Archives
Monday, January 30, 2006
History and Senator Stevens’ iPod
It isn’t long but you have to read this. It’s the most encouraging thing I’ve seen in a while.
And when Stevens asked whether with the audio flag in place he would be able to record from the radio and put the shows onto his iPod: that’s when the RIAA’s Mitch Bainwol really began to sweat.With that simple question, the octogenarian Senator encapsulated arguments about place-shifting, interoperability, and fair use that would have taken whole federal dockets to explain a few years ago.
Copyright — laura
Friday, January 27, 2006
OpenDOAR Launched
OpenDOAR (the Directory of Open Repositories) has officially launched its list of OA archives and repositories.
Open Access — laura
Thursday, January 26, 2006
5 Factors for User Centered Services
Tame The Web: Libraries and Technology: 5 Factors for User Centered Services
Words to live by.
Library Links — laura
Stanford On ITunes
‘Stanford On ITunes’ Is For Everybody - Forbes.com
In an unprecedented move, Stanford University is collaborating with Apple Computer to allow public access a wide range of lectures, speeches, debates and other university content through iTunes. No need to pay the $31,200 tuition. No need to live on campus. No need even to be a student. The nearly 500 tracks that constitute “Stanford on iTunes” are available to anyone willing to spend the few minutes it takes to download them from the Internet.Education — laura
A-Hole bill
Boing Boing: A-Hole bill would make a secret technology into the law of the land
If the controversial Analog Hole bill makes it into law, US technologists will have to obey a law whose most important details are a trade-secret.
… The idea is that any time you attempted to make a digital recording, your device would seek out the VEIL watermark and respond to any special instructions (e.g., “No recording allowed”) it discovered there.
But what the hell is VEIL? No one really knows. The sole commercial deployment of this technology to date has been in a Batman toy (why this makes it fit to be included by law into every American recording device is beyond me).
Copyfighting Princeton Prof Ed Felten called the company that makes VEIL to find out how the technology works. Their answer? They’ll tell Ed how VEIL works only if he pays them $10,000 and signs a non-disclosure agreement. And they’ll only tell him how the decoder works — there’s no price you can pay to find out how VEIL encoding works.
Sounds like Diebold. You know, the voting machines used across the country that have screwed up the last 2 presidential elections.
Copyright — laura
Monday, January 23, 2006
Hippocrates
Hippocrates is a new, free medical search engine specializing in deep-web content intelligible to lay readers. For more details, see this story about it from today’s issue of The Hindu.I tried it and was impressed by the results.
Library Links — laura
Broadcast Flag Redux
Boing Boing: Broadcast Flag is back, this time it covers iPods and PSPs, too
Under the DCPA proposal, digital media technologies would be restricted to using technologies that had been certified by the FCC as being not unduly disruptive to entertainment industry business-models.Many comments, none of them suitable for publication.
Copyright — laura
A Reasonable Thought on DRM
DRM should respect the public domain. That means [DRM on copyrighted works] should automatically expire, leaving the content freely accessible, on the date when the work enters the public domain….Copyright — laura
DMCA Starts Hitting Consumers
Can video iPod lead to DMCA reform? | Perspectives | CNET News.com
In 1998, politicians bowed to pressure from the entertainment industry and voted overwhelmingly for the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Part of that law made it a federal offense to sell or distribute software that can rip DVDs.
In other words, believe it or not, Apple CEO Steve Jobs would be guilty of a federal felony if iTunes transferred DVDs to an iPod as easily as it can music from a CD.
The entertainment industry could be in for some interesting times.
Copyright — laura
Non-Librarian’s take on DMCA
By paying an artist or rights holder we must have some rights in turn.Copyright — laura
In-house tech
LITA Blog » Blog Archive » Library services and in-house software development
Ah, you say,I don’t need to know about these things because I have vendors supply this for me. Yes, that might be true, but such an approach to the situation is expensive in terms of time. It is not possible for third party commercial institutions to create solutions quickly enough for librarians to be seen as leaders in the field and to expediently satisfy local needs. On the other hand, if libraries posses the skills to write computer programs — control their computer environment — then they will be empowered to create solutions more immediately and more specifically. How comfortable are you outsourcing your collection, reference, or cataloging operations? In today’s environment computing services are no different.As fast as technologies are being created and changing right now, a programmer who works for the library is the fastest and can be the most cost-effective way of keeping up.
Library Links — laura
Refocus
Library Marketing-Thinking Outside the Book: Don’t focus on the customer/patron (?!)
… the authors tell us to refocus our attention from consumers themselves to the jobs they want to get done.
Marketing — laura
Thursday, January 19, 2006
MLA recommends OA-related tenure reforms
Comment. There are two OA connections here. First, skyrocketing journal prices in the sciences have caused most research libraries to cut into their book budgets, which has greatly reduced the demand for monographs, which has greatly reduced the number of new book manuscripts accepted by university presses. If spreading OA can help libraries rebuild their book budgets, then humanities departments will be freer to return to the monograph standard for tenure. Second, the old bias in favor of print publication was a major disincentive to publish in OA journals, and one not justified by any considerations of quality or impact. Deemphasizing monographs and print publications for tenure are both long-overdue recognitions of reality. Kudos to the MLA.Emphasis mine.
Open Access — laura
Domestic Spying
Wired News: Suits Seek End to Domestic Spying
The New York suit, filed on behalf of the center and individuals, names Bush, the head of the National Security Agency and the heads of the other major security agencies, challenging the NSA’s surveillance of persons within the United States without judicial approval or statutory authorization.
… It asked a judge to stop Bush and government agencies from conducting warrantless surveillance of communications in the United States.
Yes, I am cleaning out my link list.
Patriot Act — laura
DoJ search requests
Boing Boing: DoJ search requests: Google said no; Yahoo, AOL, MSN yes.
It seems apparent that Google objected to the request not for privacy reasons, but on grounds that the request was too broad and burdensome.
… Justice is not requesting this data in the course of a criminal investigation, but in order to defend its argument that the Child Online Protection Act is constitutionally sound.
Patriot Act — laura
DRM primer for librarians
Boing Boing: DRM primer for librarians
Mike Godwin has written a great primer on DRM for librarians. Librarians are on the front lines of the DRM wars, since DRM so often interferes with lending, archiving and preserving creative works. Librarians are also a technology-savvy bunch. Accordingly, Mike’s paper is thoroughgoing, smart, and highly recommended.
A good recomendation and a nice mention on BoingBoing.
Copyright — laura
Friday, January 13, 2006
Open Access News
Infotrieve, Inc., today announced that it had converted ArticleFinder, its online scientific, technical, and medical (STM) database with more than 26 million citations and eight million abstracts from over 54,000 journals, to a free access model. The move provides scientists and researchers, who work for corporations and are subject to different copyright regulations than their academic counterparts, with an end-to-end solution for conducting STM searches across literature from multiple providers. The solution seamlessly retrieves full-text scholarly journal articles that they need on a pay-per-view basis.
Library Links — laura
Sunday, January 8, 2006
information overload?
LISNews.org | Are we set for information overload?
As books get digitized and TV shows get downloadable, will it be too much? Maybe! Will all this instantly accessible information make us much smarter, or simply more stressed? When can we break to think, absorb and ponder all this data? It may take better technology to cope with the problems better technology creates. Of course, if used properly, the new resources have vast potential to shape how we live, study and think. Consider books….
What I would be worried about is that people would stop thinking completely.
Library Links — laura
