The Electonic Frontier Foundation has filed a FOIA request (PDF) for documents revealing whether the FBI has been tracking web browsing without warrants. Full story from EFF. LibraryLaw Blog links to a good article on how USA PATRIOT electronic survelliance affects libraries. (PDF)
From Scholars’ Panel Explores Digital Scholarship Needs by David Seaman in CLIR:
A basic problem for scholars who use digital resources is the lack of persistent identifiers—permanent and trusted Internet addresses—for online objects … Another barrier to digital scholarship is the failure of faculty promotion and rewards structures to accommodate the shift from a print-based to […]
Radical Reference (radicalreference.info):
Mission Statement: Radical Reference is a collective of volunteer library workers who believe in social justice and equality. We support activist communities, progressive organizations, and independent journalists by providing professional research support, education and access to information. We work in a collaborative virtual setting and are dedicated to information activism to foster a […]
Here’s the list. Pretty cryptic choices. Apparently nerds weren’t very imaginative back in the late 80’s. Oh, guess what major tech company is missing. “The Internet? We are not interested in it”
An interesting experiment: memigo
UPDATE: Here’s another one that personalizes as you click: Findory
According to this Wired article, Delicious Monster, makers of Delicious Library, work out of Zoka coffee shop in Seattle’s U District.
Delicious Library really might become a revolutionary app (many people would probably say it already is). If you are unfamiliar with it, users can catalog their collections (books, movies, music) and track loans by […]
Another cool link visualization tool.
-BB
The Tribune has a good article on Bookslut, the online literary magazine and blog.
A Lessig op-ed in yesterday’s LATimes goes over some of the basic copyright issues in the Google Print project, focusing on how copyright issues make the process expensive and complicated.
This term and concept is swarming the web, so I thought I’d take a moment to mention where it comes from and what it means.
I’ll let the new wikipedia entry explain:
The Long Tail is an economic term that describes how products that are in low demand or have low sales volume collectively make up […]
New details from the Mad Librarian on Stanford and the Google project. Some of the bigger points:
Not all books will be scanned. It will be done in stages, starting with a few thousand books.
Google will be doing the actual scanning, but format details have not yet been worked out.
Copyrighted works will not be […]
Science Commons is a Creative Commons project to try to free up sharing constraints in science while working within existing copyright and patent law.
From Technology Review:
Sunstein points out that until recently peer-reviewed scientific journals were the main way in which news of scientific developments were propagated. He says that there has always been an informal […]
Code named “Isaac” and currently in beta with several academic institutions, ebrary’s new server-based technology enables libraries to create and share Remote Collections of PDF content within the institution, with peer institutions, or on the Internet … The new server-based technology integrates all the PDF content an institution owns, with the PDF documents it produces, […]
Public-awareness campaign from IPac.
[Jailed for a song.] That’s what a proposed law would allow. Skipping commercials is stealing? That’s what some copyright holders think. And spending millions of taxpayer dollars to hunt down file-sharers? Congress nearly passed not one, but two bills that would have done just that in 2004. […]
Unbelievably cool.
From InformationWeek:
IBM’s overall patent policy is underpinned by an effort to keep software and computer patents in force; the European Community has been debating the issue of software patents in recent months, and momentum has been growing to eliminate patents for software there–a move that would be detrimental for IBM and also for its arch-competitor, […]
As reported by the NYTimes:
I.B.M. plans to announce today that it is making 500 of its software patents freely available to anyone working on open-source projects, like the popular Linux operating system, on which programmers collaborate and share code…
“This is exciting,” said Lawrence Lessig, a professor at Stanford Law School and founder of the school’s […]
A group of Danish students have created Vorel Ol beer, releasing everything under a CC license.
The recipe and the whole brand of Our Beer is published under a Creative Commons license, which basically means that anyone can use our recipe to brew the beer or to create a derivative of our recipe. You are free […]
Google Scholar and EZProxy with a follow-up
Firefox extension adds OpenURL buttons to Google Scholar.
Nice Schoogle weblog
…on which I noticed this great page from U of Nevada, LV.
Google’s Advanced Scholar Search Tips page.
Via IP and mentioned on BoingBoing, law prof Michael Geist uses his Toronto Star Law Bytes column to propose that Canada create a national digital library:
The library, which would be fully accessible online, would contain a digitally scanned copy of every book, government report, and legal decision ever published in Canada…
While digitally scanning more than […]