Tag: library

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You Pay for This Research. Why Can't You See It?

— That’s the title of this post in Wired’s “27B Stroke 6” blog. The Library of Congress runs a think tank, the Congressional Research Service, which spends $100 million of taxpayer money a year to write reports only Congress is allowed to see.

Lobbyists are trying to change that, and senators McCain and Leahy agree.

“The Library of Congress is a national treasure. The public deserves ready access to the reports it prepares for Congress, and easy online retrieval is the obvious answer,” Leahy said.

And once we get access to these reports, let’s talk about the rest of the research we fund.

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Copyright Office: DMCA exemptions

The U.S. Copyright Office has published rules governing exemptions to the DMCA, including provisions for educational institutions and libraries.

The Librarian of Congress, on the recommendation of the Register of Copyrights, has announced the classes of works subject to the exemption from the prohibition against circumvention of technological measures that control access to copyrighted works. Persons making noninfringing uses of the following six classes of works will not be subject to the prohibition against circumventing access controls (17 U.S.C. ยง 1201(a)(1)) during the next three years.

The advent of DMCA has complicated the situation with copyright exemptions. In many cases, the distribution of a work is clearly fair use under previous copyright law, but in order to make distribution possible, “copy protection” schemes must be circumvented first. This sort of circumvention is generally prohibited by DMCA. So it helps to know, straight from the source, that the preparation of digital content for normal fair use is also legal.

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The Virtues and Limits of Cataloging

The first wave of digital evangelism has passed. With the dot-com bubble burst and with the help of John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid, among others, we are much less attracted to the pitch that all problems will be solved by the application of massive amounts of data.

Around the same time, Google proved that there is an extremely usable middle ground between cataloged, curated information sets and hopelessly disjoint stacks of data. Users increasingly choose the convenience of Google, and more recently Wikipedia, Flickr, and YouTube, over the authoritative thoroughness of library-mediated research.

Librarians cringe at amateur cataloging. It’s like home dentistry. Google’s black-box PageRank reflects the “uniquely democratic nature of the web” by choosing relevant information based on proxies for trust, reputation, and authoritativeness (not expert assessments of those qualities). Flickr and YouTube use “Web 2.0” social tagging techniques to roughly categorize content. Even non-librarians can appreciate the pitfalls of letting just anyone add meta-data – they’ll get it wrong.

But talking to librarians, I’ve started to appreciate whole other levels of control over the process and content of cataloging. IANAL — I am not a Librarian. The following discussion is for entertainment purposes only.

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Open Access

I attended a provocative info session on Open Access hosted by Free Culture NYU. Below, I summarize the positions of the presenters. These are their words, not mine, although I must say I was convinced.

—–

Conference: Taking Action on Open Access
Jan. 13, 2007.
Notes by Eli Jacobowitz

1. SPARC – Heather Joseph spoke.

Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition. arl.org/sparc

A coalition of libraries dedicated to the dissemination of research results, reduction of financial pressure on libraries, and leverage of network and digital technologies.

The existing scholarly journal market is monopolistic and is not being constrained by market forces. Since 1986, the Consumer Price Index rose 60%, but the cost of scholarly journals has risen by 200%.

SPARC takes member library dues and creates alternative publishing models to compete. This is a market issue. In the case of publicly funded research, taxpayers pay three times! First for the initial researchers’ salaries, second for the peer reviewers’ salaries, and third for the library to license access to the journals that publish the results. The journals make average 38% profit margins.

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