Wednesday, March 31, 2010

Podcast: William Patry speaking about "Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars"

Quoting the Beyond the Book web site:
William Patry is author of an eight-volume treatise on U.S. copyright law entitled Patry on Copyright and a separate treatise on the fair use doctrine. He is currently Senior Copyright Counsel at Google, Inc.; he previously served as copyright counsel to the U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on the Judiciary; as a Policy Planning Adviser to the Register of Copyrights; a law professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Georgetown University; and in private practice.
In this 12 minute podcast, Patry talks about his new book Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars, its original title and "why 'moral panic' describes the current situation."  A transcript is available.

Tuesday, March 30, 2010

Videos and proceedings from iPRES 2009 are now available

According to the announcement received today, the proceedings and videos from iPRES 2009 (held in San Francisco on Oct 5-6 2009) are now available online. The proceedings are available through the California Digital Library’s eScholarship site: http://www.escholarship.org/uc/cdl_ipres09

Videos of the presentations are available in addition to the papers and powerpoint presentations. Those are available on the conference program webpage: http://www.cdlib.org/services/uc3/iPres/confsched.html

Monday, March 29, 2010

Jill's Schedule: Spring 2010 (CIL, SLA and me the nominee)

I've had a busy winter, which at times has meant "running" through the weeks, airports and train stations.  The next few months are also going to be busy and let me take a moment to tell you where I'll be.
Jill Hurst-Wahl, 2008The SLA conference this year will be a very special event for me because I have been nominated to serve on SLA's Board of Directors.  Proposing someone for the Board is not something that the Nominating Committee does in haste and so I am very honored to have been considered and nominated.  While the actual election will be held in September, the SLA conference is where many Association members will be able to meet me face-to-face and learn more about me. For those that won't be at the conference, videos and other information from all of the candidates will be made available through the SLA web site and the publication Information Outlook.  My bio is already online and I hope that people will follow the links in it to this blog as well as eNetworking 101 in order to learn more about how I think and work.

Thursday, March 25, 2010

Event: The Tectonics of Digital Curation, May 25-26, 2010

I received this announcement via email. NEDCC always hosts quality events.


THE TECTONICS OF DIGITAL CURATION:
A Symposium on the Shifting Preservation and Access Landscape

MAY 25-26, 2010
The Ray and Maria Stata Center
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Cambridge, MA

PRESENTED BY the Northeast Document Conservation Center

HOSTED BY the MIT Libraries

THE TECTONICS OF DIGITAL CURATION explores the sustainability of cultural collections created for and maintained on the Web. At this two-day symposium, a diverse faculty of national experts will examine the forces at play in our increasingly networked society.

TOPICS WILL INCLUDE: divergence and complexity in information networking; digital preservation repositories; electronic copyright and intellectual property; collaborative and commercial preservation models; digital archiving strategies; open access to scholarly communication; the networked self; preservation of CAD models; and preservation of community-built digital creations (video games).

WHO SHOULD ATTEND?
Librarians, archivists, museum professionals, IT professionals, CIOs, administrators, scientists, architects, and scholars - any decision-maker responsible for creating, managing, or preserving digital resources that are accessed via networked systems

COST: $325; students: $275
REGISTRATION DEADLINE: Friday, May 14, 2010

FOR COMPLETE INFORMATION AND TO REGISTER: Visit www.nedcc.org

Tuesday, March 23, 2010

Call for Papers: 6th International Digital Curation Conference

This came to me via email....


CALL FOR PAPERS
6th International Digital Curation Conference
Participation & Practice: Growing the curation community through the data decade
6 - 8 December 2010, Chicago, USA


IDCC10 will be presented jointly by the Digital Curation Centre, UK and the Graduate School of Library and Information Science, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and in partnership with the Coalition for
Networked Information (CNI).

The Programme Committee invites the submission of papers that reflect developing trends in curation and address the issues of growing the curation community to meet the challenges of the next decade. Papers can be research or practice based. Of particular interest:
  • How is the digital curation community growing?
  • How are data curation skills embedded in the curriculum?
  • How curators are deployed in practice?
  • What are the new research and development results in data curation?

All papers accepted for the conference will be published in the International Journal of Digital Curation (http://www.ijdc.net/index.php/ijdc)

Full details of the Call for Papers can be found at: http://www.dcc.ac.uk/events/dcc-2010/call-for-papers/

Submissions will be accepted from 1 May 2010

Sent on behalf of IDCC10 Programme Committee: Co-chaired by Kevin Ashley, Director Designate of the Digital Curation Centre (DCC), Liz Lyon, Associate Director of the DCC, Allen Renear and Melissa Cragin from the Graduate School of Library and Information Science (GSLIS) at the University of Illinois.

Wednesday, March 17, 2010

Book Chapter: Copyright Law, Intellectual Property Policy, And Academic Culture

If you are interested in copyright, then you may be interested in this.  In 2006, the Center for Intellectual Property at University of Maryland University College published The Center for Intellectual Property Handbook.  Clifford Lynch wrote chapter 9 entitled "Copyright Law, Intellectual Property Policy, And Academic Culture" and that chapter is available for free on the CIP web site.

In the chapter, Lynch argues that we are narrowing our rights by seeking permission to use materials when permission is not needed.  Why?  Because academic institutions have become risk averse.  I would argue that our culture has become more litigious and so we're all more risk adverse.  Let's seek permission - just to be sure - rather than use the rights given to use in copyright law.

Article: Is Copyright the Buggy Whip of the Digital Age?

I am more focused on copyright these days than most, since I'm teaching a course on copyright this semester.  The clash between copyright law and use has sparked lively discussion and I'm sure this article will add to it.

Judy Shapiro wrote this article on a Copyright Clearance Center conference entitled "The Collision of Ideas 2010."The two-page article is a quick read and will give you food for thought (and argument).  I especially like the story that David Hoffman, a noted PBS video documentarian, told about his Sputnik documentary.

As my students are realizing, copyright law can be both freeing and confining.  The word used by Jim Griffin, the founder of OneHouse, is "yoke".  To me, that implies the burden of work...and copyright clearance can indeed be work.

Tuesday, March 16, 2010

An interesting use of digital assets (NCSU WolfWalk)

Last week, the North Carolina State University Libraries released WolfWalk.  WofWalk is "an innovative tool that makes it easy to explore the NC State campus and its history. WolfWalk capitalizes on the location awareness of today’s mobile devices to allow users to give themselves a self-guided historical walk through NC State’s main campus. As users stroll around campus, their mobile devices detect their current locations and then deliver a tour of nearby buildings and other historically interesting locations. Users with devices that don’t support GPS or other location detection, including older iPods, can manually navigate through the site to enjoy a tour of campus." The press release goes on to say:
The new tool draws on the resources of the University Archives in the NCSU Libraries’ Special Collections Research Center, a vast array of documents, photos, audio files and other historical materials from the founding of the school up through the present.
 There is a preview of WolfWalk available on the NCSU web site.

If you point your mobile browser at http://m.lib.ncsu.edu/wolfwalk, you can use WolfWalk even it you are not on campus.  I just tried it and it is VERY cool!

Don't go it alone - find a user group

Learning any software package in a vacuum -- by yourself -- is not fun.  You may become functional in the software, but those tricks that will make your life easier are learned by interacting with other people.  This is true for digital asset management software.

Have you connected with other users?  Do you know who they are?  Have you asked them questions?  Have you looked over each others' shoulders?  If you haven't, check with the sales staff for your software and see if they can put you in touch with other users in your region.  Better yet, ask if there is a user group meeting.

Speaking of the need to lean on others...

CONTENTdm seems to be one piece of software that truly requires interacting with others in order to learn.  While there are extensive help pages and support from OCLC, the trick seems to be interacting with other users during the learning process.  One person said that there are feature that you rarely use, so it's best to find someone to walk you through them rather than struggling on your one.  In the U.S., regional CONTENTdm user groups have sprung up.  For example, the Eastern CONTENTdm Users Group will have its third annual conference this summer at West Point. 

Wednesday, March 10, 2010

Book: A Guide to Distributed Digital Preservation

 The announcement below was received via email.  Please note that the book is for sale via lulu.com


Authored by members of the MetaArchive Cooperative, A Guide to Distributed Digital Preservation is the first of a series of volumes from the Educopia Institute describing successful collaborative strategies and articulating specific new models that may help cultural memory organizations work together for their mutual benefit.

This volume is devoted to the broad topic of distributed digital preservation, a still-emerging field of practice for the cultural memory arena. Replication and distribution hold out the promise of indefinite preservation of materials without degradation, but establishing effective organizational and technical processes to enable this form of digital preservation is daunting. Institutions need practical examples of how this task can be accomplished in manageable, low-cost ways.

This guide is written with a broad audience in mind that includes librarians, archivists, scholars, curators, technologists, lawyers, and administrators. Readers may use this guide to gain both a philosophical and practical understanding of the emerging field of distributed digital preservation, including how to establish or join a network.

Readers may access A Guide to Distributed Digital Preservation as a freely downloadable pdf and/or as a print publication for purchase. Please visit http://www.metaarchive.org/GDDP to download or order the book.


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Tuesday, March 09, 2010

Digital Lives Research Project & blog

According to the web site, the "Digital Lives Research Project is designed to provide a major pathfinding study of personal digital collections."  One of the ways that the project released information was (is) through its blog. An initial synthesis of the project is available (259 pages).

This looks like a report that should generate a wealth of discussion and ideas.  The idea of "personal curation" is one that might filter its way into the tools and training that we give students and adults.  I'll be interested to see what comes out of this...

Blue Ribbon Task Force Report: Preserving Our Digital Knowledge Base Must be a Public Priority

Below is a press release that I received via email. The idea of preserving our digital knowledge is something we all know and something that many of us ignore. The fact is that our reliance on digital information means that our knowledge could be lost very quickly, if saving it is not made a priority.


Blue Ribbon Task Force Report: Preserving Our Digital Knowledge Base
Must be a Public Priority
Dollars Won't Do It Alone: Deluge of Digital Data Needs Economically Sustainable Plans

Addressing one of the most urgent societal challenges of the Information Age - ensuring that valued digital information will be accessible not just today, but in the future - requires solutions that are at least as much economic and social as technical, according to a new report by a Blue Ribbon Task Force.

The Final Report from the Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access, called "Sustainable Economics for a Digital Planet: Ensuring Long-term Access to Digital Information", is the result of a two-year effort focusing on  the critical economic challenges of  preserving an ever-increasing amount of information in a world gone digital. The full report is available online at
http://brtf.sdsc.edu/biblio/BRTF_Final_Report.pdf .

"The Data Deluge is here.  Ensuring that our most valuable information is available both today and tomorrow is not just a matter of finding sufficient funds," said Fran Berman, vice president for research at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and co-chair of the Task Force. "It's about creating a "data economy" in which those who care, those who will pay, and those who preserve are working in coordination."

The challenge in preserving valuable digital information - consisting of text, video, images, music, sensor data, etc. generated throughout all areas of our society - is real and growing at an exponential pace. A recent study by the International Data Corporation (IDC) found that a total of 3,892,179,868,480,350,000,000 (that's roughly 3.9 trillion times a trillion) new digital information bits were created in 2008. In the future, the digital universe is expected to double in size every 18 months, according to the IDC report.
While much has been written on the digital preservation issue as a technical challenge, the Blue Ribbon Task Force report focuses on the economic aspect; i.e. how stewards of valuable, digitally-based information can pay for preservation over the longer term. The report provides general principles and actions to support long-term economic sustainability; context-specific recommendations tailored to specific scenarios analyzed in the report; and an agenda for priority actions and next steps, organized according to the type of decision maker best suited to carry that action forward. Moreover, the report is intended to serve as a foundation for further study in this critical area.

In addition to releasing its report, the Task Force earlier this month announced plans for a one-day symposium to provide a forum for discussion on economically sustainable digital preservation practices. The symposium, to be held April 1 in Washington D.C., will include a spectrum of national leaders from the Executive Office of the President of the United States, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the Smithsonian Museum, Nature Magazine, Google, and other organizations for whom digital information is fundamental for success.

Value, Incentives, and Roles & Responsibilities
The report of the Blue Ribbon Task Force focuses on four distinct scenarios, each having ever-increasing amounts of preservation-worthy digital assets in which there is a public interest in long-term preservation:  scholarly discourse , research data, commercially-owned cultural content (such as digital movies and music), and collectively-produced Web content (such as blogs).

"Valuable digital information spans the spectrum from official e-documents to some YouTube videos. No one economic model will cost-effectively support them all, but all require cost-effective economic models," said Berman, who was director of the San Diego Supercomputer Center at the University of California, San Diego, before joining Rensselaer last year.
The report categorizes the economics of digital preservation into three "necessary conditions" closely aligned with the needs of stakeholders: recognizing the value of data and selecting materials for longer-term preservation; providing incentives for decision makers to preserve data directly or provide preservation services for others; and articulating the roles and responsibilities among those involved in the preservation process. The report further aligns those conditions with the basic economic principle of supply and demand, and warns that without well-articulated demand for access to preserved digital assets, there will be no supply of preservation services.

"Addressing the issues of value, incentives, and roles and responsibilities helps us understand who benefits from long-term access to digital materials, who should be responsible for preservation, and who should pay for it," said Brian Lavoie, research scientist at OCLC and Task Force co-chair. "Neglecting to account for any of these conditions significantly reduces the prospects of achieving sustainable digital preservation activities over the long run."

Task Force Recommendations
The Blue Ribbon panel report cites several specific recommendations for decision makers and stakeholders to consider as they seek economically sustainable preservation practices for digital information. While the report covers these recommendations in detail, below is a summary listing key areas of priority for near-term action:

Organizational Action

  • develop public-private partnerships, similar to ones formed by the Library of Congress
  • ensure that organizations have access to skilled personnel, from domain experts to legal and business specialists
  • create and sustain secure chains of stewardship between organizations over  the long term
  • achieve economies of scale and scope wherever possible
Technical Action

  • build capacity to support stewardship in all areas
  • lower the costs of preservation overall
  • Determine the optimal level of technical curation needed to create a flexible strategy for all types of digital material
Public Policy Action

  • modify copyright laws to enable digital preservation
  • create incentives and requirements for private entities to preserve on behalf of the public (financial incentives, handoff requirements)
  • sponsor public-private partnerships
  • clarify rights issues associated with Web-based materials
Education and Public Outreach Action

  • promote education and training for 21st century digital preservation (domain-specific skills, curatorial best practices, core competencies in relevant science, technology, engineering, and mathematics knowledge)
  • raise awareness of the urgency to take timely preservation actions
The report concluded that sustainable preservation strategies are not built all at once, nor are they static.

"The environment in which digital preservation takes place can be very dynamic," said OCLC's Brian Lavoie. "Priorities change, policies change, stakeholders change. A key element of a robust sustainability strategy is to anticipate the effect of these changes and take steps to minimize the risk that long-term preservation goals will be impacted by short-term disruptions in resources, incentives, and other economic factors. If we can do this, we will have gone a long way toward ensuring that society's valuable digital content does indeed survive." 

About the Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access
The Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access was launched in late 2007 by the National Science Foundation and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, in partnership with the Library of Congress, the Joint Information Systems Committee of the United Kingdom, the Council on Library and Information Resources, and the National Archives and Records Administration. The Task Force was commissioned to explore the economic sustainability challenge of digital preservation and access.  An Interim report discussing the economic context for preservation, Sustaining the Digital Investment:  Issues and Challenges of Economically Sustainable Digital Preservation, is available at the Task Force website,
http://brtf.sdsc.edu .  Please visit the website for more information about the Task Force and its upcoming symposium, called A National Conversation on the Economic Sustainability of Digital Information, to take place April 1, 2010 in Washington D.C. A similar symposium will be held in the United Kingdom on May 6, 2010, at the Wellcome Collection Conference Centre, in London. Space is limited so early registration is advised.  More information is available at http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/preservation/BRTFUKSymposium.aspx.



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Monday, March 08, 2010

Event: Digital Preservation – The Planets Way: 19-21 April 2010

Received via email.


Registration is open for the final Planets training and outreach event, which takes place in Rome with the support of the Pontificia Università Gregoriana.  This is the final event in the series of five.

Day 1 will address the case for digital preservation, digital preservation as a risk management activity, the action that needs to be taken and introduce the Planets framework, tools and services as an integrated approach to digital preservation. Local organisations will present two case studies to show how they are preserving digital collections.

Days 2 and 3 provide an opportunity to meet and learn from the experts, creators and developers of Planets. Using a sample collection, you will gain hands-on experience of Planets tools and services. There will also be plenty of opportunity to ask questions, network with peers and to try out tools and exercises.
Register now for day 1 only at a cost of EUR95 or for the whole three-day event at a cost of EUR199 at: http://www.tcp-events.co.uk/planets2010/.

Places are limited and registration will close on 9 April 2010.

To see the event programme and to find out more information on Planets and the training and outreach event, please visit: http://www.planets-project.eu/events/rome-2010/ or send an email to trainingevents@planets-project.eu.


To read delegates’ first-hand accounts from our previous London event visit:
http://www.archiveshub.ac.uk/blog/. http://futurearchives.blogspot.com/2010/02/music-planets-and-secret-messages.html.

Planets (Preservation and Long-Term Access through Networked Services) is a four-year project co-funded by the European Union and delivered by 16 national libraries, national archives, universities and technology companies across Europe.


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Sunday, March 07, 2010

What's new and how to stay current

First, the  Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) and the Digital Curation Centre (DCC) are now publishing a joint newsletter called "What's New".  The second issue was released this month.  This replaces the DCC's monthly Curation News Round-up and the DPC's quarterly bulletin 'What's new in Digital Preservation?'  I don't see an RSS feed for the site, so I hope this is something they will add, since having content delivered is better than going out to find it.

Second, each time I teach a semester-long course in digitization, I have my students interview someone who is currently involved in a digitization project/program.  These interviews are educational for the students, since they get to hear what practitioners are doing and thinking. They are also educatinal for me, because I get a quick peak into many programs.  

What I always find interesting from the interviews is how people learned about digitization as well as how they keep up with what's going on. Many practitioners learned about digitization by doing it, rather than from classes, etc.  Rarely do my students find someone who took extensive formal training, even though that traning exists.

Most people stay up-to-date through email discussion groups, newsletters and conference sessions. Only a few people talk about anything formal that they do in order to stay current.  In looking at where people do go for information, there is no central location that everyone visits.  We all go in different directions.  That could mean that we're all not tripping over important information that could help us in our programs.

Question - should there be workshops or conferences (virtual or in person), specifically for those people that are out in the field, geared to help them learn about and discuss the latest information, techniques, hardware and software?  If yes, what would your vision of such an event be?


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Event: ECDL 2010, Glasgow, Sept 6-10, 2010

Received via email. Please check the web site for updates on proposal deadlines, etc.


14th European Conference on Digital Libraries
September 6-10, 2010
Glasgow, UK
http://www.ecdl2010.org

The European Conference on Digital Libraries (ECDL) is the leading European scientific forum on digital libraries and associated  technical, practical, and social issues, bringing together  researchers, developers, content providers and users in the field.  ECDL 2010, the 14th conference in this series, will be organised by the University of Glasgow.  The proceedings will be published as a volume of Springer's Lecture Notes on Computer Science (LNCS) series.


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