Information Research Weblog

It's been a little while since the last posting here, because I've been in Lisbon for a week, with very little in the way of Internet contact - just a few minutes on the hotel connection.

However, here's an interesting site, brought to my attention by Current Cites - where you will always find something interesting.

The site is that of the 2003 Dublin Core conference It's interesting for two reasons - the content, of course, but also the mode of presentation, using Siderean's proprietary "Seamark" navigation system.

Current Cites is an electronic publication I've drawn attention to before. Here are a couple of items that interested me:

I'm in the process of reviewing the latest version of EndNote, the bibliography organizer, and this version has a new feature, linking to the original source through the OpenURL protocol - coincidentally, Current Cites draws attention to an interview in the OCLC Newsletter with Herbert Van de Sompel, the originator of the protocol and a key figure in the Open Archives Initiative

The other piece is from First Monday that e-journal that is just a little younger than Information Research :-) This paper concerns 'open content' - that is, what you are reading now, and what you read in every new issue of Information Research. Magnus Cedergren, the author of 'Open content and value creation' states in the abstract:

In this paper, I consider open content as an important development track in the media landscape of tomorrow. I define open content as content possible for others to improve and redistribute and/or content that is produced without any consideration of immediate financial reward — often collectively within a virtual community. The open content phenomenon can to some extent be compared to the phenomenon of open source. Production within a virtual community is one possible source of open content. Another possible source is content in the public domain. This could be sound, pictures, movies or texts that have no copyright, in legal terms.

and in the body of the paper he looks at three examples of open content:

• Open Directory Project (ODP)
• Wikipedia
• Rick Prelinger's digital film archive

All in all, an interesting paper.

The economic impact of libraries

If you've ever wondered about the economic impact of libraries in society - and it must be on your minds more or less continually - then wonder no longer. OCLC has produced a nice .pdf file that tells all called Libraries: how they stack up. Among the interesting snippets:

U.S. libraries purchase an estimated $14 billion in goods and services annually—exceeding U.S. spending on videos and athletic footwear, and approaching the level spent by businesses on magazine advertising. U.S. libraries account for nearly half of the $31 billion spent annually by libraries worldwide.

And George Bush, of course, snipped $39,000,000 from the budget for libraries when he slipped into the White House - shows how much influence his wife, the former children's librarian, must have had. Of course, Tony Bliar and the New Thatcherites don't have to do that in the UK - they just crack down on 'waste' in the public services.

Licences for electronic resources

A useful little article on this subject at Free Pint by Paul Pedley of the Economist Intelligence Unit.

The key point, of course, is:

It is important to point out that a licence does not confer ownership rights. It merely specifies the conditions upon which databases and other copyright works can be used and exploited, and by whom. At the end of the subscription period they may well no longer have access to the materials. Indeed, it may even be a requirement of the contract that anything which has been downloaded from the electronic information product is deleted at the end of the contract term.

In other words, "Oh sure, we'll sell you this stuff - but we're going to take it back when George snips another $39 million."

Both of these items courtesy of Charles Bailey's Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog

Librarians in court

This from Yahoo News:

In a hotly contested lawsuit before a federal appeals court, two peer-to-peer companies are about to gain a vast army of allies: America's librarians.

The five major US library associations are planning to file a legal brief Friday siding with Streamcast Networks and Grokster in the California suit, brought by the major record labels and Hollywood studios. The development could complicate the Recording Industry Association of America's efforts to portray file-swapping services as rife with spam and illegal pornography.

According to an attorney who has seen the document, the brief argues that Streamcast -distributor of the Morpheus software - and Grokster should not be shut down. It asks the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals to uphold the April decision by a Los Angeles judge that dismissed much of the entertainment industry's suit against the two peer-to-peer companies.

Read more about it

Here's question that rings a lot of bells these days and First Monday has a paper about it.

We're all aware, I imagine, of the problem, or potential problem of the unknown life of digitally stored information. An interesting case study is that of the BBC Domesday Project, which used interactive video-discs and the BBC micro-computer. Both technologies are now obsolete. It has to be remembered that this was a very early effort to apply the new information technologies to the accumulation and presentation of a massive amount of information - the date was 1986.

Thanks to Current Cites, my attention was drawn to a short paper on the subject in the Research Libraries Group 'Diginews'. The Camileon project is an Anglo-American collaboration (rather more positive than a recent manifestation), involving the Universities of Leeds and Michigan, aimed at developing strategies for the long-term preservation of digital materials. The Domesday Project constituted a test case for its efforts. The problem has been largely solved by the use of software emulation but:

Sadly, it is unlikely that Domesday will become available to the general public unless the IPR problems can be solved.

Things are going on on one's own doorstep and you never know!

The Humanities Research Institute at the University of Sheffield and the Higher Education Digitization Service at the University of Hertfordshire have been working (funded by money from the National Lottery) on a digital library of the proceedings of the Old Bailey, 1674-1734, which is described as:

A fully searchable online edition of the largest body of texts detailing the lives of non-elite people ever published, containing accounts of over 100,000 criminal trials held at London's central criminal court.

Fascinating stuff!

No - not the old man's bone structure, but the skeleton of the classification scheme.

An interesting presentation on "Improving Subject Access in OPACs using Dewey and View-Based Searching" by Steve Pollit and Amanda Tinker. Also, a guided tour of the system here.

Here's an item that chimes in with Terry Brooks's latest column in Information Research, brought to my attention by Current Cites.

It's an article by Clifford Lynch (of the Coalition for Networked Information) on 'institutional repositories', that is, official, mainly university, archives of digital resources:

...a university-based institutional repository is a set of services that a university offers to the members of its community for the management and dissemination of digital materials created by the institution and its community members.

Terry mentioned DSpace as one of the players in this area of activity, and another is ePrints from the University of Southampton in the UK - however, the latter is intended mainly for working papers and similar documents, whereas DSpace is intended for all digital content.

One of Lynch's comments rang bells:

Our institutions of higher education have overlooked an opportunity to support our most innovative and creative faculty for at least a decade now, to the detriment of both the faculty members and the institutions themselves. These faculty have been exploring ways in which works of authorship in the new digital medium can enhance teaching and learning and the communication of scholarship; such innovations are essential to keeping scholarship vital and effective, and they must not only be supported but nurtured. Indeed nurturing these innovations reaches to the core mission of our universities, and to the core values of our universities.

Read the rest - it's well worth the time.

While searching for information on the King County wireless Internet system, I came across a conference series I hadn't seen before, which is available on the Web. It's the Virtual Reference Desk Conference series. The first thing that hit my screen was a discussion between Mike Eisenberg (University of Washington) and Charles McClure (Florida State University) in the second conference in 2000, which is entertaining as well as informative. However, there's a lot more there on the impact of the Internet, and of electronic connection between user and library that points to significant changes going on and likely to accelerate.

The latest papers (although, in fact, most are presentations rather than papers) available are those from the 2002 conference. One of the 'exemplary' papers is from Simon Bains at the University of Edinburgh on Testing Collaborative Electronic Reference Services: The Experience of UK University Research Libraries in the Use of QuestionPoint

All in all, worth a browse.

In the course of my browsing, I came across Walt Crawford's column in American Libraries on 'the PoD people' - that is, the phenomenon of Print on Demand. These days anyone with a word-processor can produce a book text that is good enough for publication - at least in technical terms, whether it is readable is another matter! Crawford suggests that a publisher might charge $100 to $160 to convert the text to PoD form and make a profit. Of course, many people are already producing books in this way - but putting them on their Web sites, rather than having them turned into print. Much of the stuff I have looked at would not be worth buying in any event, but one shudders to think about the problems caused for libraries by having to select what is good from this kind of output for the benefit of their readers. A number of e-book providers already exist, for example cBook Pro offers to guide you through the production process and claim s that thousands of sales can be made to impulse buyers. For the PDA market there are sites like Handheld Crime, which offer both free downloads to Palms and Pocket PCs and books for sale.

In other words, Crawford is probably right about the potential explosion of output.

Tom

Greetings from snowy Poland. I'm in the old city of Torun, which currently has snow falling. I'm at a conference here of the DELOS group - dedicated to digital libraries in Europe. The papers will be published in some form after the conference and should be of interest to many readers of Information Research. In the interim, after the conference, the powerpoint presentations will be on the Web site of ICIMSS - I'll keep an eye on this myself and let people know when they are available.