DigitalKoans

Library Journal Academic Newswire has published a must-read article ("Questions Emerge as Terms of the CIC/Google Deal Become Public") about the Committee on Institutional Cooperation’s Google Book Search Library Project contract.

The article includes quotes from Peter Brantley, Digital Library Federation Executive Director, from his "Monetizing Libraries" posting about the contract (another must-read piece).

Here’s an excerpt from Brantley’s posting:

In other words—pretty much, unless Google ceases business operations, or there is a legal ruling or agreement with publishers that expressly permits these institutions (excepting Michigan and Wisconsin which have contracts of precedence) to receive digitized copies of In-Copyright material, it will be held in escrow until such time as it becomes public domain.

That could be a long wait. . . .

In an article early this year in The New Yorker, "Google’s Moon Shot," Jeffrey Toobin discusses possible outcomes of the antagonism this project has generated between Google and publishers. Paramount among them, in his mind, is a settlement. . . .

A settlement between Google and publishers would create a barrier to entry in part because the current litigation would not be resolved through court decision; any new entrant would be faced with the unresolved legal issues and required to re-enter the settlement process on their own terms. That, beyond the costs of mass digitization itself, is likely to deter almost any other actor in the market.

What was new and interesting during the week of 6/11/07? (Brief quotes follow article/Web page titles.)

• "1 Billion PCs by End of 2008"
  

  Acording to a study published by Forrester Research, 2008 will be the year in which a psychological barrier will be surpassed.

• "The 3D Real/Virtual World Hybrid: How Far Away?"
  

  How long will it be until we can stroll through the streets in a virtual world that is identical to our own? Given the state of a number of technologies, not very long.

• "Another Standards Opportunity"
  

  This is a new project proposal to develop an international standard identifier for collections in libraries and related organizations such as archives, museums, and publishers, and is directly related to NISO’s draft standard Z39.91, Collection Description Specification.

• "AT&T Willing to Spy for NSA, MPAA, and RIAA"
  

  In a move that has executives from movie studios and record labels grinning from ear to ear, AT&T has announced that it will develop and deploy technology that will attempt to keep pirated content off its network.

• "The Definitive Collection Of RSS Links"
  

  . . . Stan Schroeder over at Mashable has assembled what might well be the largest collection of RSS links on the web.

• "Digital Curation Blog"
  

  The Digital Curation Centre now has a blog.

• "Digitization Vendors at the SLA Conference, Part 3"
  

  I’ve already blogged about some of the vendors, so let me talk about the rest.

• "DINI Presentations for OA Repository Managers"
  

  Presentations from the DINI meeting Technische und rechtliche Rahmenbedingungen fur die Betreiber von Open-Access Repositories (Berlin, June 5-6, 2007) are now online.

• "FBI: Operation Bot Roast Finds 1 Million Botnet Victims"
  

  The U.S. Department of Justice and the FBI yesterday said ongoing investigations have identified more than 1 million botnet crime victims.

• "Fiction Writing 2.0: Six New Ways To Write The Next Great Novel"
  

  Below we’ll explore some start ups that take creative writing into the Web 2.0 era.

• "Google Bows to EU Pressure, Will Anonymize Log Files After 18 Months, Not 24"
  

  Google has agreed to change its policy on retaining server logs after inquiries from Europe’s Article 29 Working Group.

• "Google Custom Search Engine Adds Dynamic Search Capabilities"
  

  Google has quietly updated its Custom Search Engine tools, allowing users to create dynamic search engines that update searched domains on the fly.

• "Google Named Worst Privacy Offender in Study"
  

  A new report puts Google in last place when it comes to privacy protection.

• "Hollywood’s YouTube Frustration Grows"
  

  Google and its YouTube subsidiary are trying Hollywood’s patience.

• "How Hollywood, Congress, and DRM Are Beating Up the American Economy"
  

  The United States traded its manufacturing sector’s health for its entertainment industry, hoping that Police Academy sequels could take the place of the rust belt. The United States bet wrong.

• "Librarians Respond to Global E-Book Survey with Some Interesting Results"
  

  A recent survey commissioned by ebrary who operate in the library and publishing sectors, has found users of e-books don’t rely on Google to search for content. They received responses from 552 individual libraries, the majority of which were academic.

• "Losing Sleep over Copyright"
  

  I don’t often lose sleep over copyright issues anymore. But last night I could not stop thinking about the Copyright Office’s new resource for children.

• "More Calls to Kill DRM"
  

  Former music industry executive Jay Samit called on the media companies Wednesday to do away with digital rights management software that encrypts content.

• "Now Online: Summary Minutes from the High Level Expert Group on Digital Libraries"
  

  The summary minutes (8 pages; PDF) of the 3rd meeting of the HLEG on Digital Libraries, held in Brussels on 18 April 2007, are now published and available online.

• "OCLC’s Eric Hellman Talks with Talis"
  

  In this Talking with Talis videocast, I talk with Eric Hellman, Director of OCLC’s Openly Informatics Division.

• "Publishers Testing E-Books for Young People"
  

  Two leading children’s publishers, Scholastic, Inc., and Disney, will soon discover whether the laptop compares to the lap in the hearts of young readers.

• "Supporting Research in the Arts and Humanities: JISC Reviews Its Services"
  

  Following the decision by the AHRC (Arts and Humanities Research Council) to cease funding the AHDS2 (Arts and Humanities Data Service) from March 31st 2008, JISC has decided that it is unable to fund the service alone and that therefore its own funding of the service will, in its current form, cease on the same date.

• "UT Offers Help Seeking Permissions"
  

  Now the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas, Austin has announced two databases that will help make searching for information about "orphan works" a little easier.

• "US Falls to 24th Place For Broadband Penetration"
  

  According to research done by the consultancy firm Point Topic, the US has fallen to 24th place in terms of broadband penetration, with only 53% of households connected.

The JISC-funded SPECTRa project has released Project SPECTRa (Submission, Preservation and Exposure of Chemistry Teaching and Research Data): JISC Final Report, March 2007.

Here’s an excerpt from the Executive Summary:

Project SPECTRa’s principal aim was to facilitate the high-volume ingest and subsequent reuse of experimental data via institutional repositories, using the DSpace platform, by developing Open Source software tools which could easily be incorporated within chemists’ workflows. It focussed on three distinct areas of chemistry research—synthetic organic chemistry, crystallography and computational chemistry.

SPECTRa was funded by JISC’s Digital Repositories Programme as a joint project between the libraries and chemistry departments of the University of Cambridge and Imperial College London, in collaboration with the eBank UK project. . . .

Surveys of chemists at Imperial and Cambridge investigated their current use of computers and the Internet and identified specific data needs. The survey’s main conclusions were:

• Much data is not stored electronically (e.g. lab books, paper copies of spectra)
• A complex list of data file formats (particularly proprietary binary formats) being used
• A significant ignorance of digital repositories
• A requirement for restricted access to deposited experimental data

Distributable software tool development using Open Source code was undertaken to facilitate deposition into a repository, guided by interviews with key researchers. The project has provided tools which allow for the preservation aspects of data reuse. All legacy chemical file formats are converted to the appropriate Chemical Markup Language scheme to enable automatic data validation, metadata creation and long-term preservation needs. . . .

The deposition process adopted the concept of an "embargo repository" allowing unpublished or commercially sensitive material, identified through metadata, to be retained in a closed access environment until the data owner approved its release. . . .

Among the project’s findings were the following:

• it has integrated the need for long-term management of experimental chemistry data with the maturing technology and organisational capability of digital repositories;
• scientific data repositories are more complex to build and maintain than are those designed primarily for text-based materials;
• the specific needs of individual scientific disciplines are best met by discipline-specific tools, though this is a resource-intensive process;
• institutional repository managers need to understand the working practices of researchers in order to develop repository services that meet their requirements;
• IPR issues relating to the ownership and reuse of scientific data are complex, and would benefit from authoritative guidance based on UK and EU law.

Public Knowledge has released a podcast of James Neal, Vice President for Information Services and University Librarian at Columbia University, discussing electronic reserves copyright, fair use, and licensing issues.

The JISC-funded Rights and Rewards Project at Loughborough University has made its proof-of-concept PEDESTAL system public, which uses Web 2.0 concepts in a learning repository.

Here’s an excerpt from the About: PEDESTAL page:

PEDESTAL is a demonstrator teaching and learning material repository. PEDESTAL is a service, which has been developed by the Engineering Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (EngCETL), for Loughborough staff to share their teaching material and expertise with other peers. . . .

PEDESTAL is not just about the sharing content, each user has their own blog which can be used to capture user’s thoughts and interests. Links to useful documents or webpage’s can be recorded, which also may be of interest to many others.PEDESTAL boasts a search mechanism. Within PEDESTAL, a search may retrieve more than just content. For example, a search using the term ‘Digital Photography’ may return;

• Items to embed in to teaching (textual resources, diagrams, images etc)
• Items to inform the teaching and learning process (teaching exemplars, how to guides)
• A list of people who are interested in ‘Digital Photography’
• A list of blog postings that have the term ‘Digital Photography’ within them

PEDESTAL is much different than a Virtual Learning Environment (Learn). The latter is structured around course modules and is a mechanism which delivers teaching material (usually specific to a course or module) to students. PEDESTAL is structured around people—i.e. the users. Each user is given a personal profile page which can be customised to show their teaching and research interests.

For further information, see the About: 10 Things About PEDESTAL page.

A cross-institutional team has built a a simulation of Rome as it was in 320 A.D. called Rome Reborn 1.0.

Here’s an excerpt from the press release:

Rome’s Mayor Walter Veltroni will officiate at the first public viewing of "Rome Reborn 1.0," a 10-year project based at the University of Virginia and begun at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) to use advanced technology to digitally rebuild ancient Rome. The event will take place at 2 p.m. in the Palazzo Senatorio on the Campidoglio. An international team of archaeologists, architects and computer specialists from Italy, the United States, Britain and Germany employed the same high-tech tools used for simulating contemporary cities such as laser scanners and virtual reality to build the biggest, most complete simulation of an historic city ever created. "Rome Reborn 1.0" shows almost the entire city within the 13-mile-long Aurelian Walls as it appeared in A.D. 320. At that time Rome was the multicultural capital of the western world and had reached the peak of its development with an estimated population of one million.

"Rome Reborn 1.0" is a true 3D model that runs in real time. Users can navigate through the model with complete freedom, moving up, down, left and right at will. They can enter important public buildings such as the Roman Senate House, the Colosseum, or the Temple of Venus and Rome, the ancient city’s largest place of worship.

As new discoveries are made, "Rome Reborn 1.0" can be easily updated to reflect the latest knowledge about the ancient city. In future releases, the "Rome Reborn" project will include other phases in the evolution of the city from the late Bronze Age in the 10th century B.C. to the Gothic Wars in the 6th century A.D. Video clips and still images of "Rome Reborn 1.0" can be viewed at www.romereborn.virginia.edu. . . .

The "Rome Reborn" project was begun at UCLA in 1996 by professors Favro and Frischer. They collaborated with UCLA students from classics, architecture and urban design who fashioned the digital models with continuous advice from expert archaeologists. As the project evolved, it became collaborative at an international scale. In 2004, the project moved its administrative home to the University of Virginia, while work in progress continued at UCLA. In the same year, a cooperative research agreement was signed with the Politecnico di Milano. . . .

Many individuals and institutions contributed to "Rome Reborn" including the Politecnico di Milano (http://www.polimi.it), UCLA (http://www.etc.ucla.edu/), and the University of Virginia (www.iath.virginia.edu). The advisors of the project included scholars from the Italian Ministry of Culture, the Museum of Roman Civilization (Rome), Bath University, Bryn Mawr College, the Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, the German Archaeological Institute, Ohio University, UCLA, the University of Florence, the University of Lecce, the University of Rome ("La Sapienza"), the University of Virginia and the Vatican Museums.

JISC has released Web 2.0 for Content for Learning and Teaching in Higher Education.

Here’s an excerpt from the report’s introduction:

In the main report, we provide a discussion of Web 2.0 together with a compilation of the more commonly used systems for education. We then examine progress at four universities which have taken a strategic approach and implemented Web 2.0 services in different ways at the institutional level. This is followed by a discussion of Web 2.0 content and its creation and use, together with an identification of issues affecting content creation and use. The next section considers the ways in which Web 2.0 is being used in learning, teaching and assessment, and important issues associated with pedagogy and assessment. We then turn to institutional policy and strategy and consider ways in which Web 2.0 impacts them.

Because of the relative immaturity of the technology and experimentation with its use, it is too early to make specific recommendations in most of the areas above. Consequently we make various recommendations to the JISC as to actions to guide and help the UK HE community in its ongoing exploration, adoption and adaptation of Web 2.0 systems.

What was new and interesting during the week of 6/4/07? (Brief quotes follow article/Web page titles.)

• "Apple’s File Labeling: An Effective Anticopying Tool?"
  

  More interesting than the lack of encryption is the apparent lack of integrity checks on the data. This makes it pretty easy to change the name in a file. . . . Worse yet, it would be easy to change the data in a file to frame an innocent person—which makes the name information pretty much useless for enforcement.

• "Ask.com Debuts Ask 3D: Say Hello to Morph Technology"
  

  Why, it’s MUCH MORE THAN a new interface, it’s a major re-engineering of the entire product. What follows is a brief introduction.

• "Blogs: The Many Ways ‘Many’ Come Together"
  

  Just a quick post (wasn’t quick after all) on some examples of different types ways many people come together in the blogosphere. . .

• " Book Recommendation: ‘Ourspace’ by Christine Harold"
  

  Professor Christine Harold of the University of Georgia has a great new book out entitled Ourspace: Resisting the Corporate Control of Culture that focuses on participatory culture and the movement to subvert mainstream media supremacy.

• "Book Scanners"
  

  MPOW is struggling towards getting digitization off the ground, and one of the things I’ve been looking at are book scanners.

• "Congratulations to Ted and Carl Bergstrom"
  

  Ted and Carl Bergstrom have been named the SPARC Innovators for 2007.

• "Copyright Silliness on Campus"
  

  What do Columbia, Vanderbilt, Duke, Howard and UCLA have in common? Apparently, leaders in Congress think that they aren’t expelling enough students for illegally swapping music and movies.

• "Ebooks Gain at Libraries, but Lack of Awareness Remains an Issue"
  

  A survey of libraries done by ebook vendor eBrary found that, while ebooks have become more popular, growth is being slowed by several issues, including complicated interfaces, business models, and a general lack of awareness among students and faculty.

• "E-Mail Senders Pay to Bypass Filters"
  

  In deals expected to be announced Thursday, Goodmail Systems is expanding its CertifiedEmail program to Comcast, Cox Communications, Time Warner Cable’s Road Runner and Verizon Communications. Yahoo and Time Warner’s AOL became inaugural participants last year.

• "The Future of OCLC ?"
  

  Whether you’re a member of the "worldwide library cooperative" or not, there’s plenty of value to be gleaned from spending some time listening to the podcast recordings of OCLC’s most recent Members Council meeting, where a number of the issues we’ve been expounding for a while get the OCLC treatment.

• "Industry Leading Publications Reject Office 2007 Documents"
  

  At least two major scientific publishers, Science and Nature, are both refusing to accept documents in the new Word 2007 format.

• "Microsoft: Silicon Valley Team Building Stealth Search Engine"
  

  Microsoft has gathered a team of twenty or more "rock star" developers who’ve been tasked at building their next generation search engine, a source has told us.

• "Movable Type 4.0 Beta: Popular Blogging Tool to Go Open Source"
  

  SixApart Vice President, Anil Dash, writing on the Six Apart blog, also says that the new version will be released under the GPL, which means MT 4.0 will be open source like its main competitor, Wordpress. . . . Moveable Type took something of a beating in the blogosphere when version 3.0 was released and introduced all sorts of licensing and fees that led many longtime users to abandon the platform in favor of Wordpress, Textpattern and other blogging software.

• "Net Firms Lose in House Spyware Vote"
  

  Over objections from Internet companies and online advertisers, the U.S. House of Representatives on Wednesday approved a bill touted as an antispyware measure, a move that sets the stage for a political showdown in the Senate later this year.

• "Notes from NASIG"
  

  I’m posting my notes on sessions of possible interest from NASIG 2007.

• "Pirate-Proofing Hollywood"
  

  By the end of May, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) will report to its member studios the results of tests of a dozen computerized video-fingerprinting systems.

• "PubMedCentral Canada?"
  

  According to Open Medicine sources, CISTI and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) are in discussions regarding the creation of a Canadian version of PubMed Central International (PMCI).

• "Repositories ‘Vital to UK Economy’, Delegates Hear"
  

  A major conference on digital repositories took place this week in Manchester, attracting nearly 200 delegates from around the UK.

• "RIAA Throws in the Towel in Atlantic v. Andersen"
  

  One of the most notorious file-sharing cases is drawing to a close. Both parties in Atlantic v. Andersen have agreed to dismiss the case with prejudice, which means that Tanya Andersen is the prevailing party and can attempt to recover attorneys fees.

• "Scitopia Launched"
  

  Scitopia is a federated search portal—that is, the search terms are sent simultaneously to the publications websites of the member societies, and the returned results ranked and presented on a single page. At present some 3 million articles are covered.

• "Solr-ized MARC Record Catalog"
  

  Rob Casson of Miami University announced this weekend the beta availability of their video catalog. In a subsequent posting, Rob describes the user interface elements.

• "Stallman: Why GPL Version 3 Is Important"
  

  The right to remove digital rights management (DRM) controls and patent protection for free and open source software users are important provisions in the General Public License (GPL) version 3, says the Free Software Foundation (FSF).

• "Systemic Change: CIC and Google"
  

  Much of what I have said revolves around systemic issues: how does the systemwide library resource reconfigure in a network environment which is seeing this type of change. This requires collective responses, which is why I think that this CIC initiative is so interesting. For OCLC, and the other library organizations which operate at the systemic level, it underlines the importance of working with libraries to develop web-scale, or in other words, responses which match what users now expect in a web environment.

• "Treating Downloads Like Drug Deals"
  

  No longer would you need to actually infringe on something to find yourself subject to the full panoply of investigatory tools available to federal prosecutors and law enforcement agencies. The government would be allowed to wiretap and read the personal communications of anyone suspected of the vague offense of "attempted" copyright infringement, a crime for which there is no definition.

• "Two Personal Repository Services"
  

  This year has seen the release of two personal repository services: http://PublicationsList.org/1 and the U.K. Depot2. These two services have an admittedly different focus, but I think it is still interesting to compare and contrast them to see what we can learn.

• "U.S. Cracks Down on Copyright"
  

  There will be more criminal prosecutions for intellectual property (IP) violations as a result of Australia’s Free Trade Agreement (FTA) with the United States, according to leading IP academics.