Blog Day 2006

Today is Blog Day and bloggers are encouraged to recommend "5 new Blogs, Preferably, Blogs different from their own culture, point of view and attitude...." So here are five blogs for you to check out.

Restoration Tips & Notes / Media Formats & Resources -- I have recently become aware of Richard Hess' blog. He does not write frequently, but often enough and there is good content here for those dealing with sound recordings.

Confessions of a Mad Librarian -- I am a big Eli Edwards fan. She has her MLS and is now going to law school. She doesn't blog often anymore, but when she says something, people listen. (Reminiscent of the old E.F. Hutton TV commercial.) Generally she writes about copyright-related concerns.

BTW I met Eli face-to-face at the SLA conference in Toronto after the Copyright Roundtable. She came up and introduced herself. I didn't recognize her name, but once she said her blog's name, I knew exactly who she was!

hangingtogether.org -- "HangingTogether is a place where some of the staff at RLG Programs, part of the OCLC Programs and Research division, a partnership of libraries, archives, and museums, can talk about the intersections we see happening between these three different types of institutions."

Guenter Waibel, one of the bloggers here, also teaches part-time at Syracuse University (as I do) and reading this blog has been one way of getting to know him.

Lifehacker -- "Computers make us more productive. Yeah, right. Lifehacker recommends the software downloads and web sites that actually save time. Don't live to geek; geek to live."

Presentation Zen -- This is "Garr Reynolds' blog on issues related to professional presentation design." I must admit that I skim this blog, rather than read it in depth. What I find interesting about it are the screen shots from people's presentations and comments he makes about those presentations. There are a few people out there who are masters at doing presentations and we all could learn from them.

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Technorati tag: Blog Day

Article: Google Book Search Offers Free Downloads of Public Domain Books

Quoting the press release:

Working with our library partners, we're expanding access to books that are out of copyright and have become public domain material. Users can search and read these books on Google Book Search like always, but now they can also download and print them to enjoy at their own pace.

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Technorati tag: Google

Article: ProQuest Selected to Digitize Major Historic Newspapers (Revised)

This caught my eye....

The Library of Virginia is partnering with ProQuest Information and Learning on the digitization of historically significant newspapers. The Library is one of six pilot sites to receive funds from the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP -- http://www.neh.gov/projects/ndnp.html and http://www.loc.gov/ndnp ), a long- term effort by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Library of Congress to develop an internet-based, searchable database of U.S. newspapers. ProQuest is working with the Library of Virginia to digitize key titles covering the time period 1900-1910, including The Richmond Times-Dispatch. In addition, the Library of Congress has chosen ProQuest as a partner to digitally convert 10 years of the New York Tribune to NDNP specifications for inclusion in the NDNP repository.

Notice that the newspapers being digitized are in the public domain. The "ProQuest Historical Newspapers(TM), encompassing the full runs of America's most notable newspapers totaling more than 14 million pages of news, dating back to 1764." K. Matthew Dames, when he talks about materials being digitized, will mention that public domain materials can become the property of someone through digitization. Here we have public domain materials that we will now have to pay to use through ProQuest, since ProQuest will be digitizing them and making them available for a fee. We are reminded that public domain does not equal free or freely accessible. {Added 3:15 p.m.} Let's hope that the proper agreements are in place to ensure that these newspapers are freely available even though ProQuest, a for-profit company, is involved.

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Addendum (3:15 p.m.): Richard Hess e-mailed and noted that these newspapers should be available for free, since their conversion is being funded by NEH. In fact, the NEH web site says:

NEH recently solicited proposals from institutions to participate in the development of a test bed for the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP). Ultimately, over a period of approximately 20 years, NDNP will create a national, digital resource of historically significant newspapers from all the states and U.S. territories published between 1836 and 1922. This searchable database will be permanently maintained at the Library of Congress (LC) and be freely accessible via the Internet.

The press release I read (and have linked to in the title here) was written by ProQuest, so it doesn't highlight fully the efforts of NEH or the Library of Congress. Richard is correct -- these newspapers, digitized by ProQuest for NEH and the Library of Congress -- should be freely available. Let's hope that ProQuest didn't take a page out of the Google play-book.

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Technorati tag: Digitization

More on the agreement between CDL and Google

More people are reading the California Digital Library-Google agreement, and commenting on it. (See yesterday's post) Different details stand out to different people. In an e-mail this morning, Steve Abram noted about the provision that CDL cannot give copies of the digitized materials to other third parties. Quoting ComputerWorld:

The university agreed not to charge or receive payment "or other consideration" for services it provides that use the scanned material, except for supplementary services, such as copying costs or access to annotations. The university is also forbidden from sharing, licensing or selling the material to any third party. It can distribute no more than 10 percent of the scanned material to other libraries and educational institutions for academic purposes.

In the contract, this is covered in section 4.10 on page 6, which talks about use of the Image Coordinates and the University Digital Copy (both defined earlier in the contract).

The easiest question to ask is how will this impact interlibrary loan (ILL) or normal sharing that libraries do? Harder is how will this impact what we know as "the long tail?" Does this limit access to the long tail via CDL? Does it mean that at some point CDL will need to send people to Google to obtain the materials they need? Does CDL then become a "feeder" for Google? And what will the long-long-term effect of this contract be? These questions may take time and experience to answer. Let's hope that the answers are not painful for users.

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Technorati tags: Google, Digitization

Agreement between California Digital Library and Google

The Chronicle of Higher Education has an article about the agreement between the California Digital Library (CDL) and Google. The article includes a pointer to the actual contract. Thankfully, the Chronicle has read the contract and tell us:

According to the document, the university will provide at least 2.5 million volumes to Google for scanning, starting with 600 books a day and ratcheting up over time to 3,000 volumes a day. Materials pulled for scanning will be back on the shelves of their libraries within 15 days.

The contract outlines who will pay for what between Google and CPL, how each party can use the digitized materials, and how branding will be handled.

Everyone will find something of interest in this document. What I find interesting is that the books can go off-site to a site selected by Google for digitization. (The agreement uses the words "provided by" and "controlled by", but does not say "owned by.") The external facility will be named in the project plan. The agreement also says:

Google will use reasonable commercial efforts to ensure that Selected Content is returned within ten (10) business days of its being scanned or after a determination is made by Google that Selected Content will not be scanned. Notwithstanding the foregoing, Google agrees that no materials in a Project will be off University's shelves for longer than fifteen (15) business days or for a longer period as may be specified in the Project Plan.

I know of a facility that was bulking up during the spring and was hiring more technicians to do actual digitization; all in anticipation of a project that was coming. There is nothing out in public that connects this contract with that facility/vendor, so I'll not publicly tie the two together, since it may be pure coincidence. However, I would have to wonder about the impact on 3,000 books a day on any digitization facility. How many book scanners -- running 24/7 -- would you need? Even if the scanners are doing 1,200 - 3,000 pages per hour, that is a tremendous load. (The automated book scanners by Kirtas and 4DigitalBooks fall within that range.)

Of course, the confidentiality portion of the agreement will ensure that we may not know how things proceed and what problems (or successes) they have. Will they really be able to do 3,000 books per day? Maybe someone will give us a clue.

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Technorati tags: Google, Digitization