Month: November 2005

Dr. Ilene Rockman Has Died

I’m very sorry to report that Dr. Ilene Rockman has died. She was an enormously gifted individual who made very significant contributions to librarianship. Among her many notable accomplishments was her superb editorship of Reference Services Review for over 20 years. She will be greatly missed.

Her obituary follows.

Dr. Ilene Rockman, Manager of the Information Competence Initiative for the Office of the Chancellor of the 23-campuses of the California State University (CSU) system passed away on November 26, 2005 from non-smoker’s lung cancer. She was 55 years old.

Rockman worked for the CSU for over 30 years as librarian, faculty member, and administrator at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo and CSU East Bay before moving to the CSU Chancellor’s Office in 2001.

A tireless advocate for integrating information literacy into the higher education curriculum, Rockman was active nationally and locally as a speaker, author, and consultant. She held leadership positions within the American Library Association, the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL, and its California chapter), and the Reference and User Services Association.

In 2005 she received the ACRL Instruction Librarian of the Year award, and in 2003 the ACRL Distinguished Education and Behavioral Sciences Librarian award.

She was the editor and contributing author to the best selling book, Integrating Information Literacy into the Higher Education Curriculum (Jossey Bass, 2004), found in libraries around the world.

She served as a consultant to the Educational Testing Service on the development and implementation of a new performance-based test to assess higher education students’ information and communication technology (ICT) literacy skills.

She also served as editor-in-chief of Reference Services Review, and on the editorial boards of American Libraries, Library Administration and Management, The Journal of Academic Librarianship, Reference Quarterly, and Library Hi Tech. In 2005, she received the Leading Editor award from the Emerald Publishing Company of the United Kingdom for her 20 years of editing Reference Services Review.

In addition, she served on the advisory boards of the Friends of the Hayward Public Library, the Literacy Council of the Hayward Public Library, and the Bay Area Libraries and Information Systems (BALIS).

In 2004, California State Senator Liz Figueroa named her "Hayward Woman of the Year."

Contributions may be sent to the Cancer Center at the Stanford Hospitals and Clinics, Women Against Lung Cancer, Friends of the Association of College and Research Libraries, or Friends of the Hayward Public Library.

She is survived by her loving husband Fred Gertler, of Hayward, CA and her brother, Edward Rockman and his family, of Mill Valley, CA.

Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog Update (11/21/05)

The latest update of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog (SEPW) is now available, which provides brief information on 17 new journal issues and other resources. Especially interesting are: The Access Principle: The Case for Open Access to Research and Scholarship, Acquiring Copyright Permission to Digitize and Provide Open Access to Books, Digital Libraries and the Challenges of Digital Humanities, "ETD Release Policies in American ARL Institutions: A Preliminary Study," and "Open Access Citation Information," and "Requirements for Digital Preservation Systems: A Bottom-Up Approach."

The Sony BMG Rootkit Fiasco

When Mark Russinovich posted "Sony, Rootkits and Digital Rights Management Gone Too Far," he helped trigged a firestorm of subsequent criticism about Sony BMG Music Entertainment’s use of the First4Internet’s digital rights protection software on some of its music CDs. It was bad enough that one of the planet’s largest entertainment companies was perceived as hacking users’ computers with "rootkits" in the name of copy protection, but then the EFF posted an analysis of the license agreement associated with the CDs (see "Now the Legalese Rootkit: Sony-BMG’s EULA"). Things got worse when real hackers started exploiting the DRM software (see "First Trojan Using Sony DRM Spotted"). Then the question posed by the EFF’s "Are You Infected by Sony-BMG’s Rootkit?" posting became a bit more urgent. And the lawsuits started (see "Sony Sued For Rootkit Copy Protection"). Sony BMG suspended production (see "Sony Halts Production of ‘Rootkit’ CDs"), but said it would continue using DRM software from SunnComm (see "Sony Shipping Spyware from SunnComm, Too"). Among others, Microsoft said it will try to eradicate the hard-to-kill DRM software (see "Microsoft Will Wipe Sony’s ‘Rootkit’").

What would drive Sony BMG to such a course of action? Blame that slippery new genie, digital media, which seems to want information to not only be free, but infinitely mutable into new works as well. Once it’s granted a few wishes, it’s hard to get it back in the bottle, and the one wish it won’t grant is that the bottle had never been opened in the first place.

Faced with rampant file sharing that is based on CDs, music companies now want to nip the rip in the bud: put DRM software on customers’ PCs that will control how they use a CD’s digital tracks. Of course, it would be better from their perspective if such controls were built in to the operating system, but, if not, a little deep digital surgery can add lacking functionality.

The potential result for consumers is multiple DRM modifications to their PCs that may conflict with each other, open security holes, deny legitimate use, and have other negative side effects.

In the hullabaloo over the technical aspects of the Sony BMG DRM fiasco, it’s important not to lose sight of this: your CD is now licensed. First sale rights are gone, fair use is gone, and the license reigns supreme.

Pity the poor music librarian, who was already struggling to figure out how to deal with digital audio reserves. Between DRM-protected tracks from services such as iTunes and DRM-protected CDs that modify their PCs, they "live in interesting times."

While the Sony BMG fiasco has certain serio-comic aspects to it, rest assured that music (and other entertainment companies) will eventually iron out the most obvious kinks in the context of operating systems that are designed for intrinsic DRM support and, after some bumps in the road, a new era of DRM-protected digital multimedia will dawn.

That is, it will dawn unless musicians, other digital media creators, and consumers do something about it first.

Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog Update (11/7/05)

The latest update of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog (SEPW) is now available, which provides brief information on 17 new journal issues and other resources. Especially interesting are: "The Accessing and Archiving of Electronic Journals: Challenges and Implications Within the Library World"; "DAEDALUS: Delivering the Glasgow ePrints Service"; "Improving DSpace@OSU with a Usability Study of the ET/D Submission Process"; "A Journey into E-Resource Administration Hell"; "Library Futures, Media Futures"; and "Repositories, Copyright and Creative Commons for Scholarly Communication."