DigitalKoans

The JISC-funded MIDESS Project is examining issues related to the management of digital audio, images, video, and other digital content in distributed digital repositories as well as at the national level. It is being conducted by the London School of Economics, University College London, the University of Birmingham, and the University of Leeds.

Here is an excerpt from the "Aims and Objectives of the MIDESS Project" page:

• The MIDESS project will be building digital content databases at three of the partner institutions . . .
• These databases will be populated with digital content which has already been created, or is currently under creation, by the partner institutions. . . .
• Opportunities for the sharing and re-use of digital collections across institutions will be explored . . .
• Metadata standards will be established, and metadata developed, for each collection added to the repositories. . . .
• MIDESS will explore the role of digital content databases with a particular focus on interoperability with enterprise content management architectures.
• MIDESS will also aim to establish how distributed digital repositories could encourage the wider exposure and sharing of content across institutions through an evaluation of requirements for centralised metadata harvesting services.
• MIDESS will seek to pilot an infrastructure which could serve as a model for future distributed national digitisation activities.

The project has produced a number of interesting documents, especially the detailed workpackages, which deal with issues such as digital preservation, enterprise storage, intellectual property, and user requirements.

The PerX (Pilot Engineering Repository Xsearch) project has released its Report on Embedding and Reusing PerX in a VLE. (A "VLE" is a virtual learning environment.)

Here’s an excerpt from the introduction:

This report presents the reusable middleware we have used to embed PerX functionality into the University VLE, VISION, a commercial VLE Blackboard system. We have done our best to use service oriented architectures (SOA) as possible. We argue that by using open source and open standards approaches rather than software and practices developed specifically for a particular VLE product, it is possible to obtain open reusable middleware that can simplify the DLVLE integration and bridge the functionality of both environments. We hope that our methodology can provide a common foundation on which a variety of institutions may build their own customized middleware to integrate scholarly objects in VLEs.

Here’s a brief description of the PerX project from its home page:

The PerX project has developed a pilot service which provides subject resource discovery across a series of repositories of interest to the engineering learning and research communities. This pilot was used as a test-bed to explore the practical issues that would be encountered when considering the possibility of full scale subject resource discovery services.

The LITA/ALCTS Electronic Resources Management Interest Group has established a mailing list (lita-erm@ala.org).

Here is a description of the IG from its home page:

Established in 2005. The purpose of the LITA/ALCTS Electronic Resources Management Interest Group is to promote and enable the exchange of information and discussion among librarians, publishers, electronic resource management system vendors and related service organizations concerning issues related to the management of electronic resources. The group will assist in developing appropriate and responsive systems and standards by fostering open and collaborative discussions and implementation issues.

The New York Times reports today ("War Fears Turn Digital After Data Siege in Estonia") that Estonia has suffered massive distributed denial-of-service attacks on its Internet infrastructure as a result of removing a statue of a Soviet solder from a park in Tallinn. Botnets were used to intensify the ferocity of the attacks. As many as one million zombie computers worldwide may have been involved.

The article notes:

The 10 largest assaults blasted streams of 90 megabits of data a second at Estonia’s networks, lasting up to 10 hours each. That is a data load equivalent to downloading the entire Windows XP operating system every six seconds for 10 hours.

Linton Wells II, the Pentagon’s principal deputy assistant secretary of defense for networks and information integration, said: "This may well turn out to be a watershed in terms of widespread awareness of the vulnerability of modern society."

Source: Landler, Mark, and John Markoff. "War Fears Turn Digital After Data Siege in Estonia." The New York Times, A1, C7.

Open Access News is five today. OAN’s indefatigable primary author Peter Suber has written over 10,800 OAN postings during this period. Going further back to 2001, he has written 109 issues of the SPARC Open Access Newsletter (formerly called the Free Online Scholarship Newsletter) as well as important papers on open access.

Thanks, Peter. The open access movement owes you a huge debt of gratitude for this fine work.

Although it is a lower-level court, a recent ruling by the Helsinki District Court has raised questions about whether DRM systems that can be cracked by easily available software warrant protection under Finnish and European Union copyright laws.

Here’s a excerpt from Mikko Välimäki’s analysis, "Keep on Hacking: A Finnish Court Says Technological Measures Are No Longer ‘Effective’ When Circumventing Applications Are Widely Available on the Internet":

In an unanimous decision given May 25, 2007, Helsinki District Court ruled that Content Scrambling System (CSS) used in DVD movies is "ineffective." The decision is probably the first in Europe to interpret new copyright law amendments that ban the circumvention of "effective technological measures." The legislation is based on EU Copyright Directive from 2001. According to both the Finnish copyright law and the underlying directive, only such protection measure is effective, "which achieves the protection objective." . . .

The background of the Finnish CSS case was that after the national copyright law amendment was accepted in late 2005, a group of Finnish computer hobbyists and activists opened a website where they posted information on how to circumvent CSS. They appeared in a police station and claimed to have potentially infringed copyright law. Most of the activists thought that either the police does not investigate the case in the first place or the prosecutor drops it if it goes any further.

To the surprise of many, the case ended in the Helsinki District Court. Defendants were Mikko Rauhala who opened the website, and a poster who published an own implementation of source code circumventing CSS. They were prosecuted for illegally manufacturing and distributing a circumventing product and providing a service to circumvent an effective technological measure. . . .

The decisive part of the process was the hearing of two technical expert witnesses. One was invited by the prosecutor and another was invited by the defense. Asked about the effectivity of CSS, they both held it ineffective from the perspectives of technical experts as well as average consumers. The court relied on the testimonies of the witnesses and concluded: ". . . since a Norwegian hacker succeeded in circumventing CSS protection used in DVDs in 1999, end-users have been able to get with easy tens of similar circumventing software from the Internet even free of charge. Some operating systems come with this kind of software pre-installed. . . . CSS protection can no longer be held ‘effective’ as defined in law. . . ."

The Digital Library Federation and OCLC have released their Registry of Digital Masters Working Group’s Registry of Digital Masters Record Creation Guidelines.

Here is an excerpt from the Purpose section of the document:

By recording materials in the Registry, institutions are signaling the intent to preserve and maintain the accessibility of the described materials over an extended timeframe. This implies that materials were born digital or have been converted to digital form, that the digital objects are stored in professionally managed systems, and that the institution is committed to retain and preserve them. . . .

These guidelines detail which MARC 21 elements should be used to carry Registry-required information. Registry records describe materials that an institution intends to digitize, either from existing paper- and/or microfilm-based materials (“intent to digitize”), as well as born digital materials, and to indicate the standards by which the registered objects have been digitized.

A Registry record also provides information about whether a specific item has already been digitized, and if so, whether the digitization has been done at an adequate level such that another digital copy is not required, what institution is responsible for the digitization, what institution is responsible for the preservation of the digital content, and what specific materials are available.

What was new and interesting during the week of 5/21/07? (Brief quotes follow article/Web page titles.)

• "Action Alert: Fight the Justice Department’s Copycrime Proposal!"
  

  Should ordinary Americans face jail time for attempted copyright infringement? Should the sort of property forfeiture penalties applied in drug busts also threaten P2P users, mixtape makers, and mash-up artists?

• "Citizen Media Law Project Launches Website"
  

  The Citizen Media Law Project—a joint venture of the Berkman Center and the Center for Citizen Media—has launched their new website! The CMLP’s mission is to provide practical legal knowledge and tools for citizen media creators.

• "Copying HD DVD and Blu-Ray Discs May Become Legal"
  

  Under a licensing agreement in its final stages, consumers may get the right to make several legal copies of HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc movies they’ve purchased, a concession by the movie industry that may quell criticism that DRM (digital rights management) technologies are too restrictive.

• "E-Book Sales Reach $54M in 2006, a 24 Percent Increase, According to AAP"
  

  E-books saw a 24.1% increase in 2006 at $54 million, with a compound growth rate of 65 percent since 2002 . . .

• "Fair Is Fair. . . or Is It?"
  

  The Sony Betamax Supreme Court decision was one of the most important "fair use" decisions of the last 25 years, but it’s been a constant source of frustration for Marybeth Peters, the Register of Copyrights in the US since 1994.

• "Four Sources of Metadata about Things"
  

  I think it is useful to think of four sources of descriptive metadata in libraries. These are not mutually exclusive, and one of the interesting questions we have to address is how they will be mobilized effectively together.

• "Google Print Doesn’t Do Exclusive Deals with Libraries, but Still Holds the Public Domain Tight to Its Chest"
  

  I’m still disappointed that Google puts restrictive notices on their public domain works (these aren’t licenses, just “polite notices”) that tell what you’re not allowed to do with these books. . . . Just because you scan a public domain book, it doesn’t confer the right to control it to you.

• "Google to Scan 800,000 Manuscripts, Books from Indian University"
  

  Google has agreed to index and digitize 800,000 texts stored at the University of Mysore in India as part of its attempt to broaden the Google Book Search program, according to the Indo-Asian News Service.

• "Million Books Workshop Wrap-up"
  

  The three main topics were how to get from scanned documents (especially the complicated ones that scholars sometimes encounter, like Sanskrit manuscripts or early modern broadsides, rather than simply formatted texts like modern English books) to machine-readable text that can be searched and analyzed; machine translation of texts; and moving from text to actionable data (e.g., extraction all of the place names from a document or summarizing large masses of text).

• "Museums and Misleading ‘Copyright’"
  

  Public.Resource.Org has posted 6,288 images currently sold by the Smithsonian on Flickr (a book of the images can be downloaded for free from Lulu.com), arguing that the U.S. institution is overreaching by claiming copyright or control over images that are in the public domain.

• "New Tool Screens Spam, Digitizes Books"
  

  A group of Carnegie Mellon University programmers has launched a service called ReCaptcha that can help cut down on spam while letting people digitize books

• "New York Times Column Advocates Eternal Copyright"
  

  According to Mark Helprin’s incendiary opinion piece in yesterday’s Sunday Times, copyright shouldn’t last until 70 years after the death of a work’s creator—it should last forever.

• "Newspapers Want Google News’ Quarter"
  

  For years now, newspapers have quietly watched Google index their headlines and offer users a synopsis of their stories without paying them a dime.

• "Overview of the Identity Landscape"
  

  Last week, I attended the Internet Identity Workshop. . . . In this post I will walk through the information covered, because it has served as a useful framework as I’ve thought about the issues—and I believe will also be useful to the R/WW community.

• "A Professor Pokes Fun at Copyright"
  

  Copyright law, a constant thorn in the sides of scholars and researchers, is generating a lot of public discussion this week, thanks in part to a new 10-minute video that parodies the law. "A Fair(y) Use Tale" has been downloaded from YouTube about 145,000 times since it was posted online Friday.

• "Sony Debuts Flexible TV Screen"
  

  The company claims to have developed a new technology that uses plastic instead of glass to make OLED screens that can actually bend (hopefully without breaking), according to Pink Tentacle.

• "Standing Up for Open Access"
  

  Professors at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology were perplexed: How could a membership organization that gladly accepts and archives their scholarly work turn around and limit transmission of the material?

• "Stop the Broadcasting Treaty Flip-Flop!"
  

  But now the US WIPO delegation has flip-flopped, and the WIPO Chair just released a draft that once again endangers innovators’ and users’ rights. On June 18-22, WIPO’s Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights (SCCR) will be holding a special session to determine whether there’s enough agreement on this new draft to go forward with an already-scheduled inter-governmental Diplomatic Conference in November, at which the new draft could become international law.

• "Time for Academic Librarians to Tune in to the Semantic Web"
  

  Three years ago, Campbell and Fast asked what academic libraries and the Semantic Web could offer each other. At the time, the Semantic Web was years away from offering anything tangible. Now, for those of us wondering if the successor to AACR2 will be RDA or something less library-specific, the events at W3C and O’Reilly are calls to prick up our ears.

• "Windows Media Center DRM—Now with More Bugs!"
  

  There was some Slashdot buzz earlier this week about Microsoft Windows Media Center users suddenly facing restrictions forbidding playback of recorded analog cable TV content.

• "What’s Hot Today?"
  

  And today we’re introducing a new toy we are calling Hot Trends. It’s a new feature of Google Trends for sharing the the hottest current searches with you in very close to real time.

• "Zeutschel Book Scanner and Book Copier"
  

  Announced earlier this month, the Zeutschel OS 12000 C is the book scanner and the Zeutschel OS 12000 is the book copier.

The Universiteitsbibliotheek Gent has joined the Google Books Library Project.

Earlier in the month, the La Bibliothèque Cantonale et Universitaire de Lausanne in Switzerland joined the project.