Law Librarian Blog

Harvard University Press Goes Digital

Harvard University Press is selling digital copies of books on Scribd, some 1,000 in fact.  Here's the announcement on Scribd, with links to some of the titles and their prices.  [MG]

Google Image Search Now Has a Copyright Filter, and the Life Photo Archive

Google has added a nifty feature to its Image Search function.  The Advanced Search now features a filter for copyright license, at least for images that are tagged with that information.  Obviously Google cannot account for whether images are tagged or not.  It still represents a way to search a huge archive of materials and reuse those materials legally in library and other publications.  

From Google's description of the feature:

The usage rights filter on the Advanced Search page shows you pages that are either labeled with a Creative Commons license or labeled as being in the public domain. Here are the different usage rights options available:

• Free to use or share

Your results will only include pages that are either labeled as public domain or carry a license that allows you to copy or redistribute its content, as long as the content remains unchanged.

• Free to use, share, or modify

Your results will only include pages that are labeled with a license that allows you to copy, modify, or redistribute in ways specified in the license.

• If you want content for commercial use, be sure to select the appropriate option containing the term commercially.

While we're on the subject of Google Image Search, the company is now hosting the Life Magazine photo archive, including photos never published in the magazine.  The archive stretches back to the 1750s.  Life Magazine is known for some pretty amazing photographs.  The archive is definitely a unique resource.  Links to it are on the main Image Search page and directly here. [MG]

Wisconsin-Madison and Texas Amend Google Books Agreements

The terms of the UW-Madison and Texas Google Books agreements reportedly follow along the lines of the University of Michigan's amended Google Books agreement [text] and are contingent upon the Google Books settlement agreement being approved by the court. See Google Book Search Blog post and press releases from UW-Madison and Texas. See also LLB's early post, The Amended Google-Michigan Agreement: Jonathan Band's Guide to the Perplexed. [JH] 

Clinton Library Releases Sotomayor Documents

The William J. Clinton Presidential Library has released about 5,000 pages of materials related to President Clinton's nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals.  They are available online here.

From the description of the materials at the site:

FOIA 2009-1007-F Sonia Sotomayor

Scope and Content:

The materials in FOIA 2009-1007-F are a selective, not necessarily all inclusive, body of documents responsive to the topic of the FOIA. Researchers should consult the archivist about related materials. 

FOIA request 2009-1007-F contains materials relating to the nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. President Clinton nominated Judge Sotomayor to the position in 1997, and she was confirmed by the Senate in 1998. The records contain biographical information, court opinions as Judge for the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York and letters in support of her nomination. This series also includes court records, correspondence, news clippings, articles, and emails concerning her nomination.  [MG]

Can Universities Require Open Access of Faculty-Produced Scholarship?

Probably not. "There is no such thing as a mandate on faculty," writes Stuart M. Shieber, Director of Harvard's Office for Scholarly Communication. Shieber continues "I am not saying that university open-access policies can’t be successful. But success has to be based on something more than coercion, because universities just do not have the ability to coerce their faculty, nor would it be advisable to try. Success must be based on broad collective support," in his post, University Open-Access Policies as Mandates. Hat tip to Digital Koans.

One has to wonder whether university open access policies will be supported by rankings-obsessed faculty members who fear that their SSRN download counts will decline if they deposit their scholarly works in university-sponsored repositories.  [JH]

Oldest Known Bible Digitized

CNN and others are reporting that the world's oldest known Christian Bible has been digitized and is available online.  The Codex Sinaiticus presented particular problems for archivists as the physical pages were scattered across four locations.  The Bible's pages originated in the St. Catherine Monastery located in the Sinai desert.  Over the years, pages were taken and housed in the British Library, the National Library of Russia, and Leipzig University Library in Germany.  Researchers located all of the pages available and reassembled them online as a single publication.  The contents do not completely match the current books or text in the contemporary Bible.  Nonetheless, it should be a boon to religious scholars everywhere to have access to this text. 

The CNN story, which details the history of the disassembly of the original text is here.  The web site for the Codex Sinaiticus is here.  This is an example of something that Google Books isn't going to carry.  [MG]

JISC Academic Database Assessment Tool

JISC Academic Database Assessment Tool (ADAT) allows you to compare bilbiographic and full text databases.  There are sfour main functions on the site:

1. Compare Journal Title Lists
2. Compare key features of database platforms
3. Compare e-Book platforms
4. Compare charts and statistice (dashboards) of each database

So, for example, with respect to number 3, if you compare NetLibrary to ebrary, you will learn that ebrary lets you export citations to Endnote, while NetLibrary will not. However, ebrary allows you to search by LC Subject trees, while Netlibrary does not.  There are more than 70 categories that they compare in the e-Book platform section.  It is a great service when trying to compare usability of different platforms!

Similarly, their comparison of journal titles in databases quickly provide venn diagrams of overlaps in coverage.  For example, of ABI/Informs 3,984 titles, 1,796 also appear in Business Source Premier (which has a total of 12,978) titles.  If you are using an ERM, chances are that your ERM can do this for you as well.  For those of you not using an ERM, this is an very handy collection development aid that mimics some pricey proprietary software.

The site also informs you when the title list for each database was last updated, and lets you set up alerts for when those updates take place. Contributers are a little sparse but the big names of Proquest and Thomson Reuters are both there, along with others.  It would be nice to see this grow - wouldn't it be fun to compare Lexis to Westlaw? (VS)

From Institutional Repositories to Electronic Libraries

In The End of Institutional Repositories & the Beginning of Social Academic Research Service: An Enhanced Role For Libraries (LLRX), Stuart Basefsky advocates broadening the concept of institutional repositories (IRs) to serve as full-fledged electronic libraries and documents how they can then serve the greater purpose of collecting, disseminating, analyzing and exchanging useful digital information for academic purposes. [JH]

How the Media Frames "Open Access"

Philip Davis, a Ph.D. student in the Department of Communication at Cornell University and a former science librarian, applies concepts of media framing to the debate over open access in How the Media Frames “Open Access” (Journal of Electronic Publishing). From the abstract:

The results of an analysis of editorials and letters published in major world newspapers illustrates that proponents of free access to the research literature have routinely framed their arguments in terms of transparency and accountability. In addition, proponents have been able to construct social action frames, a necessary component in creating social movements. Opponents, on the other hand, lack a central frame and have constructed complex and nuanced counterarguments about quality and sustainability of scientific publishing. While these counterarguments may be sound, they lack the simplicity and narrative structure of the proponents’ arguments.

[JH]

Preserving Born-Digital Literary Materials for Scholarly Use

What are the archival challenges presented by contemporary authors' practice of drafting almost all of their materials on a computer? Approaches to Managing and Collecting Born-Digital Literary Materials for Scholarly Use, a white paper produced by the Office of Digital Humanities in the National Endowment for the Humanities, explores the issues using a case studies approach. Hat tip to Digital Koans. [JH]

Is the Google Books Settlement Better Than Orphan Works Legislation?

On LibraryLaw Blog, Peter Hirtle says "yes." The in-copyright but out-of-print books whose authors are "inactive rights holders" have been wrongly characterized as "orphan works." This group actually consists of two separate groups.  There are true orphan works whose copyright owners cannot be idetified or located. However, there are also rights holders who could be easily located but who have chosen not to sign up with Google or the Books Rights Registry. "Even with orphan works legislation," Hirtle writes, "these works would not be eligible for inclusion in a digitized books database since they are not true orphans." [JH]

Transparency Lite at Launch of Data.gov

Last week, Valerie Jarrett, Senior Advisor to the President, announced the launch of a new initiative to open government, WhiteHouse.gov/Open [video on Administration's Open Government Blog]. With the announcement comes the long anticipated Data.gov website. "The purpose of Data.gov is to increase public access to high value, machine readable datasets generated by the Executive Branch of the Federal Government." See Personal Democracy Forum's coverage, White House Opens Doors on Major Open Government Initiative.

Data.gov includes a searchable data catalog that includes access to data in two ways: through the "raw" data catalog and using tools provided by the site. Note well, you have to agree to the site's Data Policy. See also the site's tutorial.

According to ReadWriteWeb’s Marshall Kirkpatrick, "the initial offering is a bit of a let down." Wired's Alexis Madrigal concurs, "Data.gov launched ... with 47 datasets from across the government. ... That’s a tiny fraction of the Feds’ gargantuan information stores, and the site is clearly in beta, but open-government advocates see the new site as a sign of good things to come for government transparency." [JH]

Google and UMichigan Amend Scanning Agreement

Google and the University of Michigan have renegotiated part of its agreement where Google scans its books for available online.  The recent settlement between Google and publishers has raised issues over the cost of institutional subscriptions the publishers will put in place for access to the collection.  The new agreement/amendment gives Michigan the right to a digital copy of every book on its shelves irrespective of whether the book was scanned at Michigan or somewhere else.  The school also gets greater distribution rights to its digital copies. 

The story in Wired has links to the text of the amended agreement.  Michigan's summary of the new agreement is here.  [MG]

Basic Requirements for the Authentication of Digital Repositories of Legal Resources

In Authentication of Digital Repositories, John Joergensen (Rutgers-Camden) identifies two necessary and essential elements of an authentication system for digital legal materials: (1) disclosure of how a publisher obtains the material they offer, and how that material is handled, and (2) document-level verification using a digital signature that includes one or more MD5s (Message Digest 5 hash) at the metadata level for chain of custody purposes. Hat tip to Legal Informatics Blog.

Perceptions of Trustworthiness. Do we trust LexisNexis and Westlaw more than other sources for legal resources? Of course we do and this despite the fact that neither vendor regularly performs audits of their databases. Moreover we do so while free or low cost legal research vendors harvest their documents from the same “unofficial” court sources our "traditional" online legal research vendors use. Commenting on Joergensen's post, Kate Wilko on Legal Research Plus writes "[h]is post reminded me of a lecture that Bob Berring gave to our Advanced Legal Research in which he likened these veteran vendors to Tinkerbell.  The legal community believes in their veracity and authenticity and so they continue to dominate the digital landscape.  It’s high time we created room for more Tinkerbells to spread their online legal resource dust."

Indeed it is and Joergensen hits the proverbial nail on its head. "[T]he crux of any debate about authentication comes down to this disconnect between the perceptions and needs of the professional and librarian communities, and what most Internet law publishers do to produce accurate information for the public."

As legal researchers move to free or low-cost online legal research services and away from LexisNexis and Westlaw, our job is to push for the authentication of the digital legal resources they use. Joergensen's document-level verification recommendation sounds easily do-able to me. See his article for more details. [JH]

Use Restriction on Public Domain Reproductions by Cornell University Library Removed

Cornell University Library no longer requires its users to seek permission to publish public domain works duplicated from its collections according to the Library's new policy. The Cornell initiative goes further than many other recent attempts to open access to public domain material by removing restrictions on both commercial and non-commercial use. Kudos to Cornell for donating more than 70,000 digitized public domain books to the Internet Archive.

Threat of Legal Action Ineffective.The Library, as the producer of digital reproductions made from its collections, has in the past licensed the use of those reproductions. Individuals and corporations that failed to secure permission to repurpose these reproductions violated their agreement with the Library. "The threat of legal action, however," noted Anne R. Kenney, Carl A. Kroch University Librarian, "does little to stop bad actors while at the same time limits the good uses that can be made of digital surrogates. We decided it was more important to encourage the use of the public domain materials in our holdings than to impose roadblocks." [Press Release]

Hat tip to DigitalKoans. [JH]

Link Rot in Court Opinions

"Citation format is not a sexy topic," writes Tina Ching (Reference Librarian, Seattle Univ. Law Library) in The Next Generation of Legal Citations: A Survey of Internet Citations in the Opinions of the Washington Supreme Court and Washington Appellate Courts, 1999-2005 [SSRN], 9 J. App. Prac. & Process 387 (2007) but web citations by courts and the long-term accessibility to the cited resources are important topics. Ching writes "the impermanence and ever-changing characteristics of the Internet present alarming issues that demand widespread changes to citation formats and also to the preservation and availability of cited materials."

In her survey of 14,209 Washington Supreme Court and Appellate Court opinions issued in 1999-2005, Ching found 132 Internet citations [Click on image, left, for types of Internet materials cited]. 64% of the URL citations did not lead to the cited materials. "Availability issues must be addressed so that researchers will be able to readily access government, legislative, and court materials on the Internet," writes Ching. "It is not enough that a clerk or judge keeps cited materials on file." Indeed it isn't. Ching recommends that "libraries should also be given the resources to maintain digital copies of online-only government publications, just as they currently maintain print materials, so that they can allow the public greater access to all materials that are now used to support case law."

Just like in the good old days when certain law libraries were designated as depositories for print copies of state supreme court briefs and records, Ching's research underscores the need for digital depositories to archive and make accessible online court-cited web resources at the state level.

Hat tip to Legal Research Plus for calling attention to Ching's very informative article. [JH]

Samuelson on the Google Book Settlement

Pamela Samuelson, the Richard M. Sherman Distinguished Professor of Law and Information at the University of California, Berkeley, as well as a Director of the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology and an advisor to the Samuelson High Technology Law & Public Policy Clinic at Boalt Hall has uploaded a brief article entited Legally Speaking: The Dead Souls of the Google Booksearch Settlement to SSRN. The article will be published in July 2009 issue of Communications of the ACM. See also Samuelson's guest blog post on O'Reilly Radar (note the comments).

Samuelson argues the proposed settlement of the Authors Guild v. Google lawsuit is a privately negotiated compulsory license primarily designed to monetize millions of orphan works. Quoting from the abstract, "It will benefit Google and certain authors and publishers, but it is questionable whether the authors of most books in the corpus (the “dead souls” to which the title refers) would agree that the settling authors and publishers will truly represent their interests when setting terms for access to the Book Search corpus."

You can also view Samuelson's slide show from her April 14, 2009 OCLC/Kilgour Lecture on the settlement. [JH]

Readex Launches American Newspaper Archives

Readex has launched the American Newspaper Archives, an expanding online collection that will offer access to major U.S. newspapers. A part of America’s Historical Newspapers, the Archives will provide users with fully searchable digital editions of historically significant and regionally diverse publications from the 19th century through the 1990s.

American Newspaper Archives will initially feature nine papers and their relevant predecessors: The Times-Picayune (New Orleans, Louisiana; 1837-1988), The Plain-Dealer (Cleveland, Ohio; 1845-1991), The Oregonian (Portland, Oregon; 1850-1987), Press-Register (Mobile, Alabama; 1821-1992), The Times (Trenton, New Jersey; 1883-1993), The Seattle Times (Seattle, Washington; 1896-1984),The Republican (Springfield, Massachusetts; 1850-1987), The Dallas Morning News (Dallas, Texas; 1885-1984) and The Augusta Chronicle (Augusta, Georgia; 1792-1993). [JH]

FDA Notices of Judgment Collection, 1906-1963

The FDA Notices of Judgment Collection is a digital archive of the published notices judgment for products seized under authority of the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act. The NJs are resources in themselves but also lead users to the over 2,000 linear foot collection of evidence files used to prosecute each case. The evidence files are a rich documentary resource filled with legal correspondence, lab reports and data, photographs, and product labeling and containers. This digital library, created using the SPER system, allows for browsing the collection as well as searching the collection's metadata and full-text.  [RJ]

The Public Domain Provisions of the Google Book Settlement Examined

On LibraryLaw Blog, Peter Hirtle reviews the procedures for identifing public domain books under the Google Book Settlement and then raises important concerns about the Settlement's public domain provisions. [JH]