An interesting day of copyright today. Kenneth Crews is with us in Minnesota and gave a great workshop for our staff today (faculty get a taste tomorrow). And when I got home I found Mary excited about a project at Downhill Battle to encourage people to copy Eyes on the Prize. This classic documentary about the civil rights movement of the 1960’s is not in legal distribution because the rights granted for the clips used have expired and new rights have not been cleared yet by the production company. Civil disobedience over copyright issues. Interesting times.So it may be a bit much to ask the Libraries to get on the criminal side of a copyright issue, but what if Libraries around the country (and ours in particular) took part in the Downhill Battle 2/8 Black History Month event to host public showings of episodes of the documentary? Of course, we would not show the illegally downloaded versions from the net, but the legal copies from our collections. The discussion fostered, though, could still be about the difficulty of preserving critical pieces of culture in an era of tough copyright enforcement.

The RLG has released new guidelines for their Cultural Materials Initiative. Note the extremely slim descriptive requirements: creator, type, title, date, id, and pointer. It appears that a record would be acceptable with just a unique id, a work type, and a pointer to a surrogate if the creator, title, and date were not known. There are other elements to the "value-added" and "bonus" segments of the "core fields," but the admission seems to be that thorough metadata is very hard to get.

Think Secret is reporting that the wonderfully named Delicious Monster Software is working up an app called Delicious Library. As a librarian with a Mac, this is a piece of software I’ve always wanted! Make sure to page through the pictures at the Think Secret site. Even if this app is vapor, the pictures present dozens of interface innovations that would make our academic library system catalogs a whole lot more inviting. Why can’t we do this with our catalogs? And check out the iSight barcode idea! Note that an iSight camera costs only $150, less than most dedicated barcode wands, and it can do much more than just read barcodes. I hope this product is real so I can buy an iSight to see whether this technology actually works.

Slashdot is carrying a nice little interview with Jimmy Wales, the creator of the Wikipedia. If you’ve not yet discovered this wonderful example of “open content” you should take a peek. The wikipedia’s philosophy of openness not only of access, but also of authorship is an inspiring extension of what libraries have been about. What if we didn’t just share the reference collection, but helped co-author it? Amazingly, the wikipedia organizers consider $50,000 of support a big deal. Libraries regularly attract bigger grants from the feds and organization like Mellon with a whole lot less to show for it. I wonder what the wikipedia could do with a $250,000 Mellon grant?

A colleague passed me this message which echoes my sense that some protective clauses we fight to include in our contracts are nearly worthless in the real world.

About six months ago, [our] University Libraries was faced with a decision about continuing our access to what was formerly called Elsevier’s Academic Freedom Collection. We had subscribed to the package of Academic Ideal e-journal collection since 1998 through our consortium. Elsevier wasn’t willing to work through consortium arrangements and wasn’t willing to provide the group of journals as a package any longer. [Our] Libraries’ acquisitions budget had been cut and we were facing yet another reduction. We could not afford to subscribe individually to all the previously owned journals via ScienceDirect. We renewed 34 titles in print. We also could not afford to pay the annual access fee to maintain ScienceDirect linking to the backfiles. We chose the option of receiving the Ideal/Freedom journal backfile data that we had purchased by our several years of subscriptions. Elsevier sent us 8 DLT tapes about two months after our request for the data. After another frustrating two months of locating the outdated tape drives needed to open and access the tapes, we have discovered that there is duplicated data and that the data does not appear in any kind of rational order.

It will be interesting to see how they fare. I’m afraid that the data in vendor systems will get more and more complex and that a “dump” of this data will be less and less useful to anyone outside that vendor’s shop. To make these clauses meaningful will require that we develop some well known formats and then demand the offloaded data meet these specs. Of course, none of our contracts currently contain such requirements and in any case no such standards currently exist.

I have a similar concern with regard to source code escrow agreements. How much good does it do us to have source code without the suite of compilers, libraries, and tools that it takes to build a given application? Even if we could build it, would we have the skills to do so with confidence? In most cases, wouldn’t we migrate to an alternate vendor’s product before taking on maintenance of a defunct vendor’s product?

I participated in an advisory board meeting of the Documenting Internet2 project this week. As we considered appraisal strategies for collecting electronic documents and records from I2, I wondered whether appraisal would shift into a retrospective task when dealing with the electronic record of organizations. Will it be easier to collect “everything” (or whatever can be easily acquired, anyway) and then become selective later by mining that trove for the important bits. Estimates at this meeting suggested that at least 95% of “everything” is not valuable to researchers, and appraisal has been the traditional tool to ferret out the golden 5% (or even 1% in many cases). In the electronic realm, though, could it be a wiser use of human capital to collect the 100% and then mine out the 5% as needed?

One dash of cold water on this approach has been the dearth of data mining tools. However, the rise of litigation support software may be one place to hunt for useful models. The U is also home to a strong data mining research group in the DTC. Perhaps we could work with them to develop research tools for future archives?

Finally, we are beginning to see this approach emerge on the personal computer desktop. Last week Steve Jobs announced that the next generation of Mac OS X (10.4 or Tiger) will incorporate a technology Apple calls Spotlight. Spotlight will be a very fast search engine for the Mac OS. I wonder if, as search gets fast and easy enough, it replace organization? We all know how difficult it is to create a good filing system and stick to it, even on a computer. As search improves, will we just give up on organization and instead rely on searching to pull together the documents we need as we need them?

Michael Lesk has made the US copyright renewal registry (1923-1963) searchable. This is a big help in identifying book titles which may be out of copyright even though they were published between 1923 & 1964.

Boy, is that ever a dull term! We think a lot in libraries about how we can put more information at the fingertips of our users with just a single search. MetaSearch attempts to knit together our patchwork quilt of vendors and databases into one unified set of results for users. Fat chance! All we seem to be able to do is slow down search results and present a hodgepodge of unlikely-bedfellow results. Still, metasearch is a worthy goal and we keep trying. I think Amazon is demonstrating an interesting alternative model with it’s a9.com service. There you will find websearch results from Google in one column and a set of results from Amazon in a second column. This is in some ways similar to the multiple layers of results found at Teoma. Can we apply this to library systems? Could we show Google results side by side with results from our local resources? If we don’t, will Google eat our lunch anyway, especially now that they are negotiating with commercial vendors to bring more of the “dark web” to light?

I had a nice day today at our local ARLD (Academic and Research Libraries Division of the Minnesota Library Assocation) Day conference at the Arboretum in Chanhassen. Most interesting to me was a presentation on the “Googlization of Library Values” by librarians from St. Cloud State, St. Catherine’s, and Carleton College. I was expecting the usual library lament about how we have to resist the dominion of google which is teaching our patrons that search is simple and everything is on the net. Surprise! Every one of the presenters spent their time sharing positive lessons we need to learn from Google. Robin Ewing asked us to learn from three core values demonstrated by Google: vision, usability, and whimsy. We all know Google thinks big and keeps stuff simple, but I had not really valued their sense of whimsy. Upon some reflection I find it true: Google takes the time to make things a little fun, from their name and logo to things like allowing their interface to be translated into Klingon and Elmer Fudd. Can we make library services anything other than deadly dull?

John clued me in to SRW today. I thought I had not heard of it, but have just found that it is the name for Z39.50 Next Generation, something I had hear of. Do you think Z39.50’s reputation is so poor this group had to choose a new name?