Sony has announced its third-generation e-book reader, the Sony Reader Digital Book PRS-700, which will be available in November.
Read more about it at "Hands On: Sony's New PRS-700 Touchscreen Reader" and "Hands on with Sony's New PRS-700 Digital Reader."
The Federal Agencies Digitization Guidelines Initiative has launched its Website.
Here's a summary from the home page:
This site is a collaborative effort by federal agencies formed as a group in 2007 to define common guidelines, methods, and practices to digitize historical content in a sustainable manner. Recognizing that the effort would require specialized expertise, two separate working groups were formed with the possibility that more tightly focused groups might be necessary as the work progressed. The Federal Agencies Still Image Digitization Working Group will concentrate its efforts on image content such as books, manuscripts, maps, and photographic prints and negatives. The Federal Agencies Audio-Visual Working Group is focusing its work on sound, video, and motion picture film.
The Association of European Research Libraries (LIBER) has announced that the LIBER Quarterly will "become an entirely open access publication, freely available online to the worldwide research library community, with paid printing-on-demand services to be offered upon completion of each volume (expected in January 2009 for the 2008 volume)."
The Relog Experiment reports that, at a Canadian Association of Research Libraries meeting on institutional repositories at Access 2008, most attending libraries that used DSpace were reluctant to upgrade to 1.5 and were not using Manakin.
Here's an except that explains their reservations:
- customizations made to DSpace 1.4 will take a lot of programming time to move over to 1.5
- certain plug-ins and enhancements that are in heavy use in 1.4 have not yet been made available for 1.5
- administrators are evaluating other platforms and are not willing to invest the time in upgrading to 1.5 if they end up switching platforms
- programmers are hard to find, train and retain
The Open Knowledge Foundation has held a virtual meeting on open textbooks. Textbook Revolution, a directory of free textbooks organized by subject and copyright statement/open license type, was launched to coincide with the meeting. Future virtual meetings will be held on a monthly basis.
Read more about it at "After the Open Textbook Virtual Meeting" and "OKFN Virtual Meeting."
Noted copyright freedom fighter and science fiction author Cory Doctorow has released a free version of Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future under a Creative Commons U.S. Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license. Doctorow is also a major contributor to the Boing Boing Weblog.
In "2 New Digital Models Promise Academic Publishing for Profit," Chronicle of Higher Education reporter Jennifer Howard overviews two interesting developments in academic publishing: (1) the new Bloomsbury Academic imprint, which offers free access to books in PDF form under Creative Commons licenses (as well as print-on-demand versions), and (2) the Association of American University Presses' deal to give its members lower-cost access to Tizra's Publisher, a publishing e-commerce platform.
Internet radio stations, hard-pressed by high royalty rates established by the U.S. Copyright Royalty Board, may get relief if the President signs the Webcaster Settlement Act of 2008, which was passed by the House and Senate. The bill permits webcasters and copyright holders to negotiate royalty rates directly without government approval.
Read more about it at "Congress Acts, Sort of Saves Internet Radio"; "Senate OKs Web Radio Bill, Sends to President"; and "Senate Passes Webcaster Settlement Act of 2008."
The University of Arizona's School of Information Resources and Library Science has been awarded a $539,686 grant (matching: $327,615) by the Institute of Museum and Library Services to fund its three-year "Improving Student Learning of Advanced Digital Technologies in an Online Laboratory: A Research Approach" project.
Here's an excerpt from "Library Students to Get 'Leading-Edge' Training Thanks to Federal Grant":
The UA school's partners are the UA Libraries, UA University Information and Technology Services, the Harvard University Herbaria and the Missouri Botanical Gardens.
Each of the partner institutions will provide SIRLS with information that then will be recorded and catalogued, then developed into databases—with SIRLS students responsible for these tasks. So, instead of simply having Web sites that simulate the work they would be doing as professionals, the students will have the actual software and other tools to perform more complex work.
SIRLS will use VMWare Lab Manager software—which is quite popular in industry—as the program’s platform to build a virtual online laboratory. "This grant gives us the infrastructure we need to really let us create practical and realistic exercises for students," said Botticelli, also the co-principal investigator on the grant.
TorrentFreak reports that Cox Communications is temporarily suspending Internet service to customers who receive takedown notices. Cox also has a "three-strikes" policy that permanently disconnects service to customers who have received three takedown notices.
Read more about it at "Cox Disconnects Alleged Pirates from the Internet."
Wired reports that the Shawn Bentley Orphan Works Act of 2008, which passed the Senate, will languish in the House due to pressing economic legislation. (See ARL's "Orphan Works Legislation" briefing for background information.)
You can contact your Congressional representatives to support the bill using ALA's Take Action page for the bill.
Read more about it at "'Orphan Works' Copyright Law Dies Quiet Death."
The Scholarly Communication Institute has released Scholarly Communication Institute 6: Humanities Research Centers, University of Virginia, July 13-15, 2008.
Here's an excerpt:
In SCI 6, participants undertook an exploration of humanities research centers and their potential to advance technology-enabled scholarship. . . .
SCI 6 was designed to determine what collaborative actions a group of humanities centers might undertake that would promote technology-enabled scholarly communication. Though we are particularly interested in how new technologies can advance scholarship, the goal of this meeting was to engage centers organized in a variety of models and with differing orientations towards technology. . . .
A wide spectrum of research centers were represented at this institute: local, campus-based centers that serve all humanities and social science faculty; discipline-specific centers; a national center of excellence that formed around a rich collection of rare primary-source materials; a digital humanities center housed within an academic department; a digital humanities center that constitutes an academic department; a campus-based center that supports experimental work in digital humanities; and an international institute that relies on digital technologies to share multilingual resources and maintain an international network of collaborators. Also represented were several centers still in the development phase with explicit plans to focus on new technologies.
OCLC Programs and Research has published Beyond the Silos of the LAMs: Collaboration Among Libraries, Archives and Museums.
Here's an excerpt:
The project that forms the basis of this report began in 2007, when RLG Programs initiated work on the program, Library, Archive and Museum Collaboration. The goal of the program was threefold: to explore the nature of library, archive and museum (LAM) collaborations, to help LAMs collaborate on common services and thus yield greater productivity within their institutions, and to assist them in creating research environments better aligned with user expectations—or, to reference this report’s title, to move beyond the often-mentioned silos of LAM resources which divide content into piecemeal offerings.
At the heart of the program was a series of workshops designed to be both exploratory and outcome-oriented. Workshop participants were asked to identify motivations and obstacles in the collaborative process and plan new collaborative projects and programs that addressed needs at their own institutions.
Five RLG Programs partner sites were selected to participate in the workshops: the University of Edinburgh, Princeton University, the Smithsonian Institution, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and Yale University.
The Finnish Social Science Data Archive has published Open Access to and Reuse of Research Data—The State of the Art in Finland.
Here's an excerpt:
In 2006, the Ministry of Education in Finland allocated resources to the Finnish Social Science Data Archive (FSD) to chart national and international practices related to open access to research data. Consequently, the FSD carried out an online survey targeting professors of human sciences, social sciences and behavioural sciences in Finnish universities. Some respondents were senior staff at research institutes. The respondents were asked about the state and use of data collected in their department/institute. Almost half of the respondents considered the preservation and use of digital research data to be relevant to their department. The number of respondents (150) is large enough to warrant statistical analysis even though response rate was low at 28%.
JISC has released Final Report: Usage Statistics Review.
Here's an excerpt:
The JISC Usage Statistics Review Project is aimed at formulating a fundamental scheme for repository log files and at proposing a standard for their aggregation to provide meaningful and comparable item-level usage statistics for electronic documents like e.g. research papers and scientific resources. . . .
The thus described usage events should be exchanged in the form of OpenURL Context Objects using OAI. Automated access (e.g. robots) should be tagged. . . .
With the JISC-funded Publisher and Institutional Repository Usage Statistics (PIRUS) and the DFG-funded Open-Access-Statistics there are two projects which will formulate standards for usage statistics and work on their implementation. To reach broad comparability national efforts should be bundled together. A central authority—which could for example be the Digital Repository Infrastructure Vision for European Research (DRIVER)—should aggregate the usage data. . . .
Policies on statistics should be formulated for the repository community as well as the publishing community. Information about statistics policies should be available on services like OpenDOAR and RoMEO.
The Shawn Bentley Orphan Works Act of 2008 has been passed by the Senate by unanimous consent. See ARL's "Orphan Works Legislation" briefing for background information.
The bill now goes to the House.
The Prioritizing Resources and Organization for Intellectual Property Act (PRO-IP Act), formerly called the Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights Act, has been passed by the Senate sans a controversial provision that would have given the Justice Department the ability the bring civil suits against infringers, a provision that the DoJ opposed. The provision to create an Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator, opposed by the White House, remained intact.
Read more about it at "IP Bill Passes Senate, No Civil Enforcement Power for DoJ," "Public Knowledge Statement on Senate Passage of Intellectual Property Legislation," "Senate Passes Bill Creating 'Copyright Czar,'" and "Stacking Penalties Upon Penalties (PRO-IP Passes Senate)."
Thomson Reuters has sued George Mason University over its popular Zotero research management tool, which is produced by the university's Center for History and New Media. (Thanks to Catalogablog.)
Read more about it at "Reuters Says George Mason University Is Handing Out Its Proprietary Software."
ALA has issued an urgent call to action about the Shawn Bentley Orphan Works Act of 2008. See ARL's "Orphan Works Legislation" briefing for background information.
You can contact your Congressional representatives to support the bill using ALA's Take Action page for the bill. (In Firefox, quotes do not appear properly in the prepared message. Replace diamonds with a question mark with straight quotes.)
The Metadata Working Group, a joint effort by Adobe Systems, Apple, Canon, Microsoft, Nokia and Sony, has released Guidelines for Handling Image Metadata Version 1.0.
The Center for History and New Media at George Mason University has released Omeka 0.10 Alpha. Omeka is used to provide access to digital collections and exhibitions (see the About page).
Here's an excerpt from the announcement:
In this version we’ve updated to a powerful new data model based on an unqualified Dubin Core standard. We’ve also improved the theme and plugin APIs to work with that data model and make it easier for plugin and theme creators to work with Omeka.
The U.S. Departments of Commerce and Justice have sent a joint letter to Patrick Leahy, Chairman of the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, opposing Title I of the "Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights Act."
Here's an excerpt:
We strongly oppose Title I of the bill, which not only authorizes the Attorney General to pursue civil remedies for copyright infringement, but to secure "restitution" damages and remit them to the private owners of infringed copyrights. First, civil copyright enforcement has always been the responsibility and prerogative of private copyright holders, and U.S. law already provides them with effective legal tools to protect their rights. . . .
Second, Title 1's departure from the settled framework above could result in Department of Justice prosecutors serving as pro bono lawyers for private copyright holders regardless of their resources. . . .
Third, the Department of Justice has limited resources to dedicate to particular issues, and civil enforcement actions would occur at the expense of criminal actions, which only the Department of Justice may bring.
Read more about it at "DoJ Agrees: IP Enforcement Bill is a Bad Idea" and "DoJ to Senate: Don't Make Us Be Big Content's Copyright Cops."
United States District Court Judge Michael Davis has ruled in the widely publicized Capitol Records v. Jammie Thomas case that merely making a digital work available is not enough to constitute infringement, rather the work must be accessed and such access must be proved. Since this was not the instruction given to the jury, Thomas has been granted a new trial.
The judge also commented on the disproportionate size of the awarded damages ($222,000 for 24 songs):
While the Court does not discount Plaintiffs' claim that, cumulatively, illegal downloading has far-reaching effects on their businesses, the damages awarded in this case are wholly disproportionate to the damages suffered by Plaintiffs. Thomas allegedly infringed on the copyrights of 24 songs—the equivalent of approximately three CDs, costing less than $54, and yet the total damages awarded is $222,000—more than five hundred times the cost of buying 24 separate CDs and more than four thousand times the cost of three CDs. While the Copyright Act was intended to permit statutory damages that are larger than the simple cost of the infringed works in order to make infringing a far less attractive alternative than legitimately purchasing the songs, surely damages that are more than one hundred times the cost of the works would serve as a sufficient deterrent.
Read more about it at "Capitol v. Thomas: Judge Orders New Trial, Implores Congress to Lower Statutory Penalties for P2P"; "Judge Declares Mistrial in RIAA-Jammie Thomas Trial"; and "Thomas Verdict Overturned, Making Available Theory Rejected."
Paolo Mangiafico, Digital Projects Consultant at the Duke University Libraries, has been named Director of Digital Information Strategy in Duke's Provost office.
Read more about it at "Digital Info Boss Added to Top Brass."
The National Institutes of Health has announced the resignation of its Director, Elias A. Zerhouni, M.D., from that post effective at the end of October 2008. Zerhouni has been a strong open access advocate (Peter Suber has commented on the potential effect of his resignation on the NIH Public Access Policy.)
For further information, see "Federal Health Official to Step Down," "National Institutes of Health Director Zerhouni Stepping Down," and "NIH Director Departs."
