DigitalKoans

Jennifer W. Lang has posted very detailed notes about the 2008 Midwinter meeting of the ALCTS Electronic Resources Interest Group.

Meeting speakers included Nicole Pelsinsky of Serials Solutions ("Making E-Resources Management More Manageable"), Timothy Savage of OCLC ("Automated E-Resource Cataloging"), and Peter Fletcher of the UCLA Library Cataloging and Metadata Center ("Provider Neutral Record for Remote Access Electronic Integrating Resources").

Michelle Boule, who recently authored the "Tips for High Turnover" posting about the high turnover rate at the University of Houston Libraries that DigitalKoans previously discussed, has herself resigned. In the 3 1/2 years that she has worked at the UH Libraries, Boule has become a well-known advocate for the Web 2.0 movement in libraries, most recently writing Changing the Way We Work. Boule was named as an ALA Emerging Leaders Program participant in 2006.

In her posting, she says, in part:

This post has been a long time coming. If all works out accordingly, this post will be published directly after or right before I hand the interested parties my letter of resignation from the University of Houston Libraries where I have worked for three and a half years. I am sad to be leaving my friends and colleagues behind, even though I will see most of them often enough. Those who know me or have been paying attention will not be surprised at my departure. I have needed, searched for, even longed for a change in work scenery for quite awhile.

With Boule's resignation, the University of Houston Libraries have, since May 2006, lost all three of their Library Journal Movers & Shakers recipients (Charles W. Bailey, Jr., Michelle Boule, and Jill Emery) as well as one ALA Emerging Leaders Program participant (Michelle Boule; Miranda Bennett is the remaining ALA Emerging Leader).

Terry Reese has posted step-by-step instructions about how to harvest OAI-PMH records from the University of Michigan Libraries' MBooks digital books collection using her MarcEdit freeware program. The data can either be converted to the MARC format or stored as is. MarcEdit also has a Z39.50 client as well as crosswalks, such as MARC to Dublin Core and MARC to EAD.

It is anticipated that the Swedish government will soon charge The Pirate Bay, a torrent search engine, with copyright violations. The Pirate Bay has received over 4,000 pages of evidence related to possible violations from the government. It has been reported that The Pirate Bay serves as many as 10 million peer computers, providing access to about one million torrents.

This news comes hard on the heels of Warner Music Group's suit against SeeqPod, a digital music search engine. The SeeqPod case will likely be determined by the court's interpretation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's "safe harbor" provision, with SeeqPod claiming immunity and Warner claiming that it does not apply.

Read more about it at "Do Search Engines Promote Piracy?," "Latest Test for DMCA Safe Harbors: Warner Sues SeeqPod," "The Pirate Bay Now Tracks 1 Million Torrents, 10 Million Peers," "Swedish Prosecutors Close in on The Pirate Bay," "Swedish Prosecutors Dump 4,000 Legal Docs on The Pirate Bay," "Sweden to Charge Pirate Bay in Copyright Case," "Warner Sues Music Search Engine SeeqPod," and "Warner Sues 'Playable Search Engine,' Tests DMCA Safe Harbor."

Bess Sadler has released version .1 of Blacklight, an open source "next generation library catalog written in ruby, using solr as the underlying search engine."

The forthcoming book Against Intellectual Monopoly, which will be published by Cambridge University Press, is now freely available in digital form.

Here's an excerpt from the introduction:

Our reasoning proceeds along the following lines. Everyone wants a monopoly. No one wants to compete against his own customers, or against imitators. Currently patents and copyrights grant producers of certain ideas a monopoly. Certainly few people do something in exchange for nothing. Creators of new goods are not different from producers of old ones: they want to be compensated for their effort. However, it is a long and dangerous jump from the assertion that innovators deserve compensation for their efforts to the conclusion that patents and copyrights, that is monopoly, are the best or the only way of providing that reward. Statements such as "A patent is the way of rewarding somebody for coming up with a worthy commercial idea" abound in the business, legal and economic press. As we shall see there are many other ways in which innovators are rewarded, even substantially, and most of them are better for society than the monopoly power patents and copyright currently bestow. Since innovators may be rewarded even without patents and copyright, we should ask: is it true that intellectual property achieves the intended purpose of creating incentives for innovation and creation that offset their considerable harm?

This book examines both the evidence and the theory. Our conclusion is that creators’ property rights can be well protected in the absence of intellectual property, and that the latter does not increase either innovation or creation. They are an unnecessary evil.

Richard Griscom, University of Pennsylvania, and Leah Vanderjagt, University of Alberta, have launched REPOMAN-L (Institutional Repository Managers' Mailing List).

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

We have created REPOMAN-L (Institutional Repository Managers' Mailing List) as an open forum for the discussion of issues, great and small, that confront repository managers. We hope that you will subscribe and participate enthusiastically, and use this list for problem-solving and sharing of advice; for example:

• to poll the group on practices at their institutions
• to ask about any aspect of development from policy to outreach
• initiatives to software evaluation
• to share links to useful tools and references
• to explore rationale around decisions you're making about your repository. . . .

The list is purposefully unaffiliated with any institution, initiative, repository software platform, or conceptual idea such as open access; the list would of course not exclude discussion of these areas, but we ask subscribers to consider initiating these discussions on lists set up specifically for the topics and then bring summaries of relevance to this list.

Based on a recent study published in Nature, it is possible that there may be as many as 200,000 duplicate articles (either articles that were published in multiple journals or plagiarized) in journals indexed by Medline. To conduct the study, Mounir Errami and Harold Garner utilized the eTBLAST software to analyze samples of Medline article abstracts in order to estimate the prevalence of duplicate articles.

Duplicate detection is an issue of great concern to both publishers and scholars. The CrossCheck project is allowing eight publishers to test the duplicate checking as part of the editorial process in a closed-access environment. In the project's home page, it states:

Currently, existing PD [plagiarism detection] systems do not index the majority of scholarly/professional content because it is inaccessible to crawlers directed at the open web. The only scholarly literature that is currently indexed by PD systems is that which is available openly (e.g. OA, Archived or illegitimately posted copies) or that which has been made available via third-party aggregators (e.g. ProQuest). This, in turn, means that any publisher who is interested in employing PD systems in their editorial work-flow is unable to do so effectively. Even if a particular publisher doesn't have a problem with plagiarized manuscripts, they should have an interest in making sure that their own published content is not plagiarized or otherwise illegitimately copied.

In order for CrossRef members to use existing PD systems, there needs to be a mechanism through which PD system vendors can, under acceptable terms & conditions, create and use databases of relevant scholarly and professional content.

Open access advocates have pointed out that one advantage of OA is that it allows the unrestricted analysis and manipulation of the full text of freely available works. Open access makes it possible for all interested parties, including scholars and others who might not have access to closed duplicate verification databases, to conduct whatever analysis as they wish and to make the results public without having to consider potential business impacts.

Read more about it at: "Copycat Articles Seem Rife in Science Journals, a Digital Sleuth Finds" and "How Many Papers Are Just Duplicates?"

The Motion Picture Association of America has said that a 2005 study that claimed that college students accounted for 44% of illegal downloads of movies is incorrect: the correct number is 15%. The MPAA had used the higher figure to argue for measures that would address higher education downloading abuse.

Meanwhile, the EFF Deeplinks blog is reminding its readers ("Troubling 'Digital Theft Prevention' Requirements Remain in Higher Education Bill) that the College Opportunity and Affordability Act of 2007, which the House may take up in February, still contains this wording asking institutions to "develop a plan for offering alternatives to illegal downloading or peer-to-peer distribution of intellectual property as well as a plan to explore technology-based deterrents to prevent such illegal activity."

Read more about it at: "Downloading by Students Overstated," "MPAA Admits Mistake on Downloading Study," "Oops: MPAA Admits College Piracy Numbers Grossly Inflated," and "Why the MPAA and RIAA Can't Stand College Students."