Law Librarian Blog

Survey of Library eBook Use

Primary Research Group has published Library Use of E-books, 2008-09 Edition, (ISBN 1-57440-101-7; $75.00). Data in the report are based on a survey of 75 academic, public and special libraries. Librarians detail their plans on how they plan to develop their e-book collections, what they think of e-book readers and software, and which e-book aggregators and publishers appeal to them most and why. Other issues covered include: library production of e-books and collection digitization, e-book collection information literacy efforts, use of e-books in course reserves and inter-library loan, e-book pricing and inflation issues, acquisition sources and strategies for e-books and other issues of concern to libraries and book publishers.

Some of the findings of the 110 page report are:

• Libraries in the sample expected to renew over 77% of their current contracts.
• Well over 81% of the sample cataloged their e-book collection and listed it in their online library catalog.
• E-book spending by libraries is growing rapidly in 2008 but by significantly less than in 2007
• For the most part, librarians in the sample felt that their patrons were less skilled in using e-book collections than they were in using databases of magazine, newspaper and journal articles.
• The libraries in the sample had MARC records for a mean of approximately 74% of the e-books in their collections.
• Many libraries reported significant use of electronic directories. 12.5% reported extensive use and 30% said that use was significant. The larger libraries reported the heaviest use.
• Use of e-books in the hard sciences was particularly high. More than 30% of participants said that use of e-books in the hard sciences (defined as chemistry, physics and biology) was quite extensive and another 26% noted significant use.
• Libraries in the sample maintained a print version for a mean of 24% of the e-books in their e-book collections.
• Nearly 21% of the libraries in our sample have digitized out-of-copyright books in their collections in order to make their contents more available to their patrons.
• E-books account for only about 3.9% of the books on course reserve, with a minimum of 0 to a maximum of 30%.
• Nearly 70% of the sample total spending on e-books was with aggregators, while just over 24.6% of the total spending was spent with individual publishers.

Data are broken out by library budget size, for US and non-US libraries and for academic and non-academic libraries. The report presents more than 300 tables of data on e-book use by libraries, as well as analysis and commentary. [JH]

UNHCR and Google Earth Unveil Program for Humanitarian Operations

From the press release:

"Representatives of the UN refugee agency and Google on Tuesday unveiled a powerful new online mapping programme that provides an up-close and multifaceted view of some of the world's major displacement crises and the humanitarian efforts aimed at helping the victims.

The "Google Earth Outreach" programme gives UNHCR and other humanitarian agencies the ability to use Google Earth and Maps to highlight their work on behalf of millions of refugees and other populations of concern in some of the world's most remote and difficult areas." 

Very cool.  [RJ]

Lincoln and his Circle

Digital Collection from the University of Rochester Libraries: "The project seeks to digitize and make available the letters to, from, and about Abraham Lincoln that are held in the collections of the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections at the University of Rochester."  You can browse the collection or search by keyword, writer, recipient and date range.  [RJ]

The Religion Clauses in the 21st Century: Symposium Papers

From the press release:

"ACS and the West Virginia Law Review are pleased to announce that papers written for “The Religion Clauses in the 21st Century” symposium held at the West Virginia University College of Law are now available. Video excerpts of the panelists discussing symposium topics are also available.

Written by scholars in the law of church and state, the symposium papers reflect perspectives on issues organized according to these themes: The Religion Clauses in Institutional Contexts, Government Religious Expression, Accommodation of Religion, and Religion and Politics.”   [RJ]

Global Database on the Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement

From the site:

"The Global Database on the Guiding Principles provides instant access to official documents about the rights of the internally displaced and the application of the Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement. The database includes relevant:

• National laws and policies;
• Regional and international instruments;
• Observations and recommendations of UN treaty-monitoring bodies;
• Reports of UN charter bodies;
• Resolutions of the UN General Assembly; and
• Statements of national authorities.
• When available, documents are provided in English, French and Spanish.

The Database is (i) a practical tool to assist policymakers, legislators and their advisers develop laws, policies and other instruments on internal displacement and to monitor their implementation based on the standards recognized in the Guiding Principles; (ii) an advocacy tool for lawyers, jurists and human rights and humanitarian activists arguing for implementation of the rights set out in the Guiding Principles; and (iii) a research tool for academics and students interested in the documents that formed the basis for the Guiding Principles and the subsequent impact of the Principles in protecting the rights of internally displaced persons."  [RJ]

Gutenberg-e Offers Open Access

From the site: "Columbia University Press is pleased to announce that Gutenberg-e is now an open access site. These award winning monographs, coordinated with the American Historical Association, afford emerging scholars new possibilities for online publications, weaving traditional narrative with digitized primary sources, including maps, photographs, and oral histories."

See also: Landmark Digital History Monograph Project Goes Open Access, The Chronicle. [JH]

LC's Digital Preservation Program Launches Newsletter

News from the Library of Congress:

"A monthly online newsletter highlighting the important work that the Library of Congress’s digital preservation program is performing to collect and preserve the nation’s heritage in digital form will launch in March.

The Newsletter of the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP) will be produced by the Library’s Office of Strategic Initiatives, which is leading NDIIPP, and will offer a digest of recent news related to the program’s activities. The newsletter will contain short descriptions of each news item, with links provided to the full story on the NDIIPP Web site (www.digitalpreservation.gov).

NDIIPP is the Library’s program to build a national network of partners dedicated to the collection and preservation of important digital materials that are at risk of loss if they are not now preserved. The program focuses on born-digital content; that is, materials that are created digitally and exist in no other form, such as electronic journals and Web sites as well as films, television programs, sound recordings, maps and other media that are digitally produced.

To subscribe to the newsletter, go to http://service.govdelivery.com/service/subscribe.html?code=USLOC_13. Here you will type in your e-mail address and press "Enter." Then you will see a list of all available e-mail updates from the Library of Congress; you can subscribe to any of these services. To receive the NDIIPP newsletter, scroll down and click on Digital Preservation."

[RJ]

Open Access Publishing in the Legal Academy

Gene Koo, CALI Fellow and co-editor of Law School Innovation blog, writes:

The openness of law schools'journals is largely due to history rather than deliberate planning. It gives law schools a huge potential leg up in entering the digital knowledge network, but because it's arisen by happenstance, it's also vulnerable to being undermined. It would be ironic indeed if, as the rest of academia moves towards openness that law schools could be at risk of being hemmed in.

Gene proceeds to outline some fundamental steps for an action plan for open access publishing in the legal academy. Check out his post, Harvard's open publishing policy and the outlook for law schools. I encourage you to submit your thoughts to Gene in the form of comments to his post. [JH]

Harvard Faculty Adopts Open Access Requirement

The Chronicle  of Higher Education is reporting that Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences adopted a policy that requires faculty members to allow the university to make their scholarly articles available free online. I believe this is a first and it opens the door for other universities and colleges to adopt similar policies.

Here's the text, provided by Open Access News:

The Faculty of Arts and Sciences of Harvard University is committed to disseminating the fruits of its research and scholarship as widely as possible. In keeping with that commitment, the Faculty adopts the following policy: Each Faculty member grants to the President and Fellows of Harvard College permission to make available his or her scholarly articles and to exercise the copyright in those articles. In legal terms, the permission granted by each Faculty member is a nonexclusive, irrevocable, paid-up, worldwide license to exercise any and all rights under copyright relating to each of his or her scholarly articles, in any medium, and to authorize others to do the same, provided that the articles are not sold for a profit. The policy will apply to all scholarly articles written while the person is a member of the Faculty except for any articles completed before the adoption of this policy and any articles for which the Faculty member entered into an incompatible licensing or assignment agreement before the adoption of this policy. The Dean or the Dean’s designate will waive application of the policy for a particular article upon written request by a Faculty member explaining the need.

To assist the University in distributing the articles, each Faculty member will provide an electronic copy of the final version of the article at no charge to the appropriate representative of the Provost’s Office in an appropriate format (such as PDF) specified by the Provost’s Office. The Provost’s Office may make the article available to the public in an open-access repository.

The Office of the Dean will be responsible for interpreting this policy, resolving disputes concerning its interpretation and application, and recommending changes to the Faculty from time to time. The policy will be reviewed after three years and a report presented to the Faculty.

Inside Higher Ed's coverage of the story: Harvard Opts In to ‘Opt Out’ Plan. See also Harvard University Librarian Robert Darnton's The Case for Open Access (Harvard Crimson). [JH]

The Frankenstein of Book Digitalization Projects, Google Books

1,000,000th Book Scanned

On Feb. 2, 2008, the University of Michigan Library digitized its one millionth book, most of which was done as part of the Library's deal with Google. See Paul Courant's, Dean of Libraries, blog post and the Library's website page, which includes its mass digitalization processing flowchart (pdf).

Thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of books are being added to Google Book Search every day, but writes Campus Technology's Dian Schaffhauser, "Once you get past the freakishly high numbers bandied about, the two-dozen-plus distinguished institutions that have signed on, the legal paranoia and the ultra-ultra-secret processes and technologies involved-you'll find that Book Search is simply another high-cost effort that is simultaneously visionary and crude." Schaffhauser adds, "[the project] doesn't even have to succeed in order to impact the transformation of scholarship activities."

In Google Book Search: The Good, the Bad, & the Ugly, Schaffhauser provides an inside look at how one of Google's partners, the University of California, is meeting its six-year contractual commitment to feed 2.5 million volumes into the Google Book Search system.

In the article we learn that UC is obligated to delivery 3,000 books per day. How does UC meet this goal?

It isn't by being overly selective. And it doesn't involve rare materials that aren't part of the circulating collection. "All of the libraries are talking about that, in the sense of what might be the most interesting materials to scan," says [Robin] Chandler, [former director of data acquisitions for UC's California Digital Library]. "But I'll be very frank: There's a real balance point between volume and selection, especially when looking at these numbers. UC is trying to meet the needs of the contract it's signed."

If you remember your Hegel, Quantity becomes Quality when the number is large. OK, it's been about 35 years since I read Hegel but the idea is simple enough; one atom bomb is a threat; 10,000 nuclear weapons is MADness. The quantity of digitalized books that are and will be contained in the Google Book Search database may result in Google Book Search becoming the de facto standard for researching information contained in digital books. That too would be madness. I highly recommend this article (and accompanying podcast of Dian Schaffhauser's interview with Robin Chandler) to anyone interested in how the Frankenstein of book digitalization projects was and is being created.

Hat tip to LISNews. [JH]

Should You Be Using DSpace?

DSpace is a centralized, electronic repository for the massive amounts of intellectual property created by research institutions. It can be used for a variety of digital archiving needs -- from institutional repositories to learning object repositories or electronic records management, and more.

Law schools tend to look to SSRN and bePress for their digial archiving needs but both are limited to scholarly text-based works in ADA non-complaint PDF formats and both leave much to be desired in metadata practices. DSpace can be used for all digital formats and may be either a viable alternative to SSRN and beSpace or an opportunity to create a more comprehensive institutional repository.

The DSpace engine is an open-source storage and retrieval system that individual repositories can customize and extend. Before attempting to reinvent the wheel, DSpace is worth checking out. It's well beyond the early adapter stage.

DSpace Home | FAQ | Project Wiki | The DSpace Architecture (pdf)

Jointly developed by HP and the MIT Libraries beginning in 2002, the DSpace project is now supported by the aptly named DSpace Foundation. According to DSpace, there are currently 261 DSpace instances registered on ROAR (Registry of Open Access Repositories). That's 26% of the 968 repositories registered on ROAR. See Who's Using DSpace. [JH]

Congressional Documents Online

From the Rutgers-Camden School of Law Library:

"The Law Library is in the process of digitizing our print collection of Congressional documents (U.S. Congressional Hearings and Committee Prints). As of now, there are over 1,000,000 pages available consisting of over 4,800 documents. Click here for access."  [RJ]

Bailey's Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography

Charles W. Bailey, Jr. has updated his The Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography (SEPB) again. SEPB presents selected English-language articles, books, and other printed and electronic sources that are useful in understanding scholarly electronic publishing efforts on the Internet. Most sources have been published between 1990 and the present. Where possible, links are provided to sources that are freely available on the Internet. The bibliography is regularly updated on the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog.

Check out Bailey's List of Scholarly Electronic Publishing Resources and other materials at Digital Scholarship. His DigitalKoans blog is a great place to read his commentaty on copyright, open access, scholarly communication, and other digital information issues. [JH]

National Judicial Reporting Program Series

From the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research: "This series tabulates the number of persons convicted of felonies in state courts and describes their sentences. Data were collected from state courts and state prosecutors in 100 counties of the United States. The collection contains socio-demographic information such as age, race, and sex of the felon. Types of offenses committed include homicide, rape, and robbery. Adjudication variables referring to the process between arrest and sentencing are also included. Data can be analyzed at the national level or by the individual counties."  [RJ]

Nation Votes: American Election Returns, 1787-1825

From the site: "A New Nation Votes is a searchable collection of election returns from the earliest years of American democracy. The data was compiled by Philip Lampi. The American Antiquarian Society and Tufts University Digital Collections and Archives have mounted it online for you with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Provides state, county and city election results for federal, state, and local officials, 1787-1825.  You can search by combinations of states, candidates, office titles, and dates."  [RJ]

New Resources from Harvard's Open Collections Program

From Harvard's Open Collections Program:

• Women Working, 1800-1930 explores women's roles in the US economy between 1800 and the Great Depression. Working conditions, conditions in the home, costs of living, recreation, health and hygiene, conduct of life, policies and regulations governing the workplace, and social issues are all well documented by original source material.
• Immigration to the United States, 1789-1930 includes books, manuscripts, maps, photographs, and other historical materials that document voluntary immigration to the United States from the ratification of the Constitution in 1789 to the Great Depression.

[RJ]

Columbia Becomes Newest Partner in Google Book Search Library Project

Details:

• Columbia University Libraries press release
• FAQ about Columbia-Google Book Search Partnership

[JH}

Updates from LII

Teknoids email reprinted with permission from Tom Bruce over at LII:

The LII has a couple of stocking stuffers for you this December.  The "new" in the subject line is in quotes, because these are things that have been on the site, without fanfare, for a couple of months.  Now that it looks like they work, we thought we'd share ;-).  Both are long-demanded US Code features.

-- First and newest: vastly improved views of US Code updates at all levels.  Clicking the "updates" link at the right at any level of the Code gives you all of the classification-table updates for that chunk of the Code since the last revision date for that Title.  We now parse, store, and organize the classification-table data locally, so it's speedy and up to date.  We realize that in some cases there will be a very more recent changes than are reflected in the classfication tables, but for the most part we think this is a good compromise between complexity and accuracy.  We check for new updates to the classification tables daily.  We think you'll like the presentation and the convenience.

-- For a long time now, people have asked for the ability to print multiple sections of the Code at once.  We now make available PDFs at the first layer of aggregation above the section (usually but not always called a chapter) for free, and larger aggregations at what I'd call "i-Tunes pricing".   This is not yet implemented for all Titles, and not for all "supersections" within some Titles. 

For the most part the printed versions look good.  There are always going to be problems -- for example, the Code contains numerous instances of chemical formulae that have been rendered in funny ways in the typesetting data we get and are virtually impossible to do anything useful with yet.  As a matter of geek-interest, I'll add that this has not been an easy project.  We transform the typesetting data into XML, and then use XSLT to make the hypertext version (which we've done for years) and an XSL-FO version for rendering in PDF.  This latter technology is not precisely mature; IIRC we spent (eg.) close to a year waiting for the table-rendering features to render tables ;-).  This and other problems led to a certain amount of hair-tearing by Dave Shetland (in particular) and the rest of the LII staff (in general), so that they now all look like me, at least in the matter of hairline.

As always, we hope you'll use, enjoy, and comment.

[JJ]

Presidential Recordings Program

Tom Mighell, inter alia, reports that the Presidential Recordings Program at the Miller Center of Public Affairs, University of Virginia, has some 5,000 hours of formerly-secret presidential recordings made between 1940 and 1973 -- from Roosevelt through Nixon.  For each president there's a description of the types of recordings that are available, as well as the actual recordings themselves.  Tom notes that you'll have to download a codec to decode the files to MP3 format because they come in the FLAC format, which not all audio players are automatically configured to accept.

If you don't already subscribe to Tom's Internet Legal Research Weekly, what are you waiting for! Send an e-mail to tom(at)inter-alia(dot)net or just visit his blog, inter alia and sign up. It's free, it's always informative, it's one of the very best current awareness services in the field. [JH]

Beyond the Kindle Hype

So what is Kindle? Tech Law Prof Blog editor and DePaul Law librarian Mark Giangrande explains succinctly in Thoughts On Amazon's Kindle Reader: "This is a proprietary device that offers wireless access to DRMed text from books to newspapers to [Amazon-] selected web sites [and blogs]." Mark continues

The device sells for $400 and apparently is exciting enough for enough of the literate public that Amazon notes that the item is temporarily sold out due to heavy demand.  Reviews on the site breathlessly declare that this is the future of reading.  Perhaps.

Perhaps indeed. Continuing reading Mark's post here because I'm now stepping on to my soapbox to say "not likely." Why not? Because it is a "a proprietary device that offers wireless access to DRMed text"! Computerworld may be right that Kindle will be "the forerunner of a number of limited-purpose wireless devices that are expected to hit the market in the next few years" but such devices, particularly limited-purpose gizmos with sticker-shocking price tags are so oh so 20th century I believe their appeal will not be very wide. Yes, I recognize the popularity of iPods but we're now in the iPhone age. Consumers are demanding portable multi-purpose devices and disposable digital content they can easily share with others without having to lend them their handhelds for the weekend. Plus, these gadgets better look neat too and Kindle doesn't. It's bland ... not even ugly enough to earn "lovably cute" status from any cult of users.

Would you buy a Kindle? My very unscientific blogosphere sampling of librarians indicates probably not. Some examples: Jenkins Law Library's Dan Giancaterino post This Baby Hasn't Kindled My Interest, Loose Cannon Librarian, Science Library Pad, Academic Librarian, and Free Range Librarian where K. G. Schneider writes, "I believe we are moving to a networked future. I just hope this isn’t it." Each post offers good reasons to avoid Kindle. I hope you will read them all. Since "we" won't be buying Kindle, here's Paul Glaskowky's unboxing post.

A Few Thoughts About the Technology. What I like about Kindle is the Amazon Whispernet. Apparently "free" (the cost must be charged back to the consumer somewhere in the product pricing formula), Whispernet is built on top of Sprint's EV-DO network to deliver its products. [Kindle Store].  I believe this may be the first instance of a bookseller using a cell phone wireless network for book distribution. (Is it?) Watch out FedEx and UPS! Watch out Amazon too. I can't imagine Steve Jobs not working on an "iReader"component for iPhone right now and cell phones powered by Google's Android won't miss this opportunity.  Unlike Kindle, I'm betting the competition will support PDF documents!

Good luck finding comprehensive tech specs for Kindle. See, e.g., 15 Things I Just Learned About the Amazon Kindle, Many details about the Kindle (follow the comment trail) and Engadget's live blog coverage of the the Kindle launch. See also Amazon's Digital Text Platform. Bottom line: Someone is going to have to write Kindle's "missing manual" real soon.

Kindle-ing Legal Publishers. OSU law professor, blogger, and friend Douglas Berman writes:

After learning about Kindle and other e-books in production, I really think the question is not whether, but rather when and how, the traditional casebook will go digital.

Not just casebooks, Doug. Today's law students want the option to buy digital versions of all titles sold by Thomson-West, LexisNexis, Aspen, etc. Some legal publishers, well at least one that I know of, is bundling selected eBooks into proprietary study aid applications. See the very interesting AspenLaw Studydesk which I believe will morph into a sister app for studying for the bar. The legal publishing industry needs to start offering eBooks to law students for all titles in their sales catalog. Kinde-ing their titles is not the way to go but it most definitely is time to light a fire under the major players in the law book publishing industry.

My experience indicates that most recent law book titles are available from our publishers in PDF so it is about time to include a web catalog link to "buy the digital version" now! [JH]

Note to Jeff Bezos. Love what you have done to make my life easier by setting the standard for online shopping, will be buying most of my Christmas gifts from Amazon.com again this year, made a ton of money trading AMZN before the tech bubble burst, but most of all, I'm open to bribery so if you want to ship me a free Kindle, here's my mailing address:

Joe Hodnicki
University of Cincinnati Law Library
Clifton Ave. & Calhoun St.
PO Box 210142
Cincinnati, OH 45211-0142

What the heck, it is a business expense or a chartable donation because I'll put Kindle in our library's IT petting zoo after playing with it. [JH]

Justice For All: The Legacy of Thurgood Marshall

From the U.S. Department of State:

"Thurgood Marshall stands as one of the great American heroes of the 20th century: He was the attorney who ended legal segregation in the United States with his victory in the Brown v. Board of Education case, and the U.S. Supreme Court justice who championed expanded rights for every individual American -- minorities, women, and immigrants, among many others. The essays that follow chronicle Marshall's rise in a society marred by segregation, his development as the accomplished lawyer who won "the case of the century" as well as many other important cases, and his appointment as the first African-American Supreme Court justice. His is the story of how one person, dedicated to the ideal of human rights for all, can succeed in changing society and improve the lives of millions of men and women."  [RJ]

Thanksgiving Proclamations

• The First Thanksgiving Proclamation, 1676
• Congressional Proclamation of Thanksgiving, 1782
• President George Washington's General Thanksgiving Proclamation of 1789
• President Abraham Lincoln's Proclamation Establishing Thanksgiving Day, 1863
• President Bush's Thanksgiving Proclamation, 2006

For additional information about the history of thanksgivings, see Thanksgiving Timeline, 1541-2001, compiled by the Library of Congress. [JH]

UNESCO and Library of Congress sign agreement for World Digital Library

From the press release:

"UNESCO and the US Library of Congress will join forces to build a World Digital Library, following the signing of an agreement by Abdul Waheed Khan, UNESCO’s Assistant Director-General for Communication and Information, and the Librarian of Congress James H. Billington.

The World Digital Library initiative will digitize unique and rare materials from libraries and other cultural institutions around the world and make them available free of charge on the Internet. These materials include manuscripts, maps, books, musical scores, sound recordings, films, prints and photographs."   [RJ]

Metavid, Archive of Legislative Proceedings

From the site:

"Metavid is a project which seeks to capture, stream, archive and facilitate real-time collective [re]mediation of legislative proceedings. Metavid makes use of entirely free and open source software and video codecs to make both the footage and the architecture of the site available, accessible and recontextualizable."

• Search the archive
• Access an early version of the metavid remediator system
• Check out project news our blog
• And finally check out our wiki for more detailed explanation of the project

[RJ]

Celebrating Research: Rare and Special Collections

From the Association of Research Libraries: "This compendium is a sampling of the remarkable abundance of collections available for use in the member libraries of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL). It is not a comprehensive view or a directory but instead an array of profiles that exemplify a spectrum of rare and special collections in research libraries. Special collections have been broadly construed to encompass the distinctive, the rare and unique, emerging media, born-digital, digitized materials, uncommon, non-standard, primary, and heritage materials. Each profile tells a story of a single collection, briefly recounting how the resources were acquired and developed and, importantly, how they are being used."  [RJ]

Federal Contractor Misconduct Database

From the site:

"The government awards contracts to companies with histories of misconduct such as contract fraud and environmental, ethics, and labor violations.  In the absence of a centralized federal database listing instances of misconduct, the Project On Government Oversight (POGO) is providing such data.  We believe that it will lead to improved contracting decisions and public access to information about how the government spends hundreds of billions of taxpayer money each year on goods and services."  [RJ]

Historians on America

New publication from the U.S. Department of State: "Historians on America is a series of individual essays that selects specific moments, decisions, and intellectual or legislative or legal developments and explains how they altered the course of U.S. history. The book consists of 11 separate essays by major historians, ranging from The Trial of John Peter Zenger in 1735 to The Immigration Act of 1965."  [RJ]

Is SSRN Listening?

Dan Solove and Stephen Bainbridge have been posting their wish list of SSRN improvements. Check out Solove's Improving SSRN and Bainbridge's Fixing SSRN. [JH]

More on Major Digitization Projects

Very interesting article in the New Yorker this month on digitization projects, the history of books, and the future of research.  Advocating a mixed method approach.  Also briefly touches upon the disparities in information wealth between countries as measured by the number of WorldCat holdings, referencing OCLC's WorldMap, an interactive feature that will compare up to four countries' WorldCat holdings.  Worth a read.

[JJ]

Experience "Turning the Pages" at the British Library Online

From the American Historical Association:  The British Library is reaching out to readers online by allowing them to digitally "leaf through our great books" on their Turning the Pages page.  Through the use of Adobe’s Shockwave player, visitors can interactively page through exceptional digital copies of a number of volumes from the library’s collections. Works like the first atlas of Europe, the Diamond Sutra hailed as the "oldest printed book," and the original Alice’s Adventures Under Ground by Lewis Carroll. The Shockwave format allows readers "turn pages" with their mouse, making the illusion of reading a book online more real. The contents of each work are expanded upon through the use of the "text," "magnify," and "audio" buttons at the bottom of each page, which when clicked on respectively explain, enhance, and read to the user."  Check it out! [RJ]

World Freedom Atlas

From the site:

"The World Freedom Atlas is a geovisualization tool for world statistics. it was designed for social scientists, journalists, NGO/IGO workers & others who wish to have a better understanding of issues of freedom, democracy, human rights & good governance between 1990 & 2006.
the represented datasets include general topics such as political rights, civil liberties, corruption perception index, type of regime, & more detailed statistics, such as averaging schooling years, ethnic fractionalization, or candidate intimidation affection."

Check it out!  [RJ]

HeinOnline's New Foreign Relations Library

New from HeinOnline:

"The Foreign Relations of the United States series presents the official documentary historical record of major U.S. foreign policy decisions and significant diplomatic activity. The series, produced by the State Department's Office of the Historian, comprises more than 350 volumes of resourceful historical information.

The series began in 1861 during Abraham Lincoln's administration and continues through the administration of Richard Nixon in 1975.

The Foreign Relations volumes contain documents from various Presidential libraries, the Department of State and Defense, the National Security Council, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Agency for International Development, and other foreign affairs agencies as well as the private papers of individuals involved in formulating U.S. foreign policy."  [RJ]

Libraries, Google, and Microsoft... Oh My!

The New York Times reports today on libraries that are rejecting Google and Microsoft offers to scan their books, opting instead for the Open Content Alliance.  The story itself is interesting, though the title is misleading: "Libraries Shun Deals to Place Books on Web."  Libraries are embracing many different opportunities to place books on the web with a variety of reasons for so doing and chosing different providers to accomplish this.  Yet we are apparently shunning the Internet! I suppose just like we're still shushing our patrons, wearing buns, and criticizing technology. And at the same time I think it is great that the controversy, complications, and benefits of open access and massive digitization projects (and associated costs) have made front page news of the NY Times.  [JJ]

Supreme Court Oral Arguments for 2006-07 Term

Recordings of all oral arguments and opinion announcements for the 2006 Term were made available by the Oyez Project.  [RJ]

The Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI) project

From the site:

"The Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI) project reports aggregate and individual governance indicators for 212 countries and territories over the period 1996–2006, for six dimensions of governance:

• Voice and Accountability
• Political Stability and Absence of Violence
• Government Effectiveness
• Regulatory Quality
• Rule of Law
• Control of Corruption

The aggregate indicators combine the views of a large number of enterprise, citizen and expert survey respondents in industrial and developing countries. The individual data sources underlying the aggregate indicators are drawn from a diverse variety of survey institutes, think tanks, non-governmental organizations, and international organizations.

The six aggregate indicators and the underlying data sources can be viewed interactively on the Governance Indicators webpage of this site. Documentation of the latest update of the WGI can be found in "Governance Matters VI: Governance Indicators for 1996–2006." Further documentation and research using the WGI is available on the Resources page of this website."  [RJ]

CLIR Seeks Public Comment Preservation in the Age of Large-Scale Digitization

The Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) seeks public comment on a white paper examining preservation issues relevant to large-scale digitization projects such as those being done by Google, Microsoft, and the Open Content Alliance. The paper, Preservation in the Age of Large-Scale Digitization, was written by Oya Rieger, Interim Assistant University Librarian for Digital Library and Information Technologies at Cornell University Library.

Hat tip to Free Government Information. [JH]

Sustained Deposits as Key to Successful Repository

In Size Isn't Everything: Sustainable Repositories as Evidenced by Sustainable Deposit Profiles, Leslie Carr and Tim Brody conclude that "the key to a successful repository is sustained deposits, and the key to sustained deposits is community engagement." From the abstract:

This article looks at deposit profiles automatically generated from OAI harvesting information and argues that repositories characterised by occasional large-volume deposits are a sign of a failure to embed in institutional processes. The ideal profile for a successful repository is discussed, and a new service that ranks repositories based on these criteria is implemented.

[JH

Open Access Repositories in China

Check out ShuYong Jiang's very interesting Open Mind, Open Access. Here's the abstract:

Open access is a modern notion of resource sharing in the technology era. It began as a bold reaction of the academic community to the rapidly increased cost of scholarly publishing, and it is now an important concept in digitization and digital libraries. It has hanged the way in which scholarly information is disseminated. While the development of electronic resources and digitization in China in recent years provides rich opportunities for scholarly information exchange, open access both as a concept and as a practice, is yet to be accepted. Open access repositories are very limited in number. Open access as a concept was not on the agenda for digital resource development until 2005 and the first open access library and information repository by National Library of China was launched in July 2006. Prior to this, there were very few open access resources available. Most of them were experimental in nature and inoperable with mainstream Internet tools. Not only do these open access resources not carry the same academic value as other scholarly publications, but also they lack support from both information providers and consumers. By looking at the current status of open access resources in China, this paper will examine some of the primary open access resources in China, such as Qiji Wenku ("Miracle Library"). It will raise issues related to open access in China such as scholarly resource sharing; the cooperation among information providers, creators and consumers; the implication of online copyright in a digital environment; and, the promotion of the idea of resource and technology sharing in the global information transition.

Rescuing GPO Digital Publications from Format Obsolescence

In the July/August 2007 issue of D-Lib Magazine, Gretchen Gano and Julie Linden describe a Yale Library data migration project as a means for analyzing and documenting aspects of a CD-ROM migration approach, but also as a launching pad for a community-wide consideration of a large-scale, distributed project to migrate digital legacy collections and ensure permanent public access to government information distributed on CD-ROMs. The authors write

Despite the software and hardware problems that [GPO] CD-ROMs pose, the main challenges of a large-scale CD-ROM "rescue" project are not primarily technological. Files from CD-ROMs can be systematically copied to redundant, stable server environments. Obsolete file formats can be migrated to non-proprietary formats for continued use of the data; unusual or obsolete software programs can be made available through web-based virtualization. Rather, the main challenges are to organize and fund a collaborative rescue project so that institutions can contribute to different tasks as they are able and willing; to establish a decision-making framework so that portions of the collection that are at highest risk can be addressed first, according to agreed-upon standards; and to ensure quality control of both "rescued" CD-ROM files and associated metadata.

Read more about it in Government Information in Legacy Formats: Scaling a Pilot Project to Enable Long-Term Access. [JH]