DigitalKoans

EDUCAUSE has issued a call to action about a Higher Education Reauthorization Act amendment:

Here’s an excerpt from the call:

I am writing to ask your help in a matter of urgency to higher education in general and the IT community in particular: U.S. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) intends to offer a very harmful amendment, involving illegal file sharing, to the Higher Education Reauthorization Act when the Senate turns to this issue on July 22-23. The amendment can be found at <http://tinyurl.com/2×45d2>. The amendment:

*  Makes the Secretary of Education an agent of the entertainment industry;

*  Requires the Secretary to take action using data given to her by the entertainment industry that is terribly inaccurate;

*  Requires targeted colleges and universities to plan for implementing a "technical solution" to illegal file sharing that does not yet exist for many campus environments; 

*  Is aimed only at colleges and universities, and NOT other Internet service providers;  . . . .

It is important that your institution (CEO, government relations official, and yourself) CALL today, not write, your state’s U.S. senators’ staff members for higher education issues and tell them how much higher education opposes this amendment. Please also call Senator Reid’s office (202-224-3542), Senator Edward Kennedy’s office (202-224-4543), and Senator Michael Enzi’s office (202-224-3424). Thank you for your help.

In a move that should greatly reduce Internet use and library expenditures for licensed electronic resources, the University of Kansas has prohibited campus network users from downloading copyrighted material:

Violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act is against the law. If you are caught downloading copyrighted material, you will lose your ResNet privileges forever. No second notices, no excuses, no refunds. One violation and your ResNet internet access is gone for as long as you reside on campus.

Most likely Kansas means "If you are caught illegally downloading copyrighted material . . .," but, unfortunately, as worded, the only files that can be downloaded without penalty are those in the public domain.

Source: Bangeman, Eric. "University of Kansas Adopts One-Strike Policy for Copyright Infringement." Ars Technica, 20 July 2007.

With an average of 51 inches of rain a year (compared to a national average of 37 inches) and a comfort index of 24 out of 100 (measures humidity, higher is better, and the US average is 44), and an average July high of 94, few people move to Houston because it has a balmy climate. After a year or so, some who do move here decide that they can’t stand the heat and humidity and leave.

I’ve never minded the Houston weather much, but this year has been exceptionally rainy, and the last couple of months there has been no need to look at the daily forecast—the forecast is rain. Rain here usually means a torrential downpour, although the long, slow drizzle is not unknown. Houstonians think of rain as those in more northerly climates think of snow. That’s because rain is associated with street flooding (and sometimes house flooding from overfull bayous), low highway exit ramps becoming mini-lakes, poor visibility, and massive highway traffic jams that spill over into adjoining surface streets creating citywide gridlock.

You adjust to the inconvenience of rain, but this year, more than once, it’s become almost pitch black in the morning or afternoon hours because the overcast is so heavy, and that’s a bit depressing.

But, I guess we should be thankful that the hurricane season has been very quiet so far (no one wants another Tropical Storm Allison or Hurricane Rita nightmare).

Massive Traffic Jam on I-45 as Houston Residents Flee Hurricane Rita

Source: AmyEmilia, This photo is licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 License.

By a 276 to 140 vote, the House approved H. R. 3043 (Making Appropriations for the Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education, and Related Agencies for the Fiscal Year Ending September 30, 2008, and for Other Purposes), which includes the following wording:

SEC. 217. The Director of the National Institutes of Health shall require that all investigators funded by the NIH submit or have submitted for them to the National Library of Medicine's PubMed Central an electronic version of their final, peer-reviewed manuscripts upon acceptance for publication, to be made publicly available no later than 12 months after the official date of publication: Provided, That the NIH shall implement the public access policy in a manner consistent with copyright law.

Due to concerns over increased spending, President Bush may veto the bill (see Peter Suber's "House Approves OA Mandate for NIH, but Bush May Veto" for details).

Here's the party breakdown on the vote:

• Democrats: 223 yes, 1 no, 6 not voting.
• Republications: 53 yes, 139 no, 9 not voting.

You can see a breakdown of votes by party, state, and other criteria at the Washington Post Votes Database page for the bill.

From the Washington Post, here are the House members who voted against the bill.

Robert Aderholt, Todd Akin, Rodney Alexander, Michele Bachmann, Spencer Bachus, Richard Baker, J. Gresham Barrett, Roscoe Bartlett, Joe Barton, Melissa Bean, Brian Bilbray, Rob Bishop, Marsha Blackburn, Roy Blunt, John Boehner, Jo Bonner, John Boozman, Charles Boustany, Kevin Brady, Henry Brown, Ginny Brown-Waite, Michael Burgess, Dan Burton, Steve Buyer, Dave Camp, John Campbell, Chris Cannon, Eric Cantor, John Carter, Steve Chabot, Howard Coble, Tom Cole, Michael Conaway, Ander Crenshaw, John Culberson, Geoff Davis, David Davis, Tom Davis, Nathan Deal, Mario Diaz-Balart, Lincoln Diaz-Balart, John Doolittle, Thelma Drake, David Dreier, John 'Jimmy' Duncan, Mary Fallin, Tom Feeney, Jeff Flake, Randy Forbes, Vito Fossella, Virginia Foxx, Trent Franks, Rodney Frelinghuysen, Elton Gallegly, Scott Garrett, Paul Gillmor, Phil Gingrey, Louie Gohmert, Virgil Goode, Bob Goodlatte, Kay Granger, Ralph Hall, J. Dennis Hastert, Doc Hastings, Dean Heller, Jeb Hensarling, Wally Herger, Peter Hoekstra, Duncan Hunter, Bob Inglis, Darrell Issa, Sam Johnson, Walter Jones, Jim Jordan, Steve King, Peter King, Jack Kingston, John Kline, Joe Knollenberg, Randy Kuhl, Doug Lamborn, Ron Lewis, Jerry Lewis, John Linder, Frank Lucas, Daniel Lungren, Connie Mack, Donald Manzullo, Kenny Marchant, Kevin McCarthy, Michael McCaul, Thad McCotter, Jim McCrery, Patrick McHenry, John Mica, Jeff Miller, Jerry Moran, Marilyn Musgrave, Sue Myrick, Randy Neugebauer, Devin Nunes, Stevan Pearce, Mike Pence, Thomas Petri, Joe Pitts, Ted Poe, Tom Price, Adam Putnam, George Radanovich, Thomas Reynolds, Cathy McMorris Rodgers, Hal Rogers, Dana Rohrabacher, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Peter Roskam, Edward Royce, Paul Ryan, Bill Sali, Jean Schmidt, Jim Sensenbrenner, Pete Sessions, John Shadegg, John Shimkus, Bill Shuster, Lamar Smith, Adrian Smith, Mark Souder, Cliff Stearns, John Sullivan, Lee Terry, Mac Thornberry, Todd Tiahrt, Pat Tiberi, Timothy Walberg, Greg Walden, Zachary Wamp, Lynn Westmoreland, Ed Whitfield, Roger Wicker, Joe Wilson

Should the need arise due to a veto, you can easily contact House and Senate members by e-mail using ALA's Action Alert form.

What was new and interesting during the week of 7/16/07? (Brief quotes follow article/Web page titles.)

• "Almost 65 Percent of New Book Titles Reportedly in E-Book Format"
  

  Nearly 65 pecent of new titles are in e-book format, according to InfoWorld, perhaps relying on stats from the Association of American Publishers.

• "APP and Repositories"
  

  Pete Johnston blogged recently about a very nice use of the Atom Publishing Protocol (APP) to provide digital library repository functionality.

• "ARL Releases White Paper on Interlibrary Loan"
  

  ARL has released a white paper on interlibrary loan (ILL) written by Anne K. Beaubien, Director, Cooperative Access Services, University of Michigan Library. The paper analyzes trends in ILL activity in US academic and research libraries over the past two decades. ILL activity has increased over this period, primarily due to growing requests for returnable items (e.g., books, audiovisual items, microfilms) as opposed to non-returnables (e.g., copies of journal articles, conference papers).

• "Arts and Humanities Data Service. . . Next Steps?"
  

  In an earlier post, I mentioned the decision by the AHRC (and later JISC) to cease funding the AHDS from March 2008. Since then the AHRC have re-affirmed their decision. On 28 June, the Future Histories of the Moving Image Research Network made public an open letter to the AHRC, to no avail it would appear.

• "Confirmed: Microsoft's Windows Media DRM Cracked (Again)"
  

  Ars Technica has been able to confirm that the latest attacks on Microsoft's Windows Media DRM work as proclaimed. Via an update of the Individualized Blackbox component (IBX), FairUse4WM can now remove DRM for Microsoft IBX versions 11.0.6000.6324 and earlier, on both XP and Vista.

• "Copy-Editing and Citation-Linking"
  

  There’s an interesting debate going on at present about the value added to journal articles in the course of copy-editing.

• "Dangerous Ruling Puts Interactive Web Services at Risk"
  

  The ruling came in a housing discrimination lawsuit against Roommate.com, which runs Internet forum where users can search for potential roommates. A three-judge panel held that Roommate.com could be held liable for the activity of its users because it "suggested, encouraged, or solicited" and then sorted and categorized content that may have violated fair housing law. But this reasoning threatens both current and future Internet innovators with potentially insurmountable liability problems—impacting everything from search engine functionality to the ability to tag content on media sharing sites such as YouTube and Flickr—and is directly contrary to federal law.

• "Ebooks Face Triple Threat"
  

  A survey of libraries done by ebook vendor ebrary found that while ebooks have become more popular, growth is being slowed for a number of reasons.

• "EU's Top Court Deals Blow to Music Industry's Fight against File-sharing"
  

  Today, an advocate general for the European Court of Justice, the highest court in the EU, released an opinion saying that ISPs are not required to disclose information that could identify subscribers in civil copyright infringement cases.

• "Full Text: Keen vs. Weinberger"
  

  This is the full text of a "Reply All" debate on Web 2.0 between authors Andrew Keen and David Weinberger.

• "Great Strides for Intute—One Year On"
  

  Intute, the free national online service funded by JISC, celebrates its first birthday today by renewing its commitment to enable lecturers, researchers and students to discover and access high quality Internet resources.

• "If Libraries Had Shareholders"
  

  And one has to think: if libraries had shareholders, would they, like newspapers, be in the midst of a gut-wrenching, brake-screeching exercise in redefinition?

• "JISC Launches RepositoryNet to Connect Existing Projects"
  

  JISC has launched RepositoryNet, an umbrella initiative to unify four of its existing repository projects.

• "More on the DSpace Foundation"
  

  HP and the MIT Libraries today announced the formation of the DSpace Foundation, a non-profit organization that will provide support to the growing community of institutions that use DSpace, an open source software solution for accessing, managing and preserving scholarly works in a digital archive.

• "Moving Images: Digitization for Access: Lot 49"
  

  This last Friday (the 13th!), at U.C. Berkeley, the Digital Library Federation was honored to host a landmark meeting of a group that we have labeled "Lot 49" on the topic of moving image digitization.

• "MPAA to FCC: Net Neutrality Could Kill a Cornucopia of Content (Monitoring)"
  

  The MPAA is concerned that network neutrality rules might bring an end to such beloved technologies as digital watermarking, deep packet inspection, acoustic fingerprinting, and content filtering of all kinds.

• "Net Radio "Compromise" Hinged on DRM Adoption"
  

  As we reported Friday, the looming royalty crunch on Internet radio that would have begun today (July 15) was narrowly averted last week by a temporary reprieve from SoundExchange. Now it appears that a lasting compromise is indeed possible, but such a compromise will likely mean mandatory DRM for Internet radio.

• "Once Upon a Time . . . E-book Revolution"
  

  There are now millions of books free online. So why hasn't the e-book revolution taken off?

• "Oregon State University Press Now Part of the Library "
  

  The Oregon State University (OSU) Press has a new home: a division of the OSU Libraries.

• "Papers/Presentation from the 7th International Web Archiving Workshop"
  

  The papers and presentations from the 7th International Web Archiving Workshop are now online.

• "RIAA Sends July's Batch of Pre-Litigation Letters"
  

  Today the trade group sent a total of 408 messages to 23 different colleges, which must now decide whether they will pass the notices on to their students.

• "RIAA's Final Tab for Capitol v. Foster: $68,685.23"
  

  Foster's attorney, Marilyn Barringer-Thompson, submitted a bill for $105,680.75. After taking into account the amount of time spent on the case, how the time was billed, and costs of expert witnesses, Judge West decided that $68,685.23 was adequate to compensate Barringer-Thompson and her legal staff for the time spent litigating the case.

• "‘Voyages into Publisher Copyright’"
  

  Peter Murray-Rust of the Unilever Centre for Molecular Informatics, Cambridge, has recently been looking into the licensing practices and access policies of publishers of science journals.

• "When Do You Stop The Presses?"
  

  Play with me on this one: Which major American newspaper should be the first to throw up its hands and stop publishing a print product?

Villanova University's Falvey Memorial Library has released VuFind 0.5 Beta. This open-source software operates in conjunction with Voyager OPACs (more drivers being developed), and it is powered by Solr.

Here's an excerpt from the project's home page:

VuFind is a library resource portal designed and developed for libraries by libraries. The goal of VuFind is to enable your users to search and browse through all of your library's resources by replacing the traditional OPAC to include:

• Catalog Records
• Digital Library Items
• Institutional Repository
• Institutional Bibliography
• Other Library Collections and Resources

VuFind is completely modular so you can implement just the basic system, or all of components. And since it's open source, you can modify the modules to best fit your need or you can add new modules to extend your resource offerings.

The International Telecommunication Union has released the World Information Society Report 2007: Beyond WSIS.

Here's an excerpt from the "Executive Summary":

Developing countries (most notably, India and China) are gaining on OECD countries in terms of fixed line penetration, mobile cellular subscriber penetration, Internet usage and broadband penetration. Least Developed Countries (LDCs) are also catching up with developing countries in terms of mobile phones, Internet usage and broadband. However, LDCs are actually being left behind in fixed lines, where there is a widening gap between developing countries and LDCs. This may later have a negative impact on the take-up of broadband in LDCs. . . .

The digital divide is also narrowing in terms of Internet usage. In 1997, the nearly three-quarters of the world’s population living in low-income and lower-middle income economies accounted for just 5 per cent of the world’s Internet users (see Figure 2). By 2005, they accounted for just over 30 per cent of all Internet users. . . .

In terms of broadband subscribers, high-income economies account for nearly three-quarters of total broadband subscribers worldwide (see Figure 1). Lower-middle income economies accounted for 20 per cent (with China alone accounting for 87 per cent of these or some 15 per cent of the global total). Low-income countries accounted for less than 1 per cent of total global broadband subscribers, with India and Vietnam accounting for virtually all of these.

2005 and 2006 were a period of startling growth in Internet in many countries, thanks to the boost from broadband. The United States remains the largest Internet market in terms of the number of Internet subscribers, but China is gaining fast and, if current growth rates continue, China could overtake the United States in terms of total Internet subscribers within two years. . . .

In developed countries, growth rates in Internet subscriptions tend to be lower, but many subscribers are exchanging their narrowband dial-up connection for a higher speed broadband connection. One example is the substitution of broadband for dial-up in the United Kingdom (see Figure 4). In the United States, some 60 per cent of all Internet connections are now broadband, while in Japan and Spain, efforts by operators to encourage consumers towards broadband have resulted in three-quarters of Internet subscribers now using broadband. In the Republic of Korea and Canada, virtually all Internet subscribers already enjoy broadband access to faster, advanced services such as video, teleconferencing, multi-player gaming and triple play.

I’ve revised Open Access Update migrating the aggregate RSS feed for the OA-related weblogs to Yahoo Pipes, switching the source feed for the aggregate FeedBurner feed to the new Yahoo Pipes feed; adding more weblogs to the aggregate RSS feed; correcting the URLs for the OA-related mailing lists, e-journals, and wikis; and correcting the URLs in the Google Search Engines for those resources.