DigitalKoans

The Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog is now searchable using a Google Custom Search Engine. The new search box is near the bottom of the Weblog’s home page.

The Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography is also now searchable using a Google Custom Search Engine. This will be incorporated into a future version of SEPB. Only the bibliography sections of the document are searchable using this method (e.g., SEPW and SEPR are excluded).

Keep in mind when you search that you will retrieve bibliography section file or Weblog archive file titles with a single representative search result shown from that file. To see all hits, click on the cached page, which shows the retrieved search term(s) in the file highlighted in yellow.

For those who might be interested in including these Google Custom Search Engines in their Web pages, see "Code for Bailey’s Google Search Engines"

For those who might be interested in including one of my Google Custom Search Engines in their Web pages, see "Code for Bailey’s Google Search Engines"

I’ve enhanced Open Access Update with four new Google Custom Search Engines:

1. Open Access Mailing Lists (these are lists that have general discussion of OA topics)
2. Open Access Serials
3. Open Access Weblogs
4. Open Access Wikis

The indexed works contain significant information about open access topics and are freely available.

See Open Access Update for details about the included works.

What was new and interesting during the week of 10/23/06? (Brief quotes follow article/Web page titles.)

• "21st Century Reaganomics: Helping the ‘Merely Rich’ so as to Help the Really Poor"
  

  Former FCC Chairman William Kennard published an op-ed in the New York Times Saturday. The main point of the piece is to lament the truly awful state of broadband access for the poor in the United States. One statistic (not mentioned by Kennard) says it all: As the OECD reported, the United States has the 4th highest level of students (by 15 years old) who have never used a computer—worse than Greece, Poland, Portugal, and the Czech Republic. What I found extraordinary about the piece, however, was its slam of "network neutrality" legislation.

• "Access 2006 Conference Speaker Presentations and Podcasts Available"
  

  Presentations and podcasts from the Access 2006 conference, "Capitalizing on Access", held in Ottawa, Ontario, the national capital of Canada, are available.

• "Adobe Tries Again with E-Books"
  

  Digital Editions is a 2.5MB free download that works as an add-in to Adobe’s Flash Player 9. The software can read PDF pages as well as XHTML-formatted content, which makes it suitable for both longer texts, such as books, and shorter texts, such as magazine articles. Digital publishers can combine text with Flash videos and animations.

• "Cartoon: Our Bright, Non-Neutral Future"
  

  Smith portrays a future where phone and cable companies have successfully painted Net Neutrality as "Pinko-Commie Talk," paving the way for corporations "to do whatever they want."

• "Digital Freedom Campaign Launches to Champion the Public’s Rights in the Copyfight"
  

  Today, the Digital Freedom campaign was launched by a broad coalition of groups including the Consumer Electronics Association, EFF, Public Knowledge, and the Media Access Project.

• "Digital Repositories Supporting eResearch"
  

  The presentations from the UKOLN conference, Digital repositories supporting eResearch (London, October 20, 2006), are now online.

• "Digital Watermarking Alliance Publishes White Paper Addressing Copyright and Content Identification Issues within P2P and Social Networks"
  

  Published by the DWA, the white paper outlines how content owners can embed digital watermarks as content identifiers and digital media serial numbers into entertainment content to communicate the identity of copyrighted works. Because digital watermarks inherently survive the "ripping" process and format conversions, copyrighted songs, movies, TV or radio programming and images can be identified on P2P systems and online communities such as MySpace, YouTube, Google and Yahoo.

• DRM.info
  

  DRM.info helps you to understand how DRM will affect your life and the society you live in.

• "Feeling the Curb in Monterey"
  

  Last Sunday I traveled out to California to attend the Internet Librarian Conference—ITI’s tenth, my first. . . . Kathryn Deiss and Matt Gullett spoke about the two target cultures of the conference—librarianship and information technology—that often are at loggerheads.

• "Google Book Search is NOT a Library Backup"
  

  I have seen various quotes from library managers that the Google Book Search program, which is digitizing books from about a dozen large research libraries, now provides a backup to the library itself. This is simply not the case. Google is, or at least began as, a keyword search capability for books, not a preservation project. This means that "good enough" is good enough for users to discover a book by the keywords.

• "Higher Education and Library Leaders Voice Support for Free Access to Federal Research"
  

  In remarks at a forum on "Improving Access to Publicly Funded Research," leaders of major higher education and library organizations voiced their support for the goals of recent measures to expand public access to research funded by the US Government. . . . Papers and slides from speakers at the forum are available at http://www.arl.org/forum06/.

• "IL 2006 Day 1: Federated Search: State of the Art"
  

  Features:
  Support for multiple protocols (Z39.50, SRU/SRW, OAI)
  Simple and advanced search (search by specific field)
  Post processing of results (combined results)
  Integration with other software (courseware, bib management tools)
  Advanced result display (clustering, visualization)
  Context-sensitive linking (OpenURL)

• "IL2006 Day 2: Institutional Repository Basics: From Soup to Nuts"
  

  Advice: This is a huge project and requires real commitment. Don’t just do because it’s the hot new thing. Don’t do it without a strong institutional commitment. Make sure that your project is sustainable. Review the experiences of others. Consider your implementation model and don’t make it hard for people to add their content to the repository.

• "It’s a Bird, It’s a Satellite, It’s . . ."
  

  another high-flying digitization effort: Alouette Canada. The project, which officially launched in June 2006, recently gained a project director, the affable Mr. Brian Bell, former chair of the Canadian Initiative on Digital Libraries (CIDL).

• "iTunes Copy Protection ‘Cracked’"
  

  The code that prevents music downloaded from Apple’s iTunes store being played on any portable player other than an iPod has been ‘cracked’.

• "IWF Metadata Harvester"
  

  This package reads data from servers, writes it to databases, implements various kinds of searches, and writes HTML files to display the results. It currently handles data from two kinds of interface: OAI (Open Archives Initiative), which provides XML, and Z39.50, using the Pica format.

• "Libraries Have a Chance to Influence Copyright Law—Chicago Jan. 31"
  

  You can still submit comments online at http://www.loc.gov/section108/contact.html, but now there’s a chance to talk in person with the Sect. 108 Study Group that is evaluating copyright law and libraries. Comment examples at Sect. 108 Study Group site.

• "MPAA Sinks to New Low"
  

  Perhaps it is just because my son is in the Cub Scouts, but I found this article on Ars Technica that the MPAA has pursuaded the Boy Scouts to give out a “respect copyright” patch based on MPAA developed materials revolting beyond measure.

• "Pendulums, Spirals, Edges and Mush"
  

  In friday’s Christian Science Monitor article about networked books, Geoff Nunberg who along with Umberto Eco convened the seminal conference on The Future of the Book, suggested that collaboration has its limits.

• "Quick Anti-Splog Kludge"
  

  Spam weblogs (colloquially “splogs”) have discovered DSpace installations. Let us all rejoice. Specifically, what they’re doing is calling the feedback page with a link to their URL in the fromPage parameter, in the fond hope that their garbage will get into some sort of referrer-page listing.

• "The Research Library in the 21st Century"
  

  Podcasts of the presentations at the University of Texas Symposium on The Research Library in the 21st Century (Austin, September 11-12, 2006) are now online.

• "Web 2.0lier Than Thou"
  

  By putting the means of production into the hands of the masses but withholding from those same masses any ownership over the product of their work, Web 2.0 provides an incredibly efficient mechanism to harvest the economic value of the free labor provided by the very, very many and concentrate it into the hands of the very, very few.

• "We’re Google. So Sue Us"
  

  As Google has grown into the world’s most popular search engine and, arguably, the most powerful Internet company, it has become entangled in scores of lawsuits touching on a wide range of legal questions, including copyright violation, trademark infringement and its method of ranking Web sites.

• "What We Talk About When We Talk About Books"
  

  One of the most apt presentations was by Catherine Zekri of the Universié de Montréal, who attempted to decipher exactly what a "book" was from usage. She noted the confusion between the object of the book and its contents, and pointed out that this confusion carried over into the electronic realm, where "ebook" can either mean a device (like the Sony Reader) or the text that’s being read on the device.

• "YouTube’s No Friend to Copyright Violators"
  

  The video-sharing site may hand over information on those who post video clips of movies and TV shows if they’re accused of copyright infringement, something perhaps not well known by those who do so.

The Open Access Bibliography: Liberating Scholarly Literature with E-Prints and Open Access Journals is now searchable using a Google Custom Search Engine. The new search box is just before the table of contents in the bibliography’s home page. Only the bibliography sections of the document are searchable (e.g., the "Key Open Access Concepts" section is excluded).

Keep in mind when you search that you will retrieve bibliography section file titles with a single representative search result shown from that section. To see all hits in a section, click on the cached page, which shows the retrieved search term(s) in the section highlighted in yellow.

The recently re-established Rice University Press, which was reborn as a digital press, has published its first e-report: Art History and Its Publications in the Electronic Age by Hilary Ballon (Professor and Director of Art Humanities at the Columbia University Department of Art History and Archaeology) and Mariet Westermann (Director and Professor at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University).

The introduction notes:

Just as we were finishing our report, Rice University Press announced that it would re-launch itself as a fully electronic press with a special commitment to art history. We were delighted to find Rice willing to partner with the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) to publish our report electronically, with the kinds of hyper-linking, response capability, and print-on-demand options we consider vital to the success of scholarly publication on line. At Rice University Press, Chuck Henry, Chuck Bearden, and Kathi Fletcher generously steered us through the technological and legal process. We received enthusiastic support at CLIR from Susan Perry, Michael Ann Holly, Kathlin Smith, and Ann Okerson.

Like all digital works to be published by the press, this one is under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 license. At this time, it does not appear that a print-on-demand version of the work is available from Rice University Press.

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, newsletters, technical reports, and white papers. Especially interesting are: "Copyright Jungle," "Disruptive Beneficence: The Google Print Program and the Future of Libraries," "DLF-Aquifer Asset Actions Experiment: Demonstrating Value of Actionable URLs," "Ideas on Creating a Consumer Market for Scholarly Journals," "An Interoperable Fabric for Scholarly Value Chains," IWAW’ 06: Proceeding of the 6th International Web Archiving Workshop, "Moving into the Digital Age: A Conceptual Model for a Publications Repository," "The Publishing Imperative: The Pervasive Influence of Publication Metrics," and "Strategies and Frameworks for Institutional Repositories and the New Support Infrastructure for Scholarly Communications."

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.

What was new and interesting during the week of 10/16/06? (Brief quotes follow article/Web page titles.)

• "Complete Darwin Works Put Online"
  

  Tens of thousands of pages of text and pictures and audio files have been made available, including some previously unpublished manuscripts and diaries of the great British scientist.

• "Copyrighted Fabric: No Selling the Stuff You Make from It"
  

  Reprodepot sells fabric that comes with a ‘license agreement’ that prohibits you from making commercial goods out of the material.

• "Europe Starts to Build an Open Access Information Network"
  

  Driver will help countries to create networks of open access (OA) repositories. It will build on existing institutional repositories and networks from countries including the Netherlands, Germany, France, Belgium and the UK.

• "International Record Industry Files 8,000 Downloading Suits"
  

  The international record industry launched thousands more lawsuits around the world against individuals it accuses of illegally downloading and sharing digital music, ranging from a Finnish laboratory assistant to a German clergyman.

• "Institutional Repositories—0915 David Moorman SSHRC"
  

  CARL Institutional Repositories: The Next Generation, an Access 2006 preconference

• "Microsoft Steps Up Book Digitization"
  

  Back in June, Microsoft struck deals with the University of California and the University of Toronto to scan titles from their nearly 50 million (combined) books into its Windows Live Book Search service. Today, the Guardian reports that they’ve forged a new alliance with Cornell and are going to step up their scanning efforts toward a launch of the search portal sometime toward the beginning of next year.

• "Open Access to the Library Literature"
  

  Faculty or not . . . the costs and benefits of open access apply to us librarians too. We certainly have overpriced journals and trade publications. We certainly have journals that sold out and saw their prices soar. We certainly have journals and trade publications that ask us to sign ridiculous copyright-transfer agreements.

• OurOntario.ca
  

  OurOntario.ca is a gateway providing seamless access to digital content and collections of libraries, archives, museums, historical societies, and other cultural heritage and community groups in Ontario.

• Planets
  

  The Planets project brings together European National Libraries and Archives, leading research institutions, and technology companies to address the challenge of preserving access to digital cultural and scientific knowledge.

• "Protect DVD-Video—A Slap in the Face for PC and Media Center Owners"
  

  The movie industry seems determined to continue on a course where it happily erodes the rights of legitimate users, all in the name of securing profits. The latest example of this comes in the form of a DVD copy protection technology called Protect DVD-Video which actually prevents a DVD being played on a Windows PC using Windows Media Player, Windows Media Center Edition or any software players based on DirectShow.

• "Re-Kindling the E-book Fire"
  

  News of Amazon’s apparent attempt to go head-to-head with Sony by launching its own e-ink reader were thwarted, however, by a withdrawn FCC application and relative silence from the online book retailer.

• "Report from Access 2006"
  

  I just returned from Access 2006 in Ottawa. Another great year for this conference. . . . I’ll offer a short report on topics directly related to digitization and digital collection building, although many themes from the conference are relevant, such as Web 2.0, mashups, and removing barriers for users.

• "A Report on the Commons"
  

  Creative Commons launched the licensing project in December 2002. Within a year, there were more than 1,000,000 link-backs to our licenses (meaning at least a million places on the web where people were linking to our licenses, and presumptively licensing content under those licenses). Within two years, that number was 12,000,000. At the end of our last fundraising campaign, it had grown to about 45,000,000 link-backs to our licenses. That was December, 2005. In the first six months of 2006, that number grew by almost 100,000,000 licenses. In June, we reported about 140,000,000 link-backs to our licenses.

• "Reuters Opens Virtual News Bureau in Second Life"
  

  Reuters is opening a news bureau in the simulation game Second Life this week, joining a race by corporate name brands to take part in the hottest virtual world on the Internet.

• "Shakespeare Coming to a Virtual World"
  

  On Thursday, the MacArthur Foundation is expected to announce a $240,000 grant to Castronova and his team to build ‘Arden: The World of Shakespeare,’ a massively multiplayer online game, or MMO, built entirely around the plays of the Bard.

• "Taking ‘Second Life’ to the Next Level"
  

  On Monday, Linden Lab CEO Philip Rosedale’s avatar took the stage in CNET Networks’ ‘Second Life’ headquarters to talk about the metaverse’s latest developments in front of an audience of several dozen residents.

• "Universal Sues Video Sharing Sites Grouper and Bolt.com"
  

  Today, Universal Music Group sued Grouper and Bolt.com for hosting copyrighted music videos uploaded by individual users.

• "US Congress Steps into Cyberspace"
  

  The Joint Economic Committee (JEC) of the US Congress has announced it is investigating the amount of commerce taking place in virtual game worlds.

• "US Shows Signs of Net Addiction"
  

  More than one in eight adults in the US show signs of being addicted to the internet, a study has shown.

• "Wikipedia Co-Founder Plans ‘Expert’ Rival"
  

  Larry Sanger, a co-founder of Wikipedia and the site’s former editor-in-chief, is launching a rival site called Citizendium. It will include user registration and editorial controls to govern user-submitted articles, unlike the free-for-all submission process that reigns on Wikipedia.

Version 64 of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography is now available. This selective bibliography presents over 2,780 articles, books, and other printed and electronic sources that are useful in understanding scholarly electronic publishing efforts on the