After Months as a Pay-What-You-Want Download, Radiohead's Album Tops the Charts

After being available for three months as a pay-what-you-want MP3 download, Radiohead's In Rainbows album has topped the charts in the U.S., Canada, France, Japan, and Ireland in CD and vinyl formats.

Read more about it at "Radiohead Finds Sales, Even After Downloads," "Radiohead's 'Rainbows' Hits No. 1," and "Radiohead's Web Album No 1 in US."

Library of Congress Office of Strategic Initiatives' Strategic Plan FY 2008-2013

The Library of Congress Office of Strategic Initiatives has published its Strategic Plan FY 2008-2013. This is a large color PDF file (about 34 MB).

Here are three brief excerpts:

By 2013 we expect to have in place:

  • Increased digital content holdings
  • Capability to produce and receive sustainable digital content from multiple sources
  • A stewardship network of collaborative partners
  • Recommendations on digital content information architecture, preservation and access
  • Recommendations on public policy for digital content preservation and access

Through 2013, we expect to:

  • Increase use and awareness of content and services by target user communities
  • Improve integrated search and discovery
  • Secure delivery of digital content and services
  • Enable multiple ways/methods of access to digital content and services
  • Facilitate integration of the Library’s primary sources into K–12 educational settings
  • and networks

Key outcomes associated with our technology infrastructure objective include:

  • Secured, available and scalable technology infrastructure
  • Defined Library of Congress technical infrastructure for shared tools and services
  • among networked entities
  • Defined future institution-wide architecture and support for a national networked
  • digital information architectural framework
  • Specialized institutional digital media repository services
  • Preserved authentic digital content over time.

Report on Library of Congress/San Diego Supercomputer Center Data Transfer and Storage Tests

The Library of Congress has published Data Center for Library of Congress Digital Holdings: A Pilot Project; Final Report.

Here an excerpt from the "Introduction":

Between May 2006 and October 2007, the Library of Congress (LC) and the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) conducted data-transfer and storage tests. At the heart of the project was the issue of trust, specifically how the LC could trust SDSC to reliably store several terabytes of the LC’s data. By what means could SDSC prove to the LC that the data was intact, preserved, and well-cared for? What tests could the LC devise, and what metrics could SDSC produce, to guarantee the integrity of their remotely stored data?

The two main objectives of the project were:

  • For SDSC to host LC content reliably and return it intact at the end of the project
  • For LC to be able to remotely access, process, analyze, and manage that content . . . .

Inspired by SDSC’s staggering technological potential, the LC had devised several scenarios for the data tests. But ultimately, as the project progressed, the LC opted to keep its goals simple: data transfer, storage, and file manipulation. In the end, both partners were happy with the project’s success. The project also produced lessons and unexpected results, some of which will have deep implications for all cultural institutions regarding transfer and storage of their digital assets.

AT&T, Microsoft, and NBC: It's Time to Filter the Internet

In "AT&T and Other ISPs May Be Getting Ready to Filter," The New York Times reports that AT&T, Microsoft, and NBC are lining up in support of filtering the Internet to cope with digital copyright infringement problems.

On December 31, 2007, the Australian Telecommunications Minister announced that there would be mandatory Internet filtering for "inappropriate" material, and a posting about that decision, "Australian Filtering Announcement Raises Questions and Ire," provides a good overview of national-level filtering issues.

Read more about it at "Is AT&T Siding With NBC To Get Rid Of Neutrality?"

The RIAA and CD Ripping for Personal Use: Infringement or Not?

Recently, there has been a flurry of articles about the RIAA's stance on the legality of CD ripping for personal use that was triggered by a Washington Post article ("Download Uproar: Record Industry Goes After Personal Use") that was later corrected. The controversy resulted in a debate on National Public Radio between the article's author and RIAA's president (Cary Sherman). In it, Sherman would not say that CD ripping for personal use was legal, but he did say: "Not a single (legal) case has ever been brought (by the RIAA against someone for copying music for personal use)."

Just as the dust seemed to be settling, Wired Blog Network has published "RIAA Believes MP3s Are A Crime: Why This Matters—Updated," takes another look at what the RIAA has said on the issue, and concludes "The RIAA doesn't believe Americans have any right—or Fair Use legal defense—to play copyrighted material on the device and in the format of their choosing."

Image Management Software Descriptions from TASI Survey

TASI (Technical Advisory Service for Images) has published descriptions of information management software resulting from a vendor survey (e.g., see the Greenstone description). TASI notes: "The information has been provided by the system developer/vendor in answer to TASI's survey, but has not been independently verified."

TASI recommends that readers consult Systems for Managing Image Collections and Choosing a System for Managing your Image Collection as background for evaluating the survey responses.

UK May Make CD Ripping for Legal in Some Cases

Did you know that ripping MP3 files from CDs was illegal in the UK? The good news (for a change) is that Lord Triesman, Minister for Intellectual Property, has initiated an IP reform consultation that may result in making CD ripping legal for distance education, personal use, parody, and preservation purposes.

Read more about it at "Proposal to Make CD Copying Legal," "UK Issues Public Consultation on More Flexible Copyright," "U.K. Looks to Relax Restrictive Copyright Laws," and "UK Wants to Make CD Rips Legal (at Last)."

STARGATE Report Investigates Issues with Software to Support Harvesting for Publishers without OAI-PMH-compliant Repositories

The JISC-funded extension of the STARGATE project has released the STARGATE Extension Final Report.

Here's an excerpt from the original STARGATE project page that explains its goals:

The Centre for Digital Library Research (CDLR) at of Strathclyde set out to implement a low-tech solution to OAI-based disclosure for small publishers. Their STARGATE project was based on the 'static repositories' model for using OAI-PMH . . . Instead of building an OAI-compliant repository, a publisher builds a static repository, effectively an XML file of the relevant metadata on an accessible server. A separate static repository gateway handles the technical aspects of making the metadata available for harvesting, i.e. the complexity is shifted away from the publisher.

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

The extension has produced a functional branded gateway that the publishing community can use to explore the use of static repositories. It will be maintained for the next year. The gateway is available at http://stargate.cdlr.strath.ac.uk/gateway/.

The project concludes that although functional the software is not suitable for deployment by a novice user. It is also effectively still in at the beta stage of development and it has only been used in a limited number of settings.

The project further suggests that the creation and maintenance of gateway(s) within the publishing community may be more suitably carried out in the same way that DOI and Purl provision is offered through a third-party service provider willing to work with developing open source software. Any deployment of a gateway by JISC to support wider participation in static repositories should also engage with the gateway software developers.

Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog Update (1/9/08)

The latest update of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog (SEPW) is now available, which provides information about new works related to scholarly electronic publishing, such as books, journal articles, magazine articles, technical reports, and white papers.

Especially interesting are: "Assessment of Self-Archiving in Institutional Repositories: Across Disciplines"; "Copyright and Research: A Different Perspective"; "The Cost Profiles of Alternative Approaches to Journal Publishing"; "Data, Disciplines, and Scholarly Publishing"; "Discovering Books: OCA & GBS Retrospective"; In the Public Interest: The Future of Canadian Copyright Law; "Open Access in 2007"; "An Open Access Mandate for the NIH"; and "The Rutgers Workflow Management System: Migrating a Digital Object Management Utility to Open Source."

Recut, Reframe, Recycle: Quoting Copyrighted Material in User-Generated Video

American University's Center for Social Media has released Recut, Reframe, Recycle: Quoting Copyrighted Material in User-Generated Video, which examines fair use issues in user-created digital videos. See the announcement for links to videos used in the report.

Here's an excerpt from the "Next Steps" section:

The effervescence of this moment at the dawn of participatory media should not be mistaken for triviality. The practices of today’s online creators are harbingers of a far more interactive media era. Today’s makers—feckless, impudent, brash, and extravagant as they often are—in fact are the pioneers of an emerging media economy and society. Recognition of the importance of fair use, within the copyright law toolkit for cultural creation, is both prudent and forward-looking for those concerned with maintaining an open society.

Wikia Search Debuts to Pundits’ Criticism

An alpha version of Wikia's open source Wikia Search has gone public, but the consensus seems to be that this user-tuned search engine has a long way to go to compete with the likes of Google.

Read more about it at "Jimmy Wales Argues That His Wikia Needs More Time," "Wiki Citizens Taking on a New Area: Searching," "Wikia Launching Human-Powered Search," "Wikia Search Alpha Preview Leaves Much to Be Desired," "Wikia Search Is A Complete Letdown," and"Wikia Search—Miles Behind the Competition."

Sony BMG, Last of the Big Music Labels to Use DRM, Drops It for Some Albums

According to "Sony BMG to Sell DRM-Free Music Downloads through Stores," Sony BMG will join EMI, Vivendi's Universal Music Group, and Warner Music Group in offering DRM-free MP3 tracks. Initially, this will be for a small number of albums, and it will require that buyers purchase a card at a retail store. In 2005, Sony BMG was embroiled in a major controversy about its use of DRM software.

Read more about it at "Digital Music: 2007 Year in Review," "Labels See New Online Music Options," "Sony BMG Cautiously Exploring DRM-Free Future," and "Sony BMG Plans to Drop DRM."

PublicDomainReprints.org Turns Digital Public Domain Books into Printed Books

PublicDomainReprints.org is offering an experimental service that allows users to convert about 1.7 million digital public domain books in the Internet Archive, Google Book Search, or the Universal Digital Library into printed books using the Lulu print-on-demand service.

Source: "Converting Google Book PDFs to Actual Books."

Institutional Repositories, Tout de Suite

Institutional Repositories, Tout de Suite, the latest Digital Scholarship publication, is designed to give the reader a very quick introduction to key aspects of institutional repositories and to foster further exploration of this topic through liberal use of relevant references to online documents and links to pertinent websites. It is under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License, and it can be freely used for any noncommercial purpose in accordance with the license.

NIH Open Access Mandate Becomes Law

President Bush has signed the "Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2008," which includes the NIH open access mandate. The mandate states: "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."

Read more about it at "OA Mandate at NIH Now Law and "Public Access Mandate Made Law."

Version 70, Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography

Version 70 of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography is now available from Digital Scholarship. This selective bibliography presents over 3,195 articles, books, and other digital and printed sources that are useful in understanding scholarly electronic publishing efforts on the Internet.

The Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography: 2006 Annual Edition is also available from Digital Scholarship. Annual editions of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography are PDF files designed for printing.

The bibliography has the following sections (revised sections are in italics):

1 Economic Issues
2 Electronic Books and Texts
2.1 Case Studies and History
2.2 General Works
2.3 Library Issues
3 Electronic Serials
3.1 Case Studies and History
3.2 Critiques
3.3 Electronic Distribution of Printed Journals
3.4 General Works
3.5 Library Issues
3.6 Research
4 General Works
5 Legal Issues
5.1 Intellectual Property Rights
5.2 License Agreements
6 Library Issues
6.1 Cataloging, Identifiers, Linking, and Metadata
6.2 Digital Libraries
6.3 General Works
6.4 Information Integrity and Preservation
7 New Publishing Models
8 Publisher Issues
8.1 Digital Rights Management
9 Repositories, E-Prints, and OAI
Appendix A. Related Bibliographies
Appendix B. About the Author
Appendix C. SEPB Use Statistics

Scholarly Electronic Publishing Resources includes the following sections:

Cataloging, Identifiers, Linking, and Metadata
Digital Libraries
Electronic Books and Texts
Electronic Serials
General Electronic Publishing
Images
Legal
Preservation
Publishers
Repositories, E-Prints, and OAI
SGML and Related Standards

Google Gives Wikipedia a Lump of Knol for Xmas

According to "Encouraging People to Contribute Knowledge," Google has launched Knol, a Wikipedia competitor, in test mode.

Here'as an excerpt from the posting:

Earlier this week, we [Google] started inviting a selected group of people to try a new, free tool that we are calling "knol", which stands for a unit of knowledge. Our goal is to encourage people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it. . . . .

A knol on a particular topic is meant to be the first thing someone who searches for this topic for the first time will want to read. The goal is for knols to cover all topics, from scientific concepts, to medical information, from geographical and historical, to entertainment, from product information, to how-to-fix-it instructions. Google will not serve as an editor in any way, and will not bless any content. . . . .For many topics, there will likely be competing knols on the same subject. . . .

Knols will include strong community tools. People will be able to submit comments, questions, edits, additional content, and so on. Anyone will be able to rate a knol or write a review of it. Knols will also include references and links to additional information. At the discretion of the author, a knol may include ads.

Read more about it at "Google to Wikipedia: "Knol" Thine Enemy," "Google's Knol: No Wikipedia Killer," "Google's 'Knols' Aren't a Threat to Wikipedia," "Google's Know-It-All Project," and "Google's Units of Knowledge May Raise Conflict of Interest."

Columbia University Libraries and Bavarian State Library Become Google Book Search Library Partners

Both the Columbia University Libraries and Bavarian State Library have joined the Google Book Search Library Project.

Here are the announcements: