Month: November 2007

National Archives in the UK Releases New Versions of PRONOM and DROID

The National Archives in the UK has released new versions of PRONOM, an online registry of file formats, software, and other technical information used for digital preservation purposes, and DROID (Digital Record Object Identification), software that is used to identify file formats in batch mode. DROID requires the Java Runtime Environment (version 1.5.0 or later), and it runs under Windows (Windows 2000, XP, and Vista), OS X, and Linux.

DigitalPreservationEurope Publishes Report on Copyright and Privacy Issues for Cooperating Repositories

DigitalPreservationEurope has published PO3.4: Report on the Legal Framework on Repository Infrastructure Impacting on Cooperation Across Member States.

Here's excerpt from the "Introduction."

The focus of this paper is the legal framework for the management of content of cooperating repositories. The focus will be on the regulation of copyright and protection of personal data. That copyright is important when managing data repositories is common knowledge. However, there is an increasing tendency among authors not only to deposit their published scientific work, scientific articles, dissertations or books, but also the underlying data. In addition to this ordinary publicly available sources like internet web pages contain personal data, often of a sensitive nature. Due to this emergent trend repositories will have to comply with the rules governing the use and protection of personal data, especially in the medical and social sciences.

The scenario is the following:

  • National repositories acquire material from different sources and in different formats.
  • The repositories cooperate with repositories in other countries in the preservation of data.
  • There is some degree of specialisation, some repositories specialise on preserving certain formats and other repositories on the preservation of other formats.

This paper describes the legal framework regulating the two decisive actions which have to take place if this scenario is to become a reality:

  1. The reproduction of data
  2. The transfer of data to other repositories

Other copyright issues like the rules concerning communication with the public and the protection of databases will also be touched upon.

Paul Courant on Michigan’s Mass Digitization Project with Google

In "On Being in Bed with Google," Paul N. Courant, University Librarian and Dean of Libraries at the University of Michigan, vigorously rebuts arguments against research libraries participating in the Google Books Library Project.

Here's an excerpt:

Since 2005, Siva Vaidhyanathan has been making and refining the argument that libraries should be digitizing their collections independently, without corporate financing or participation, and that those who don’t are failing to uphold their responsibility to the public. "Libraries should not be relinquishing their core duties to private corporations for the sake of expediency."

"Expediency" is a bit of a dirty word. Vaidhyanathan’s phrase suggests that good people don’t do things simply because they are "expedient." But I view large-scale digitization as expeditious. We have a generation of students who will not find valuable scholarly works unless they can find them electronically. At the rate that OCA is digitizing things (and I say the more the merrier and the faster the better) that generation will be dandling great-grandchildren on its knees before these great collections can be found electronically. At Michigan, the entire collection of bound print will be searchable, by anyone in the world, about when children born today start kindergarten.

Free Press, Public Knowledge Project, and Others Ask FCC to Stop ISP P2P Blocking

Free Press, Public Knowledge, and others (Media Access Project, Consumer Federation of America, Consumers Union, the Information Society Project at Yale Law School, Charles Nesson of Harvard Law School and the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, and Barbara van Schewick of Stanford Law School and the Stanford Center for Internet & Society) have filed a Petition for Declaratory Ruling with the FCC in order to stop ISPs from blocking peer-to-peer Internet traffic from services such as BitTorrent and Gnutella.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

In the "most drastic example yet of data discrimination," the Associated Press recently exposed that Comcast, the nation's largest cable company and second-largest Internet service provider, is actively interfering with its users' ability to access legal content. The company is cutting off legal peer-to-peer file-sharing networks such as BitTorrent and Gnutella, as well as business applications such as Lotus Notes. Comcast has claimed its actions were "reasonable network management."

"Comcast's defense is bogus," said Ben Scott policy director of Free Press. "The FCC needs to take immediate action to put an end to this harmful practice. Comcast's blatant and deceptive BitTorrent blocking is exactly the type of problem advocates warned would occur without Net Neutrality laws. Our message to both the FCC and Congress is simple: We told you so, now do something about it."

The "Petition for Declaratory Ruling" presses the FCC to establish that blocking peer-to-peer communications like BitTorrent violates the agency's "Internet Policy Statement"—four principles issued in 2005 that are supposed to guarantee consumers competition among providers and access to all content, applications and services.

"Last year, FCC Chairman Kevin Martin and opponents of Net Neutrality told Congress that the FCC has all the authority it needs to prevent exactly this sort of customer abuse by a major provider," said Harold Feld, senior vice president of Media Access Project. "Now we come to the acid test. Will the FCC, which vowed to protect our freedom to run the applications of our choice, stand up for citizens in the face of Comcast?"

The FCC issued its policy after dismantling longstanding "open access" requirements that had protected Net Neutrality since the birth of the Internet. Millions of concerned citizens and hundreds of organizations from across the political spectrum have urged Congress and the FCC to reinstate and enforce Net Neutrality laws to prevent discrimination by cable and phone companies, which dominate nearly 95 percent of the broadband market.

"The Commission has a choice," said Gigi B. Sohn, president and co-founder of Public Knowledge. "It can either protect consumers from the abuses of telephone and cable companies, or it can walk away and let the telephone and cable companies chip away at the free and open Internet little by little until they can control consumer use of the network as they please. We will see how serious the Commission is about preserving the neutral, non-discriminatory Internet that encourages innovation without permission.". . .

Free Press and Public Knowledge also filed a complaint against Comcast, asking the FCC to stop Comcast from interfering with Internet traffic and rule that the cable giant's actions directly violate the agency's Internet Policy Statement. The groups proposed fines to deter future violations by Comcast and other Internet service providers.

ARL Publishes Scholarly Communication Education Initiatives SPEC Kit

The Association of Research Libraries has published Scholarly Communication Education Initiatives, SPEC Kit 299. The front matter and Executive Summary are freely available.

Here's an excerpt from the "Executive Summary" of this very interesting SPEC Kit:

The majority of respondents [there were 73] indicated that the leadership for these [scholarly communication] education initiatives comes from within the library. Only 11 (17%) indicated that a group outside of the library plays a leadership role. In 25 cases (39%), leadership is shared by some combination of library SC committee, SC librarian, other library staff member, and outside group or is otherwise distributed across the organization. In most of the remaining cases there is a single leader. Twenty-one institutions reported that this is a library committee, eight that it is a chief SC librarian, three another library staff member, and two a committee outside the library.

Twenty-one respondents (32%) identified a "Chief SC Librarian" who has primary responsibility for education initiatives. About half of these are at the Assistant/Associate Librarian level. Only three of these librarians (14%) devote 100% of their time to SC initiatives. Most of the chief SC librarians have split appointments and all but a few devote less than 30% of their time to this work. Judging from their titles, they frequently also have responsibility for collections. . . .

It was anticipated that many institutions would not have a chief SC librarian yet would have another librarian who was shouldering the primary SC responsibility. Eighteen respondents (28%) indicated this was the case and 12 identified the position. The survey results showed that, again, this responsibility most frequently is assumed by a collections or science librarian. . . .

The most frequently mentioned effective means to deliver the SC message were one-on-one conversations and presentations. One-on-one interactions, in person or via personal e-mails, were good for reaching individuals such as faculty editors, department heads, or regular faculty members. Presentations were an effective means to reach groups such as graduate students, librarians, and the Faculty Senate Committee on the Library. Many also reported that symposia are effective; several reported that their campuses hold annual symposia. Several listed Web sites as effective tools, without much explanation. Other activities that were mentioned multiple times were marketing campaigns, passage of Senate SC resolutions, and newsletter items. Workshops—both library-sponsored and campus-sponsored—were also an effective means to reach the campus. A number of institutions have found it effective to work through their Faculty Senate Committee on the Library.

The SPEC Kit also highlights the many significant challenges involved in offering a successful scholarly communication program, which must educate library staff about key issues and outreach to university administrators, faculty, graduate students, and other constituencies. I found this to be true at my former employer, the University of Houston Libraries, where I chaired a Scholarly Communications Public Relations Task Force that produced a Transforming Scholarly Communication website and a weblog (although the weblog is still active, the website does not appear to have been updated or enhanced since my departure), organized a Transforming Scholarly Communication Symposium (conceived of as an annual event, but no follow-up is evident), and engaged in other activities.

SPEC Kit readers should make particular note of one issue: support from the library administration. This is a make-or-break issue: if top-level library administrators do not have a strong interest in and adequate understanding of scholarly communication issues as well as a real commitment to foster change, scholarly communication programs are hamstrung, and they become token efforts or die.

Update on the British Public Library/Microsoft Digitization Project

Jim Ashling provides an update on the progress that the British Public Library and Microsoft have made in their project to digitize about 100,000 books for access in Live Book Search in his Information Today article "Progress Report: The British Library and Microsoft Digitization Partnership."

Here's an excerpt from the article:

Unlike previous BL digitization projects where material had been selected on an item-by-item basis, the sheer size of this project made such selectivity impossible. Instead, the focus is on English-language material, collected by the BL during the 19th century. . . .

Scanning produces high-resolution images (300 dpi) that are then transferred to a suite of 12 computers for OCR (optical character recognition) conversion. The scanners, which run 24/7, are specially tuned to deal with the spelling variations and old-fashioned typefaces used in the 1800s. The process creates multiple versions including PDFs and OCR text for display in the online services, as well as an open XML file for long-term storage and potential conversion to any new formats that may become future standards. In all, the data will amount to 30 to 40 terabytes. . . .

Obviously, then, an issue exists here for a collection of 19th-century literature when some authors may have lived beyond the late 1930s [British/EU law gives authors a copyright term of life plus 70 years]. An estimated 40 percent of the titles are also orphan works. Those two issues mean that item-by-item copyright checking would be an unmanageable task. Estimates for the total time required to check on the copyright issues involved vary from a couple of decades to a couple of hundred years. The BL’s approach is to use two databases of authors to identify those who were still living in 1936 and to remove their work from the collection before scanning. That, coupled with a wide publicity to encourage any rights holders to step forward, may solve the problem.

International Coalition of Library Consortia Protests AAAS Decision to Drop JSTOR

The International Coalition of Library Consortia, which represents 72 consortia, has issued a statement regarding the American Association for the Advancement of Science decision to sever its relationship to JSTOR.

Here's an excerpt from the statement:

The ICOLC strongly objects to the recent decision by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) to discontinue its participation in JSTOR, including withholding future issues of its premier publication, Science, from the JSTOR archive and prohibiting JSTOR from making issues of Science currently held in the archive available to new JSTOR participants.

JSTOR has been a singular success in meeting the needs of students, scholars, librarians, and publishers. JSTOR offers a robust platform for cross-disciplinary discovery and integration of content that extends the multi-disciplinary reach of Science to students and faculty, including those in non-scientific disciplines. In addition, JSTOR offers to publishers a moving wall policy that protects their ability to obtain current subscription revenue to support ongoing publication.

Science is an outstanding source of high-quality, vetted information covering all areas of science, the inclusion of which enhances the value, breadth, and quality of the JSTOR archive. The decision to discontinue participation in JSTOR is in conflict with AAAS' mission, as a non-profit, membership-based organization, of advancing science and serving society. Withholding future issues of Science from JSTOR, and prohibiting JSTOR from making previously archived Science content available to future JSTOR participants, is an action which diminishes the value and contribution of both AAAS and JSTOR to the international community of researchers, the academy, and society.

Boston Public Library/Open Content Alliance Contract Made Public

Boston Public Library has made public its digitization contract with the Open Content Alliance.

Some of the most interesting provisions include the intent of the Internet Archive to provide perpetual free and open access to the works, the digitization cost arrangements (BPL pays for transport and provides bibliographic metadata, the Internet Archive pays for digitization-related costs), the specification of file formats (e.g., JPEG 2000, color PDF, and various XML files), the provision of digital copies to BPL (copies are available immediately after digitization for BPL to download via FTP or HTTP within 3 months), and use of copies (any use by either party as long as provenance metadata and/or bookplate data is not removed).

Jefferson Airplane Member, RIAA Director of Communications, and Others Discuss P2P File Sharing at Ohio University Forum

Ohio University has released a digital video of its October 30, 2007 P2P File Sharing: A 360° Perspective forum. Among others, the speakers included Jorma Kaukonen, member of the Jefferson Airplane and Hot Tuna, Jonathan Lamy, Director of Communications of the RIAA, and Vijay Raghavan, Director of Digital Freedom University and the Digital Freedom Campaign.