Author: Charles W. Bailey, Jr.

Charles W. Bailey, Jr.

What Is www.digital-scholarship.com?

I’ve switched to a new domain for everything but DigitalKoans and SEPB/SEPW:

www.digital-scholarship.com

If you enter an old escholarlypub.com address it will automatically switch you to the equivalent digital-scholarship.com address. Due to a peculiarity in the way my blogging software works, DigitalKoans must remain at:

http://www.escholarlypub.com/digitalkoans/

However, if you enter the digital-scholarship.com address by mistake you will still get to the site, but the URLs will revert to the old domain as soon as you start navigating the blog. Confused? Hopefully not.

My new e-mail address is:

cbailey@digital-scholarship.com

I’ll still check the old one for awhile.

Note to catalogers: Many catalog records for the Open Access Bibliography: Liberating Scholarly Literature with E-Prints and Open Access Journals still point to:

http://info.lib.uh.edu/cwb/oab.pdf

They should be updated to:

http://www.digital-scholarship.com/oab/oab.pdf

The old link will not get users directly to the file.

New Campus Copyright Booklet

Four associations (Association of American Publishers, Association of American Universities, Association of American University Presses, and Association of Research Libraries) have prepared a new copyright booklet, Campus Copyright Rights and Responsibilities: A Basic Guide to Policy Considerations, that, according to ARL, represents "a consensus document" that is "descriptive, not prescriptive." As such, this 30-page document is unique, and it is well worth reading.

Creative Commons Exceeds Fundraising Goal

As I write this, the Creative Commons has raised over $249,000, exceeding its fundraising goal of $225,000. In part, this is due to a check from Microsoft for $25,000. Following the fundraising campaign’s Web page daily, it has been obvious me that a large number of individual contributions have been made in the last week or so. In fact, there have been so many that the December contributor’s page seems to have cratered under the load, since it now shows no one. Anne Marino, Creative Commons Development Director, has posted a blog entry that says, in part:

Because of this tremendous community support, the groundwork for CC’s fundraising program is in place. 2006 will bring many more opportunities for CC to serve the public, create programs for individual Commoners to connect and participate, provide networking forums and events for CC’s new Corporate Commoners Program and encourage and involve continuing institutional support. Stay tuned! 2006 will have many surprises!

Update (1/5/06): The CC campaign had a spectacular finish: there was an anonymous gift of $1 million, plus the total funds raised, excluding this gift, have grown to $346,212.00.

Preliminary www.escholarlypub.com 2005 Use Statistics

The www.escholarlypub.com site was made public on 4/20/2005 when DigitalKoans was launched; I moved my personal publication files to www.escholarlypub.com on 6/27/2005. SEPB/SEPW files are still on University of Houston Libraries servers, and are not included here. My e-prints are also on DLIST and E-LIB, and those figures are not included here; nor are statistics for my old UH Libraries e-print site. The below statistics are generated by Urchin, which my host service provides. (I’ll crunch the numbers with analog later; experience shows there can be some variation between different log analysis packages.)

From 4/20/05 until around noon today, there have been about 134,400 sessions on www.escholarlypub.com, with 500 sessions daily (all figures are rounded to the nearest hundred). There have been 250,000 page views, with 900 page views daily. There have been 297,300 hits, with 1,100 daily hits.

For the site, there were sessions from 119 Internet domains. Leaving aside unknown domains, the top 10 are:

  1. com (Commercial): 54,300
  2. net (Network): 14,400
  3. edu (Educational): 11,500
  4. ca (Canada): 3,000
  5. org (Non-Profit Organizations): 2,800
  6. de (Germany): 2,300
  7. au (Australia): 2,100
  8. uk (United Kingdom): 2,100
  9. it (Italy): 1,400
  10. fr (France): 1,300

The top 10 site pages (leaving aside the Atom/RSS feeds, top-level pages, and Weblog category pages) were:

  1. Open Access Webliography (e-print): 10,500
  2. Open Access Bibliography: Liberating Scholarly Literature with E-Prints and Open Access Journals (OAB description page): 9,100
  3. The Google Print Controversy: A Bibliography (DigitalKoans posting): 8,000
  4. Key Open Access Concepts (e-print; part of the OAB): 6,500
  5. Electronic Theses and Dissertations: A Bibliography (DigitalKoans posting): 4,300
  6. Open Access Bibliography: Liberating Scholarly Literature with E-Prints and Open Access Journals (e-print): 4,100 (there also were 29,000 requests at the UH Libraries site)
  7. Selected Publications of Charles W. Bailey, Jr.: 4,100
  8. The Role of Reference Librarians in Institutional Repositories (e-print): 2,600
  9. The Spectrum of E-Journal Access Policies: Open to Restricted Access (DigitalKoans posting): 2,200
  10. BMC’s Impact Factors: Elsevier’s Take and Reactions to It (DigitalKoans posting): 1,600

(Note: DigitalKoan page view counts are partial because new postings stay on the home pages until they roll off.)

For DigitalKoans alone, there have been 182,100 page views.

The Sony BMG Rootkit Fiasco Redux

There’s a new development in the Sony BMG Rootkit story (for background see my prior posting and update comment): Sony BMG has reached a settlement (awaiting court approval) regarding the class action lawsuit about its use of DRM (Digital Rights Management) software after virtual "round-the-clock settlement negotiations" (on December 1st numerous individual lawsuits were given class action status). The short story is that XCP-protected CDs will be replaced with DRM-free CDs and customers will be given download/cash incentives to exchange the disks; no recall for MediaMax-protected CDs, but buyers will get song MP3s and an album download. You can get details at "Sony Settles ‘Rootkit’ Class Action Lawsuit."

Since my December 4th update comment, there have been a few articles/blog postings of note about this controversy. "Summary of Claims against Sony-BMG" provides an analysis by Fred von Lohmann of EFF of "the various legal theories that have been brought against Sony-BMG over the CD copy-protection debacle." In "Sony CDs and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act," Ed Felten considers whether Sony BMG, First4Internet, and SunnComm/MediaMax "violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), which is the primary Federal law banning computer intrusions and malware" (he notes that he is not a lawyer), and, in "Inside the MediaMax Prospectus," he highlights some interesting aspects of this document. "New Spyware Claim against Sony BMG" describes a new claim added to the Texas lawsuit by Attorney General Greg Abbott: "MediaMax software . . . violated state laws because it was downloaded even if users rejected a license agreement." Finally, "Just Let Us Play the Movie" examines the fallout for the film industry and DRM use in general.

In other recent IP news, two items of interest: "France May Sanction Unfettered P2P Downloads" (mon dieu!) and "Pro-Hollywood Bill Aims to Restrict Digital Tuners."

Lessig Explains Why the Creative Commons Urgently Needs Donations

In a posting on Lessig Blog yesterday, Lawrence Lessing explains in more detail why donations are still needed by the Creative Commons by December 31st. As I write this, the CC is within $10,000 of its goal. Quote:

(1) Where’d you get the goal of $225,000?

To understand this, you need to know something about the "public support test" that is part of the IRS review all tax-exempt non-profits suffer after 4 years of life. That test essentially asks, how diverse is your funding support. If most of your support comes from a few foundations, then there’s a risk you’ll lose your tax exempt status. I let this issue remain unresolved for too long. But this is the year the numbers will be calculated, and hence the push right now.

When we saw how much we needed to raise to pass the test, we divided up areas of support. The $225,000 is the amount we absolutely must raise from a general public appeal. If we meet that, and the other goals we’ve also set, then we’re fine.

(2) What happens if we fail this test?

The risk is that we’ll lose our public charity status. That’s critical to us because some foundations are not able to support organizations without a public charity status. And however fantastic the support from the public has been so far, we still absolutely must continue to get foundation support.

Lessing also explains in some detail how the raised funds will be used.

You can give at:

http://creativecommons.org/support/


Machinima

Here’s an interesting trend: using video games to create animated digital films. It’s called "Machinima." In one technique, the 3-D animation tools built into games to allow users to extend the games (e.g., create new characters) are used to generate new 3-D films. Of course, it can be more complicated than this: the Machinima FAQ outlines other strategies in layperson’s terms.

BusinessWeek has a short, interesting article on Machinima ("France: Thousands of Young Spielbergs") that describes one social commentary Machinima film (The French Democracy), noting that it got over one million hits in November. It also quotes Paul Marino, executive director of the Academy of Machinima Arts & Sciences as saying: "This is to the films what blogs are to the written media."

If you want to check out more Machinima films, try the 2005 Machinima Film Festival or Machinima.com (try "download" if "watch" doesn’t work).

Machinima is yet another example of how users want to create derivative works from digital media and how powerful a capability that can be—if intellectual property rights owners don’t prohibit it. Since the first Machinima movie was created in 1996, it appears that the video game industry has not moved to squash this movement, and, needless to say, it has thrived. However, this state of affairs may simply reflect Machinima’s low profile: A recent Wired News article, which notes that Machinima has been employed in commercials and music videos, indicates that Doug Lombardi, Director of Marketing at Valve (a video game software company), feels that: "As the films become commercially viable, machinima filmmakers are going to butt up against copyright law."

The Creative Commons Needs Urgent Help

According to Michael W. Carroll, Associate Professor of Law at Villanova University School of Law, the Creative Commons is in danger of losing its charitable status with the IRS unless it receives more donations by the end of the year. Any donation, no matter how small, will help and it will be matched. For donations at $50 or above, the CC offers buttons, stickers, and shirts (at least $75 for this item).

Give at:

http://creativecommons.org/support/

More information at Carroll’s SOAF message.

Also see Lawrence Lessig’s blog posting.


Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog Update (12/19/05)

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, newsletters, technical reports, and white papers. Especially interesting are: "Comparison of IR Content Policies in Australia," "If You Harvest arXiv.org, Will They Come?," "Interdisciplinary Differences in Attitudes towards Deposit in Institutional Repositories," "Open Access Federation for Library and Information Science: dLIST and DL-Harvest," and "Ten-Year Cross-Disciplinary Comparison of the Growth of Open Access and How it Increases Research Citation Impact."

Open Access Bibliography and The Access Principle Discount at Amazon

Amazon is offering the Open Access Bibliography: Liberating Scholarly Literature with E-Prints and Open Access Journals and John Willinsky’s insightful The Access Principle: The Case for Open Access to Research and Scholarship together for a discounted price of $68.07 (vs. the normal $79.95). See the OAB Amazon record for the link. (Note: By my request, I do not profit from sales of the print version of the OAB; all proceeds go to ARL to subsidize the print version.)

Version 60, Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography

Version 60 of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography is now available. This selective bibliography presents over 2,560 articles, books, and other printed and electronic sources that are useful in understanding scholarly electronic publishing efforts on the Internet.

The Open Access Bibliography: Liberating Scholarly Literature with E-Prints and Open Access Journals, by the same author, provides much more in-depth coverage of the open access movement and related topics (e.g., disciplinary archives, e-prints, institutional repositories, open access journals, and the Open Archives Initiative) than SEPB does.

The "Open Access Webliography" (with Ho) complements the OAB, providing access to a number of Websites related to open access topics.

Changes in This Version

The bibliography has the following sections (revised sections are marked with an asterisk):

Table of Contents

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*
5.3 Other Legal Issues
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

Further Information about SEPB

The HTML version of SEPB is designed for interactive use. Each major section is a separate file. There are links to sources that are freely available on the Internet. It can be can be searched using Boolean operators.

The HTML document includes three sections not found in the Acrobat file:

  1. Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog (biweekly list of new resources; also available by mailing list and RSS feed)
  2. Scholarly Electronic Publishing Resources (directory of over 270 related Web sites)
  3. Archive (prior versions of the bibliography)

The Acrobat file is designed for printing. The printed bibliography is over 210 pages long. The Acrobat file is over 560 KB.

Related Article

An article about the bibliography has been published in The Journal of Electronic Publishing.

Selected by Librarians' Index to the Internet

Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog Update (12/5/05)

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, newsletters, technical reports, and white papers. Especially interesting are: "Are Authors and Publishers Getting Scroogled?"; "OCA and GLP 1: Ebooks, Etext, Libraries and the Commons"; "OCA and GLP 2: Steps on the Digitization Road"; "Reassessing Prospects for the Open Access Movement"; "Sony BMG: DRM Gone Bad"; "Strengthening the NIH Policy"; and "What I Wish I Had Known."

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."

The Google Print Controversy: A Bibliography

Update: See the Google Book Search Bibliography, Version 2 for the latest bibliography.

This bibliography presents selected English-language electronic works about Google Print that are freely available on the Internet. It has a special focus on the legal issues associated with this project. Page numbers for print/electronic publications are not included unless they are mentioned in the electronic version.

Association of American Publishers. "Google Library Project Raises Serious Questions for Publishers and Authors."

Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers. "Google Print for Libraries—ALPSP Position Statement."

Authors Guild. "Authors Guild Sues Google, Citing 'Massive Copyright Infringement'."

Band. Jonathan. "The Google Print Library Project: A Copyright Analysis." ARL: A Bimonthly Report on Research Library Issues and Actions from ARL, CNI, and SPARC, no. 242 (2005): 6-9.

Banks, Marcus A. "The Excitement of Google Scholar, the Worry of Google Print." Biomedical Digital Libraries 2 (Article 2 2005).

Battelle, John. "The AAP/Google Lawsuit: Much More At Stake ." John Battelle's Searchblog, 20 October 2005.

Blankenhorn, Dana. "Economic Lesson of Google Print." Moore's Lore, 21 October 2005.

Chafkin, Max. "Google Scrambles to Defend 'Google Print for Libraries' Initiative." The Book Standard, 21 October 2005.

Coleman, Mary Sue. "Riches We Must Share . . ." The Washington Post, 22 October 2005, A21.

Crawford, Susan. "Why Google Is Right." Susan Crawford Blog, 21 September 2005.

Drummond, David. "Why We Believe in Google Print." Google Blog, 19 October 2005.

DW staff. "German Publishers Warm to Google Library." Deutsche Welle, 20 October 2005.

Felten, Edward W. "Google Print, Damages and Incentives." Freedom to Tinker, 23 September 2005.

Finkelstein, Seth. "Google Print Is Not Copyright's Enemy-Of-My-Enemy-Is-My-Friend." Infothought, 23 September 2005.

Google. "Google Checks Out Library Books."

———. "Google Print."

———. "Information for Publishers about the Library Project."

Google, and University Library, University of Michigan. "Cooperative Agreement."

Graham, Jefferson. "Google Print Project Inspires Fans, Fears." USA Today, 17 October 2005.

Helm, Burt. "For Google, Another Stormy Chapter." BusinessWeek, 22 September 2005.

———. "A Google Project Pains Publishers." BusinessWeek, 23 May 2005.

———. "Google's Escalating Book Battle." BusinessWeek, 20 October 2005.

———. "Google's Plan Doesn't Scan." BusinessWeek, 12 August 2005.

———. "A New Page in Google's Books Fight." BusinessWeek, 22 June 2005.

Hof, Rob. "Lawsuit Against Google Print: The End of the Internet?" The Tech Beat, 21 October 2005.

Keegan, Victor. "A Bookworm's Delight." The Guardian, 21 October 2005.

Lavoie, Brian, Lynn Silipigni Connaway, and Lorcan Dempsey. "Anatomy of Aggregate Collections: The Example of Google Print for Libraries." D-Lib Magazine 11, no. 9 (2005).

Lessig, Lawrence. "Google Sued." Lessig Blog, 22 September 2005.

Marco, Meghann. "So, My Publisher Is Sueing Google. . ." MeghannMarco.com, 19 October 2005.

Markoff, John, and Edward Wyatt. "Google Is Adding Major Libraries to Its Database." The New York Times, 14 December 2004.

Mathes, Adam. "The Point of Google Print." Google Blog, 19 October 2005.

O'Reilly, Tim. "Google Library vs. Publishers." O'Reilly Radar, 13 August 2005.

Patry, William. "Google Revisited." The Patry Copyright Blog, 23 September 2005.

______. "Google, the Second Suit and Second Copy." The Patry Copyright Blog, 21 October 2005.

Petit, C. E. "Author's Guild v. Google: A Skeptical Analysis." Scrivener's Error: Warped Weft, 2005.

Pickering, Bobby. "Google Clarifies Print Differences in Europe." Information World Review, 18 October 2005.

Quilter, Laura. "Google & Not-for-Profit Libraries." Derivative Work, 13 August 2005.

Quint, Barbara. "CORRECTIONS: Google Print Not All I Said It Was." Information Today NewsBreaks & the Weekly News Digest, 29 August 2005.

———. "Google and Research Libraries Launch Massive Digitization Project." Information Today NewsBreaks & the Weekly News Digest, 20 December 2004.

———. "Google Library Project Hit by Copyright Challenge from University Presses." Information Today NewsBreaks & the Weekly News Digest, 31 May 2005.

———. "Google Slows Library Project to Accommodate Publishers." Information Today NewsBreaks & the Weekly News Digest, 15 August 2005.

———. "Google's Library Project: Questions, Questions, Questions." Information Today NewsBreaks & the Weekly News Digest, 27 December 2004.

———. "The Other Shoe Drops: Google Print Sued for Copyright Violation." Information Today NewsBreaks & the Weekly News Digest, 3 October 2005.

Raff, Andrew. "Google, Publishers, Copies and 'Being Evil'." IPTAblog, 21 September 2005.

Slater, Derek. "Google Print Commentary Round-Up." A Copyfighter's Musings, 20 October 2005.

Smith, Adam M. "Making Books Easier to Find." Google Blog, 11 August 2005.

Suber, Peter. "Does Google Library Violate Copyright?" SPARC Open Access Newsletter, no. 90 (2005).

Sullivan, Danny. "Forget Google Print Copyright Infringement; Search Engines Already Infringe." Search Engine Watch, 25 May 2005.

_______. "Indexing Versus Caching & How Google Print Doesn't Reprint." Search Engine Watch, 21 October 2005.

Taylor, Nick. ". . . But Not at Writers' Expense." The Washington Post, 22 October 2005, A21.

Thompson, Bill. "Defending Google's Licence to Print." BBC News, 10 October 2005.

University Library, University of Michigan. "UM Library/Google Digitization Partnership FAQ, August 2005."

Vaidhyanathan, Siva. "Google Avoids Copyright Meltdown." SIVACRACY.NET: Opinions, Rants, and Obsessions of Siva Vaidhyanathan and his Friends and Family, 12 August 2005.

_______. "On the Essense of Libraries and Fair Use." SIVACRACY.NET: Opinions, Rants, and Obsessions of Siva Vaidhyanathan and his Friends and Family, 18 August 2005.

_______. "'Steal This Book'." On the Media, 30 September 2005.

"Why I Think Google's Library Plan was Out of Bounds." SIVACRACY.NET: Opinions, Rants, and Obsessions of Siva Vaidhyanathan and his Friends and Family, 13 August 2005.

von Lohmann, Fred. "Authors Guild Sues Google." Deep Links, 20 September 2005.

Wentworth, Donna. "Google Print Is as Google Print Does." Copyfight, 15 August 2005.

Wilkin, John P., and Reginald Carr. "Google's Library Digitization Project: Reports from Michigan and Oxford."

Wojcicki, Susan. "Google Print and the Authors Guild." Google Blog, 20 September 2005.

Wu,Tim. "Leggo My Ego." Slate, 17 October 2005.

Wyatt, Edward. "Google Opens 8 Sites in Europe, Widening Its Book Search Effort." The New York Times, 18 October 2005.

Selected by Librarians' Index to the Internet

Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog Update (10/24/05)

The update of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog (SEPW) is now available, which provides brief information on 22 new journal issues and other resources. Especially interesting are: Acquiring Copyright Permission to Digitize and Provide Open Access to Books "; The Dublin Core Metadata Registry: Requirements, Implementation, and Experience"; "Exploiting ‘Light-Weight’ Protocols and Open Source Tools to Implement Digital Library Collections and Services"; "Library Access to Scholarship"; New Journal Publishing Models: An International Survey of Senior Researchers; Open Access Citation Information; "Open Access to Science in the Developing World"; and "The Status of Open Access Publishing by Academic Societies."

Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog Update (10/7/05)

The update of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog (SEPW) is now available, which provides brief information on 26 new journal issues and other resources. Especially interesting are: "Academic Institutional Repositories: Deployment Status in 13 Nations as of Mid 2005"; "BioOne’s Business Model Shift: Balancing the Interests of Libraries and Independent Publishers"; "Does Google Library Violate Copyright?"; "Electronic Scientific Information, Open Access, and Editorial Peer Review: Changes on the Horizon"; "Institutional Repository Deployment in the United States as of Early 2005"; "New Roles for a Changing Environment: Implications of Open Access for Libraries"; "Project MUSE’s New Pricing Model: A Case Study in Collaboration"; and "You Get What You Pay for? Archival Access to Electronic Journals."

What’s in Your Digital Asset Catastrophe Plan?

Anything? You likely have a disaster plan that addresses digital asset issues. The potential problem with a disaster plan is that it can be grounded in assumptions of relative normalcy: the building burns down, a tornado hits, a lower-category hurricane strikes. It may assume severe damage within a confined area and an unimpaired ability of federal, state, and local agencies (as well as relief organizations) to respond. It may assume that workers are not at the disaster site, that they are relatively unaffected if they are, or that they can evacuate and return with relative ease and speed. It may assume that your offsite tape storage or "hot" backup site is far enough away to be unaffected.

What it probably doesn’t assume is the complete devastation of your city or town; widespread Internet, phone, power, and water outages that could last weeks or months; improbable multiple disasters across a wide region surrounding you; the inability of officials at all levels of government to adequately respond to a quickly deepening crisis; the lack of truly workable evacuation plans; depleted gas supplies for a hundred miles in all directions; your evacuated workers being scattered across a multiple-state area in motels, hotels, and the houses of friends and relatives after trips or 20 to 30 hours in massive traffic jams; your institution’s administration being relocated to a hotel in another city; evacuees ending up in new disaster zones and needing to evacuate yet again; and the possibility of more local post-catastrophe catastrophes in short order.

Here’s some thoughts. You may need to have your backups and hot sites in a part of the country that is unlikely to be experiencing a simultaneous catastrophe. This will not be reliable or convenient if physical data transportation is involved. Your latest data could end up in a delivery service depot in your city or town when the event happens. Even if this doesn’t occur, how frequently will you ship out those updates? Daily? Weekly? Another frequency?

Obviously, a remote hot site is better than just backups. But, if hot sites were cheap, we’d all have them.

In terms of backups, how software/hardware-specific are your systems? Will you have to rebuild a complex hardware/software environment to create a live system? Will the components that you need be readily available? Will you have the means to acquire, house, and implement them?

Lots of copies do keep stuff safe, but there have to be lots of copies. Here are two key issues: copyright and will (no doubt there are many more).

You may have a treasure trove of locally produced digital materials, but, if they are under normal copyright arrangements, no one can replicate them. It took considerable resources to create your digital materials. It’s a natural tendency to want to protect them so that they are accessible, but still yours alone. The question to ask yourself is what do I want to prevent users from doing, now and in the future, with these materials? The Creative Commons licences offer options that bar commercial and derivative use, but still provide the freedom to replicate licensed data. True, if you allow replication, you will not really be able to have unified use statistics, but, in the final analysis, what’s more important statistics or digital asset survival? If you allow derivative works, you may find others add value to your work in surprising and novel ways that benefit your users.

However, merely making your digital assets available doesn’t mean that anyone will go to the trouble of replicating or enhancing them. That requires will on the part of others, and they are busy with their own projects. Moreover, they assume that your digital materials will remain available, not disappear forever in the blink of an eye.

It strikes me that digital asset catastrophe planning may call for cooperative effort by libraries, IT centers, and other data-intensive nonprofit organizations. Perhaps by working jointly economic and logistical barriers can be overcome and cost-effective solutions can emerge.

OAB, OAW, SEPB, and SEPW Zip Files

Zip files (with adjusted URLs that allow mirroring) for the above publications are available.

  • SEPB/SEPW (complete archive; will be updated as SEPB changes)
  • OAB/OAW (all files in one subdirectory)

With the exception of the OAW, these publications are under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License (the OAW is under version 2 of the license).