DigitalKoans

PROLEARN has released Harmonization of Metadata Standards.

Here's an excerpt from the "Introduction":

Today there is a plethora of metadata specifications (such as IEEE LOM, Dublin Core, METS, MODS, MPEG-7, etc.), many of which are useful in whole or part for activities related to teaching and learning. While each specification in itself is designed to increase system interoperability, we are increasingly seeing systems that need to work with more than one of these specifications. Adding support for an additional specification generally presents a significant amount of added complexity in implementation. The reason for this is a lack of harmonization between specifications. . . .

Existing solutions to the metadata harmonization issue are few—systems are either limited to a single specification, or implement ad-hoc solutions that only work in that particular environment. There are many examples of "mappings" between specifications that provide partial solutions to the problem, but generally fail due to low-fidelity translations and lack of generality (i.e. the mapping only works for limited parts of specifications). Another solution is to create a top-level data model that encompasses the common aspects of all the specifications. This has proven to be feasible in relatively well-constrained domains such as resource aggregation. . . In the field of general metadata, where there is no such common ground, such an approach is substantially less likely to be successful. . . .

The deliverable begins with a short introduction to metadata in Section 3. Section 4 discusses a set of metadata specifications that are highly relevant to learning and teaching. Section 5 forms the core of the deliverable and analyses the harmonization issues among a chosen set of specifications. Section 6 generalizes the analysis in Section 5 and makes a deeper analysis of the relationship between IEEE LOM and Dublin Core. Section 7, finally, points to possible ways to address the identified harmonization issues.

The U.S. National Telecommunications and Information Administration will shortly release a report, Networked Nation: Broadband in America, that critics say presents too optimistic a picture of broadband access in the U.S. Read more about it at "Study: U.S. Broadband Goal Nearly Reached."

Meanwhile, EDUCAUSE has released A Blueprint for Big Broadband: An EDUCAUSE White Paper, which says that: "The United States is facing a crisis in broadband connectivity."

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

While other nations are preparing for the future, the United States is not. Most developed nations are deploying "big broadband" networks (100 Mbps) that provide faster connections at cheaper prices than those available in the United States. Japan has already announced a national commitment to build fiber networks to every home and business, and countries that have smaller economies and more rural territory than the United States (e.g., Finland, Sweden, and Canada) have better broadband services available.

Why is the United States so far behind? The failure of the United States to keep pace is the direct result of our failure to adopt a national broadband policy. The United States has taken a deregulatory approach under the assumption that the market will build enough capacity to meet the demand. While these steps may have had some positive influence, they are not sufficient. . . .

For these reasons, this paper proposes the creation of a new federal Universal Broadband Fund (UBF) that, together with matching funds from the states and the private and/or public sector, should be used to build open, big broadband networks of at least 100 Mbps (scalable upwards to 1 Gbps) to every home and business by 2012. U.S. state governors and foreign heads of state have found the resources to subsidize broadband deployment; the U.S. federal government should as well.

JISC has released SHERPA DP: Final Report of the SHERPA DP Project.

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

The SHERPA DP project (2005–2007) investigated the preservation of digital resources stored by institutional repositories participating in the SHERPA project. An emphasis was placed on the preservation of e-prints—research papers stored in an electronic format, with some support for other types of content, such as electronic theses and dissertations.

The project began with an investigation of the method that institutional repositories, as Content Providers, may interact with Service Providers. The resulting model, framed around the OAIS, established a Co-operating archive relationship, in which data and metadata is transferred into a preservation repository subsequent to it being made available. . . .

The Arts & Humanities Data Service produced a demonstrator of a Preservation Service, to investigate the operation of the preservation service and accepted responsibility for the preservation of the digital objects for a three-year period (two years of project funding, plus one year).

The most notable development of the Preservation Service demonstrator was the creation of a reusable service framework that allows the integration of a disparate collection of software tools and standards. The project adopted Fedora as the basis for the preservation repository and built a technical infrastructure necessary to harvest metadata, transfer data, and perform relevant preservation activities. Appropriate software tools and standards were selected, including JHOVE and DROID as software tools to validate data objects; METS as a packaging standard; and PREMIS as a basis on which to create preservation metadata. . . .

A number of requirements were identified that were essential for establishing a disaggregated service for preservation, most notably some method of interoperating with partner institutions and he establishment of appropriate preservation policies. . . . In its role as a Preservation Service, the AHDS developed a repository-independent framework to support the EPrints and DSpace-based repositories, using OAI-PMH as common method of connecting to partner institutions and extracting digital objects.

Scholarly bibliographies are not destined for the bestseller list. This is especially true of bibliographies that deal with fairly specialized topics vs. those that deal with topics of more general interest. Selling more than a few hundred copies of a specialized bibliography is a major achievement.

Does open access to digital bibliographies change the picture? Two digital books, one of which is also in print form, illustrate the potential of this new publishing strategy.

The Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography has been freely available since 1996. What has use been like? Below is a table that shows file and page requests rounded to the nearest thousand (a "page," such as an HTML page or a PDF file, contains content; page requests are a subset of file requests).

From 2006 onward there is only partial use data, since all or part of the University of Houston Libraries' use data for this period is unavailable to me. (DLIST and E-LIS use is not included for any year.)

In my experience, Web log statistics provide a general indicator of the magnitude of use, but not an absolutely precise one. There are also hermetic disputes about whether spider activity should be included, as it is above.

There are four things to note about SEPB: (1) it was born digital and has live links; (2) in July 2004, it was put under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License that permits any kind of noncommercial use or reuse; (3) it has been updated 70 times, and these updates have been advertised; and (4) it includes a Weblog and a resource directory. It also has a prehistory: the freely available article that it was based on had 26 versions, so one could argue that the bibliography has 96 versions.

These characteristics make SEPB represent an extension and evolution of the traditional bibliography model, but not a perfect example of it.

For more information on the evolution of SEPB, see the "Evolution of an Electronic Book: The Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography" and "A Look Back at Eighteen Years as an Internet Digital Publisher."

The second bibliography, the Open Access Bibliography: Liberating Scholarly Literature with E-Prints and Open Access Journals, is closer to the traditional model because it has not been updated and it is based on a printed book. There are two digital versions: a PDF file and a XHTML site, neither of which has live links. All print and digital versions are under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License. The OAB was advertised on the Internet and elsewhere.

Below is a table that shows OAB file and page requests rounded to the nearest thousand. It does not include any use of the digital book at the publisher's Website (Association of Research Libraries) nor at DLIST and E-LIS.

Does open access make a difference? The history of these two open access digital books suggests that it can significantly increase use. As the potentials of digital publication are more fully exploited (e.g., linking and updating), use may be driven even higher. However, these examples tell us nothing about the commercial potential of open access books, since my data are for "no-profit" use only and do not include ARL sales data for the print book (I do not receive royalties and do not have access to this data).

The European Court of Justice has ruled that EU countries do not have to force ISPs to reveal the names of users associated with IP addresses in civil copyright cases. The court said: "Community law does not require the member states, in order to ensure the effective protection of copyright, to lay down an obligation to disclose personal data in the context of civil proceedings."

Read more about it at "EU Court Says File Sharers Don't Have to be Named" and "Mixed Reaction to EU Court Ruling on Copyright."

JISC has published JISC Programme Synthesis Study: Supporting Digital Preservation and Asset Management in Institutions: A Review of the 4-04 Programme on Digital Preservation and Asset Management in Institutions for the JISC Information Environment: Part II: Programme Synthesis.. The report covers a number of projects, including LIFE, MANDATE, PARADIGM, PRESERV, and SHERPA DP.

Here's an excerpt from UKOLN News:

Written by Maureen Pennock, DCC researcher at UKOLN, the study provides a comprehensive and categorised overview of the outputs from the entire programme. Categories include training, costs and business models, life cycles, repositories, case studies, and assessment and surveys. Each category includes detailed information on project outputs and references a number of re-usable project-generated tools that range from software services to checklists and guidance.

The Columbia University Libraries have announced that they will work with Microsoft to digitize a "large number of books" that are in the public domain.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

Columbia University and Microsoft Corp. are collaborating on an initiative to digitize a large number of books from Columbia University Libraries and make them available to Internet users. With the support of the Open Content Alliance (OCA), publicly available print materials in Columbia Libraries will be scanned, digitized, and indexed to make them readily accessible through Live Search Books. . . .

Columbia University Libraries is playing a key role in book selection and in setting quality standards for the digitized materials. Microsoft will digitize selected portions of the Libraries’ great collections of American history, literature, and humanities works, with the specific areas to be decided mutually by Microsoft and Columbia during the early phase of the project.

Microsoft will give the Library high-quality digital images of all the materials, allowing the Library to provide worldwide access through its own digital library and to share the content with non-commercial academic initiatives and non-profit organizations.

Read more about it at "Columbia University Joins Microsoft Scan Plan."

In "Roundtable on Copyright Damages: 'What Are We Doing Here?'," Sherwin Siy reports on an important roundtable discussion about Section 104 of the PRO IP Act.

Here's an excerpt:

My problem with the provision then was that no one present at the hearing was particularly keen on it—neither the Department of Justice nor the Chamber of Commerce were pushing it particularly hard. Nor was it really clear that this provision did much good to improve the state of copyright law. It has been fairly clear that this is something that the RIAA wants—it would allow them to recover a much larger sum in statutory damages. For instance, if a 10-song album were infringed, the statutory damages would not range from $750 to $150,000, as they do today, but could be as high as $7500 to $1.5 million.