If you represent something that you would consider a digital humanities center, anywhere in the world, we are interested in including you in a developing network of such centers. The purpose of this network is cooperative and collaborative action that will benefit digital humanities and allied fields in general, and centers as humanities cyberinfrastructure in particular. It comes out of a meeting hosted by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the University of Maryland, College Park, April 12-13, 2007 in Washington, D.C., responding in part to the report of the American Council of Learned Societies report on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences, published in 2006.

We leave the definition of "digital humanities" up to you, but we intend to be inclusive, and we know that there will be cross-over into the social sciences, media studies, digital arts, and other related areas. If you think your center is a digital humanities center, in whole or in part, then we’d be glad to have you as part of the network. This might include humanities centers with a strong interest in or focus on digital platforms. The definition of "center" is only slightly more prescriptive: a center should be larger than a single project, and it should have some history or promise of persistence.

Some early initiatives are likely to include

• workshops and training opportunities for faculty, staff, and students
• developing collaborative teams that are, in effect, pre-positioned to apply for predictable multi-investigator, multi-disciplinary, multi-national funding opportunities, beginning with an upcoming RFP that invites applications for supercomputing in the humanities
• exchanging information about tools development, best practices, organizational strategies, standards efforts, and new digital collections, through a digital humanities portal

For further information (including how to respond), see the call.

Michele Kimpton, formerly of the Internet Archive, has been appointed the Executive Director of the newly formed DSpace nonprofit organization.

Here’e an excerpt from the announcement:

I am happy to report that we are making good progress on establishing the new non-profit organization, and I would like to take this opportunity to announce that Michele Kimpton has accepted the position as Executive Director for the organization. The DSpace non-profit corporation will initially provide organizational, legal and financial support for the DSpace open source software project. Prior to joining DSpace, Michele Kimpton was one of the founding Directors at Internet Archive, in charge of Web archiving technology and services. . . .

Michele developed an organization within Internet Archive to help support and fund open source software and web archiving programs, so she comes to us with a lot of experience in both open source software and long-term digital curation. Her organization worked primarily with National Libraries and Archives around the world, so she is familiar with large, widely diverse and distributed communities. Michele was one of the co-founders of the IIPC (International Internet Preservation Consortium, netpreserve.org), whose mission is to work collaboratively to develop tools, standards and processes for archiving and preservation of web material.

The DSpace non-profit corporation is in the final stages of completing filing status as a not-for-profit corporation of Massachusetts. By summer 2007 we expect to have this legal entity in place, and a complete Board of Directors. Both MIT and Hewlett Packard have provided the start up funding to establish the organization over the next several years. . . .

The latest update of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog (SEPW) is now available, which provides information about new scholarly literature and resources related to scholarly electronic publishing, such as books, journal articles, magazine articles, technical reports, and white papers.

Especially interesting are: "The CIC Metadata Portal: A Collaborative Effort in the Area of Digital Libraries," "Design and Implementation of a Custom OAI Search and Discovery Service," "A Digital Decade: Where Have We Been and Where Are We Going in Digital Preservation?," "Digital Imaging—How Far Have We Come and What Still Needs to be Done?," "Google Print and the Principle of Functionality," "Open Access and the Progress of Science," "Open Access on a Zero Budget: A Case Study of Postcolonial Text," Researchers’ Use of Academic Libraries and Their Services: A Report Commissioned by the Research Information Network and the Consortium of Research Libraries, "Serial Wars," and Trends in Scholarly Journal Prices 2000-2006.

For weekly updates about news articles, Weblog postings, and other resources related to digital culture (e.g., copyright, digital privacy, digital rights management, and Net neutrality), digital libraries, and scholarly electronic publishing, see the latest DigitalKoans Flashback posting.