Author: Charles W. Bailey, Jr.

Charles W. Bailey, Jr.

AltLaw.org Launch

The Columbia Law School and the University of Colorado Law School have launched AltLaw.org.

Here's a quote from the press release:

AltLaw.org contains nearly 170,000 decisions dating back to the early 1990s from the U.S. Supreme Court and Federal Appellate courts. The site’s creators, Columbia Law School’s Timothy Wu and Stuart Sierra, and University of Colorado Law School’s Paul Ohm, said the site’s database will grow over time. . . .

Wu said he envisions AltLaw.org being used by many groups—journalists, the public, lawyers who want to avoid the hundreds of dollars per hour in fees for proprietary law databases, and legal scholars who need quick and searchable access to cases at home or on the road. One of the assets to AltLaw.org’s design is that it is fast and simple to use, Wu said.

Ohm wrote the thousands of lines of code that download cases to AltLaw.org from more than a dozen court websites each night. He said the data comes from the courts themselves, and AltLaw.org is designed as an extremely open platform so that others can take the raw material and use it in various ways.

"This is what we call the 'law commons' part of the design," Ohm said. "The touchstone of AltLaw.org is openness, and this means that not only will users be able to search cases, but they'll also be able to make copies of all of the cases in our database to reuse or remix in any way that they'd like."

Google Scholar Digitization Program

According to the article "Changes at Google Scholar: A Conversation with Anurag Acharya," Google Scholar has begun a small-scale, targeted journal digitization effort.

Here's a quote from the article:

Representing another effort to reach currently inaccessible content, Google Scholar now has its own digitization program. “It’s a small program,” said Acharya. “We mainly look for journals that would otherwise never get digitized. Under our proposal, we will digitize and host journal articles with the provision that they must be openly reachable in collaboration with publishers, fully downloadable, and fully readable. Once you get out of the U.S. and Western European space into the rest of the world, the opportunities to get and digitize research are very limited. They are often grateful for the help. It gives us the opportunity to get that country’s material or make that scholarly society more visible.”

Source: Quint, Barbara. "Changes at Google Scholar: A Conversation with Anurag Acharya." NewsBreaks 27 August 2007.

Crawford's Public Library Blogs: 252 Examples Published

Walt Crawford has published Public Library Blogs: 252 Examples.

Here's an excerpt from his posting about the book:

Public Library Blogs: 252 Examples

Public Library Blogs: 252 Examples is now available at Cites & Insights Books. Price: $29.50 plus shipping and handling.
The 299-page 6×9 trade paperback (x+289 pages) features descriptions and sample posts for a wide range of blogs from 196 public libraries of all sizes, in the United States, Canada, Australia, Ireland and New Zealand.

If your library is considering a blog, this book should help you find blogs from comparable libraries to consider as examples. If your library has a blog and is considering more (or revising the ones you have), this book should help you find interesting examples–the public library blogging community is remarkably diverse!

For now, Public Library Blogs is only available from the Cites & Insights Books store at Lulu.com, printed on 60lb. cream book stock. In a few days, a version on bright white paper and with an ISBN will be available from CreateSpace–and, a couple of weeks after that, from Amazon.com

Interviews with Copyright and Other "Open" Activists from KRUU

KRUU has a series of digital audio interviews with copyright and other activists in the "open" movement. Here's a sample:

University of Minnesota Launches the Digital Conservancy

The University of Minnesota has launched its institutional repository, the Digital Conservancy. It utilizes DSpace.

Here's a description from the University Digital Conservancy FAQ page:

The University Digital Conservancy is a program of the University of Minnesota, administered by the University Libraries. The program provides stewardship, reliable long-term open access, and broad dissemination of the digital scholarly and administrative works of University of Minnesota faculty, departments, centers and offices. Materials in the Conservancy are freely available online to the University community and to the public.

Here are selected web pages about the Digital Conservancy:

Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog Update (8/22/07)

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

Especially interesting are: "The Changing Landscape of Serials: Open Access Journals in the Public Catalog"; "DRIVER: Seven Items on a European Agenda for Digital Repositories"; "EThOSnet: Building a UK e-Theses Community"; "Incentivizing the Open Access Research Web Publication-Archiving, Data-Archiving and Scientometrics"; "Institutional Repositories and Their 'Other' Users: Usability Beyond Authors"; "Interoperability for the Discovery, Use, and Re-Use of Units of Scholarly Communication"; "Next-Generation Implications of Open Access"; "The PubMed Central Archive and the Back Issue Scanning Project"; and "The State of Scholarly Communications: An Environmental Scan of Emerging Issues, Pitfalls, and Possibilities."

For weekly updates about news articles, Weblog postings, and other resources related to digital culture (e.g., copyright, digital privacy, digital rights management, and Net neutrality), digital libraries, and scholarly electronic publishing, see the latest DigitalKoans Flashback posting.

Institutional Repositories: DOA?

Of late, an air of discouragement has begun to permeate discussions about institutional repositories. Of course, this is understandable. E-print deposit rates have been disappointing, deposit mandates hard to come by, and real operational costs have been higher than some imagined.

Are institutional repositories dead on arrival?

The answer is determined by our expectations.

If we expect swift, easy, rapid progress with university administrators and faculty enthusiastically rallying behind institutional repositories, the answer is "yes." The thrill of putting up the repository software and seeing the initial inflow of e-prints is, for many, gone; the experiment has failed; and it's time to cut our losses and move on.

On the other hand, if we expect that the establishment of fully functional institutional repositories will be a complex, lengthy, and expensive venture, we are on target, and remarkable progress has been made worldwide in a short period of time.

I'm in the latter camp. I cannot say this enough: successful institutional repositories are not primarily determined by technical factors, rather they are determined by attitudinal factors. In other words, faculty, especially key faculty such as holders of endowed chairs and journal editors, and university administrators, especially provosts and presidents, must be convinced that institutional repositories are essential infrastructure for the 21st century. For the most part, the argument rests on the scholarly communication crisis theme, with institutional repositories portrayed as part of the remedy. However, institutional prestige, institutional visibility, and improved citation impact factors are important themes as well. The successful, relentless communication of these themes to key constituencies is essential to the successful establishment of institutional repositories.

In my view, the best strategy for a institution without a repository is to start a vigorous scholarly communication outreach program first. The next best strategy is to do so in parallel with putting up an institutional repository. Next is to implement a scholarly communication program after the repository is up. The worst strategy is to put up a repository with no scholarly communication program—this is a recipe for failure.

So, chin up. It will take slow, steady effort to succeed, but it will be worth it in the end.

Look Out LexisNexis: Malamud Wants Free Access to Court Decisions

In a move that could change the $5 billion legal publishing marketplace, Carl Malamud, who established public.resource.org earlier this year, plans on making more than ten million court decisions freely available on the Internet.

Here's an excerpt from "A Quest to Get More Court Rulings Online, and Free":

Mr. Malamud has a significant track record in battling publishers over public information. In 1994 he began a crusade that ultimately persuaded the federal government to make records from the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Patent and Trademark Office available online to the public at no cost.

He said the free availability of that digital information did not undercut the businesses that were making money from the information at the time. . . .

The Public Resource effort is one of several attempts to make the nation's laws more accessible. One project, AltLaw (altlaw.org) is a joint effort by Columbia Law School’s Program on Law and Technology and the Silicon Flatirons program at the University of Colorado Law School to permit free full-text searches of the last decade of federal appellate and Supreme Court opinions.

Source: Markoff, John. "A Quest to Get More Court Rulings Online, and Free." The New York Times, 20 August 2007, B6.

Athabasca University Establishes AU Press, an Open Access Publisher

Athabasca University has established AU Press, which will publish open access books, journals, and other digital publications.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

AU Press, Canada’s first 21st century university press, is dedicated to disseminating knowledge emanating from scholarly research to a broad audience through open access digital media and in a variety of formats (e.g., journals, monographs, author podcasts).

Our publications are of the highest quality and are assessed by peer review; however, we are dedicated to working with emerging writers and researchers to promote success in scholarly publishing.

Our geographical focus is Canada, the West, and the Circumpolar North, and we are mandated to publish innovative and experimental works that challenge the limits of established canons, subjects and formats. Series under development in several subject areas will promote and contribute to specific academic disciplines, and we aim to revitalize neglected forms such as diary, memoir and oral history.

At AU Press, we also publish scholarly websites with a particular focus on distance education and e-learning, labour studies, Métis and Aboriginal studies, gender studies and the environment.

Web/Web 2.0 Tools

Here’s a list of a few Web/Web 2.0 resources and tools that developers may find useful.

SPARC Canadian Author Addendum

The Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL) and SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) have released the SPARC Canadian Author Addendum.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

Traditional publishing agreements often require that authors grant exclusive rights to the publisher. The new SPARC Canadian Author Addendum enables authors to secure a more balanced agreement by retaining select rights, such as the rights to reproduce, reuse, and publicly present the articles they publish for non-commercial purposes. It will help Canadian researchers to comply with granting council public access policies, such as the Canadian Institutes of Health Research Policy on Access to Research Outputs. The Canadian Addendum reflects Canadian copyright law and is an adaptation of the original U.S. version of the SPARC Author Addendum. . . .

An explanatory brochure complements the Addendum. Both the brochure and addendum are available in French and English on the CARL and SPARC Web sites and will be widely distributed. SPARC, in conjunction with ARL and ACRL, has also introduced a free Web cast on Understanding Author Rights. See http://www.arl.org/sparc/author for details.

Two EDUCAUSE Live! Podcasts: Cyberinfrastructure and Digital Libraries

Two EDUCAUSE Live! Podcasts have been released:

Portico Studying E-Book Preservation

Portico is launching a e-Book preservation study, which will last the rest of the year.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

In response to several requests from publishers and libraries, Portico is conducting a study in order to assess how to extend its archival infrastructure and service to respond to the emerging need to preserve e-books. During the study we will analyze the structure and preservation needs of e-books and determine what adjustments to Portico's existing, operational and technological infrastructure and the economic model developed to support e-journal preservation might be required in order to respond to this new genre. Portico's e-journal archiving service was developed through a pilot project that drew heavily upon engagement with publisher and library pilot participants. We anticipate that a similar process will be essential in understanding how best to respond to the challenges of e-book preservation. . . .

The current participants in the E-Book Preservation study include:

Publishers

  • American Math Society
  • Elsevier
  • Morgan Claypool
  • Taylor and Francis

Libraries

  • Case Western Reserve University
  • Cornell University Library
  • McGill University
  • SOLINET
  • Texas University Libraries
  • University College of London
  • Yale University Library

Institutional Repositories: Staff and Skills Requirements

SHEPRA has released Institutional Repositories: Staff and Skills Requirements.

Here’s an excerpt from the document:

This document began in response to requests received by the core SHERPA team for examples of job descriptions for repository posts. Its development has been greatly assisted by contributions from the SHERPA partners and UKCORR members.

This document will be revised annually (July/August) to reflect changing needs and requirements. Input from the repository community will be sought at this time.

Official Release of the kopal Library for Retrieval and Ingest

The German National Library and SUB Göttingen have announced the official release of the kopal Library for Retrieval and Ingest on diglib.

Here's an excerpt from the message:

The kopal project (Co-operative Development of a Long-term Digital Information Archive) was dedicated to find a solution to providing not only bitstream preservation but long-term accessibility as well in the form of a cooperatively developed and operated long-term archive for digital data. The German National Library, the Goettingen State and University Library, the Gesellschaft fuer wissenschaftliche Datenverarbeitung mbH Goettingen, and IBM Germany have been working in close cooperation on a technological solution. The now released software tools mark the successful development of such an archiving solution.

The Open-Source-Software koLibRI is a framework to integrate a long term preservation system as the IBM Digital Information Archiving System (DIAS) into the infrastructure of any institution. In particular, koLibRi organizes the creation and the import of Archival Information Packages into DIAS, and offers functions to retrieve and to govern them. Preservation methods like data customization and migration of data are part of the tasks of long term preservation. koLibRi Version 1.0 provides modules that manage future migration procedures. koLibRI Version 1.0 provides a completely functional and stable condition. Nevertheless, in the context of connecting new partners to the existing long term preservation system, the software will be constantly adjusted to the needs of different partners.

A documentation has been published with the conclusive release that describes the installation and the adjustment of a functional koLibRi-system and the basic internal layout to make individual development possible. The described release is offered for free download. . . .

100 Year Archive Requirements Survey

The Storage Networking Industry Association has released the 100 Year Archive Requirements Survey. Access requires registration.

Here's an excerpt from the "Survey Highlights":

  • 80% of respondents declared they have information they must keep over 50 years and 68% of respondents said they must keep it over 100 years. . . .
  • Long-term generally means greater than 10 to 15 years—the period beyond which multiple migrations take place and information is at risk. . .
  • Database information (structured data) was considered to be most at risk of loss. . .
  • Over 40% of respondents are keeping e-Mail records over 10 years. . . .
  • Physical migration is a big problem. Only 30% declared they were doing it correctly at 3-5 year intervals. . . .
  • 60% of respondents say they are ‘highly dissatisfied’ that they will be able to read their retained information in 50 years. . .
  • Help is needed—current practices are too manual, too prone to error, too costly and lack adequate coordination across the organization. . . .

Fedora Commons Website Launches

The Fedora Commons Website has gone live.

Here's an excerpt from the About Fedora Commons page:

Fedora Commons is a non-profit organization providing sustainable technologies to create, manage, publish, share and preserve digital content as a basis for intellectual, organizational, scientific and cultural heritage by bringing two communities together.

Communities of practice that include scholars, artists, educators, Web innovators, publishers, scientists, librarians, archivists, publishers, records managers, museum curators or anyone who presents, accesses, or preserves digital content.

Software developers who work on the cutting edge of open source Web and enterprise content technologies to ensure that collaboratively created knowledge is available now and in the future.

Fedora Commons is the home of the unique Fedora open source software, a robust integrated repository-centered platform that enables the storage, access and management of virtually any kind of digital content.

Here's an excerpt from the press release about the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation grant that helps fund the Fedora Commons:

Fedora Commons today announced the award of a four year, $4.9M grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation to develop the organizational and technical frameworks necessary to effect revolutionary change in how scientists, scholars, museums, libraries, and educators collaborate to produce, share, and preserve their digital intellectual creations. Fedora Commons is a new non-profit organization that will continue the mission of the Fedora Project, the successful open-source software collaboration between Cornell University and the University of Virginia. The Fedora Project evolved from the Flexible Extensible Digital Object Repository Architecture (Fedora) developed by researchers at Cornell Computing and Information Science.

With this funding, Fedora Commons will foster an open community to support the development and deployment of open source software, which facilitates open collaboration and open access to scholarly, scientific, cultural, and educational materials in digital form. The software platform developed by Fedora Commons with Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation funding will support a networked model of intellectual activity, whereby scientists, scholars, teachers, and students will use the Internet to collaboratively create new ideas, and build on, annotate, and refine the ideas of their colleagues worldwide. With its roots in the Fedora open-source repository system, developed since 2001 with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the new software will continue to focus on the integrity and longevity of the intellectual products that underlie this new form of knowledge work. The result will be an open source software platform that both enables collaborative models of information creation and sharing, and provides sustainable repositories to secure the digital materials that constitute our intellectual, scientific, and cultural history.

There's a 20% Chance That You Are a Digital Simulation Living in a Virtual World

Nick Bostrom, Director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford, says in a New York Times article today:

“My gut feeling, and it’s nothing more than that,” he says, “is that there’s a 20 percent chance we’re living in a computer simulation.”

Bostrom thinks so because, barring a future prohibition on creating simulated worlds or disinterest in doing so, that our posthuman descendants are almost certain to create simulations of the past. The more simulations that are run, the more likely that you are in one.

By some estimates, there will be enough available computing power to create a simulated world by 2050.

However, there could be a recursive problem:

It’s also possible that there would be logistical problems in creating layer upon layer of simulations. There might not be enough computing power to continue the simulation if billions of inhabitants of a virtual world started creating their own virtual worlds with billions of inhabitants apiece.

I wouldn't count on it though.

Source: Tierney, John. "Our Lives, Controlled From Some Guy's Couch." The New York Times, 14 August 2007, D1, D4.

Welcome to the DRM Zone: Case in Point, the Google Video Store

If you have ever purchased or rented a video from the Google Video Store, it will cease to function on August 15, 2007. That's because the Google Video Store is being shut down and along with it Google 's associated DRM system.

Customers will get credits in Google Checkout for what they spent on Google Video Store products, but not cash refunds, meaning that they must buy merchandise available via that service to recoup their losses. Of course, this does not compensate purchasers for the inconvenience of having to replace their videos (assuming that they can).

This fiasco underlines a key problem with DRM: it doesn't just restrict access, it restricts access using proprietary technologies, and, with few exceptions, those technologies cannot be legally circumvented under U.S. law.

Source: Fisher, Ken. "Google Selleth Then Taketh Away, Proving the Need for DRM Circumvention." Ars Technica, 12 August 2007.