BIBLIOTHEKE

The US Copyright Office has granted six DMCA exemptions, a few of which are great for libraries and universities, although they denied proposed exemptions, such as for region coding or backing up DVDs, that would benefit consumers.

Persons making noninfringing uses of the following six classes of works will not be subject to the prohibition against circumventing access controls (17 U.S.C. § 1201(a)(1)) during the next three years.

1. Audiovisual works included in the educational library of a college or university’s film or media studies department, when circumvention is accomplished for the purpose of making compilations of portions of those works for educational use in the classroom by media studies or film professors.

2. Computer programs and video games distributed in formats that have become obsolete and that require the original media or hardware as a condition of access, when circumvention is accomplished for the purpose of preservation or archival reproduction of published digital works by a library or archive. A format shall be considered obsolete if the machine or system necessary to render perceptible a work stored in that format is no longer manufactured or is no longer reasonably available in the commercial marketplace.

3. Computer programs protected by dongles that prevent access due to malfunction or damage and which are obsolete. A dongle shall be considered obsolete if it is no longer manufactured or if a replacement or repair is no longer reasonably available in the commercial marketplace.

4. Literary works distributed in ebook format when all existing ebook editions of the work (including digital text editions made available by authorized entities) contain access controls that prevent the enabling either of the book’s read-aloud function or of screen readers that render the text into a specialized format.

5. Computer programs in the form of firmware that enable wireless telephone handsets to connect to a wireless telephone communication network, when circumvention is accomplished for the sole purpose of lawfully connecting to a wireless telephone communication network.

6. Sound recordings, and audiovisual works associated with those sound recordings, distributed in compact disc format and protected by technological protection measures that control access to lawfully purchased works and create or exploit security flaws or vulnerabilities that compromise the security of personal computers, when circumvention is accomplished solely for the purpose of good faith testing, investigating, or correcting such security flaws or vulnerabilities.

Engadget has been reporting over the last couple weeks on the upcoming e-book reader from Sony. More details can be found in the BusinessWeek article. It will support PDF docs as well as e-books from the Sony Connect online store and will retail for about $300-$400. Engadget has some photos of the Reader from CES (also here).

Some might say moves like this are the future, but it sure seems awfully insecure in the long run, IMHO.

The library world has been buzzing for the last few days over an article in a small newspaper relaying a report from two UMass Dartmouth professors that a senior at the school claimed he was visited by, as the article put it, “two agents of the Department of Homeland Security” after getting Mao’s Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung, commonly called “The Little Red Book,” through Interlibrary Loan apparently from UMass Amherst. According to the student, he “was told by the agents that the book is on a ‘watch list,’ and that his background, which included significant time abroad, triggered them to investigate the student further.” Boing Boing has also posted two good posts [1][2] summarizing a lot of the discussion around this case, including this statement from the UMass Dartmouth Library:

University of Massachusetts Dartmouth officials are investigating reports that a student at the university was visited by officials from Homeland Security after the student requested a copy of Chairman Mao’s “Little Red Book”. UMass administrators have interviewed the student who has requested that his identity be shielded, and the University is complying with that request.
At this point, it is difficult to ascertain how Homeland Security obtained the information about the student’s borrowing of the book. The UMass Dartmouth Library has not been visited by agents of any type seeking information about the borrowing patterns or habits of any of its patrons and did not handle the request for the book in question. The student has indicated that another university library processed the request.

The UMass Dartmouth library has established policies for handling requests under the Patriot Act and has taken every lawful measure possible to protect the confidentiality of patron records.

The Library subscribes to the American Library Association Library Bill of Rights and was a signatory to the MCCLPHEI (Massachusetts Conference of Chief Librarians of Public Higher Educational Institutions) resolution on the USA Patriots Act submitted to the Massachusetts Civil Liberty Union in 2003.

UMass Dartmouth Chancellor Jean F. MacCormack said, “It is important that our students and our faculty be unfettered in their pursuit of knowledge about other cultures and political systems if their education and research is to be meaningful. We must do everything possible to protect the principles of academic inquiry.'’

Ann Montgomery Smith
Dean of Library Services
University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Library

So now the student is saying the book was requested through another library. There are a lot of holes and/or inconsistencies in the story. For instance, assuming we are talking about the original English Peking version, WorldCat/FirstSearch lists 425 libraries that have it (including Northwestern) and it is even available in full online.

Also, a 5/17/5 op-ed by librarian Joan Airoldi gives us some insight into an experience of the FBI requesting records of patrons requesting a particular book. However, in that case the visit was prompted by a patron who notified the FBI after finding a message of hostility toward the US scrawled in the margin of an Osama bio. In addition, the FBI dropped the request after the library decided to challenge it in court.

In fact, the DoJ claims that FISA orders under the Patriot Act’s Section 215 have only been used 35 times as of 3/30/5, and not once to request library records.

On the other hand, according to UIU Library Research Center surveys, many libraries (as many as 10% nationwide) have apparently been visited by federal and local law enforcement seeking information on patrons, and according to comments from an Illinois specific survey, a number felt or were told that they were not allowed to discuss the visits:

Similarly, when asked survey question number 8, “Have authorities requested any kind of information about any of your patrons since September 11, 2001?”, only twenty-seven (6.0%) public libraries and 6 (5.0%) academic libraries responded yes. In reference to this question and the secrecy provision, librarians wrote comments such as:

“By the way, it is illegal for me to answer question 8.”

Or as another wrote:

“The Patriot Act lowers the standard of proof that law enforcement officers must provide in order to view library records. It also requires secrecy from the library officials. In fact, if we’ve been served under the Patriot Act, we shouldn’t be answering question 8 on your survey.”
Another librarian commented:

“Technically, I think I shouldn’t have answered #8 according to the ‘Act’ but I’m not totally sure.”

Twelve Illinois public libraries (2.6%) and 2 academic (1.7%) reported that they did not answer questions on the survey because they believe the provisions of the USA Patriot Act prohibit them. One librarian wrote:

“While I cannot tell my board that we have been served with a search warrant, I can and do tell them each month that we haven’t been served.”

So what’s really going on here? We can’t tell the nature of these requests and it’s possible that some of the respondents misunderstood their rights, but there does appear to be widespread interest by federal counter-terrorism investigators in patron records. And if these records aren’t being sought under Section 215 but are still secret, what kind of orders are these?

Regarding the question of whether investigators will actually make visits over something as trivial as a book, there are very detailed reports that they do. See here and here for one account. He makes a good point, though:

I realize these two guys were just doing their job, which includes checking out every complaint they get no matter how bizarre or inconsequential.

How many of the library visits are like this case or the one mentioned above with the Osama bio? We don’t know.

And to clear up the question about how exactly they could go about tracking ILL requests, assuming there is a “watch list” on interlibrary loans, the most obvious way for federal officials to track it would be through OCLC since virtually all major ILL requests go through their system. And, yes, there is a patron field viewable by the lending library containing whatever information the borrowing library puts in. If federal agencies do want to track ILL requests, there is indeed a centralized system they can hook into.

In the end, my opinion is that this is just some student’s tale/rumor that got out of hand. As mentioned before, the book is widely available. Furthermore, it’s extraordinarily unlikely that federal officials are that concerned with college students studying communist writings. This just sounds way too much like the kind of thing a student would make up on the fly rather than something that happens in real life.

As for what DHS and the FBI have to say about it:

A spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security said the story seemed unlikely.
“We’re aware of the claims,” said Kirk Whitworth, a DHS spokesman in Washington, D.C. “However, the scenario sounds unlikely because investigations are based on violation of law, not on the books and individual might check out from the library.”
Mr. Whitworth pointed out that while the original story stated the student was visited by agents of the Department of Homeland Security, the DHS does not actually have its own agents. Under the umbrella of the DHS are Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Inspector General, the Bureau of Customs and Border Protection, the U.S. Secret Service, and the Coast Guard, among others.
Mr. Whitworth could not comment on the record whether the agency monitors inter-library loans, or whether there is a watch list of books that the agency maintains.
An FBI spokeswoman was similarly skeptical.
“I have never heard that we would go after someone because of a book,” said Gail Marcinkiewicz, who works in the FBI’s Boston office. “That event in itself is not a criminal activity. I can’t imagine how we would follow up something like that. Everyone is protected under the First Amendment, which would include what you would read.”

However, the unfortunate thing about incidents like this is that once they are debunked, many people then disregard anything related to the subject. That’s not good. With the recent revelations about wiretaps on US citizens, these issues need to be recognized, examined and debated more than ever.

UPDATE: Student admits he made it up:

But yesterday, the student confessed that he had made it up after being confronted by the professor who had repeated the story to a Standard-Times reporter.

The professor, Brian Glyn Williams, said he went to his former student’s house and asked about inconsistencies in his story. The 22-year-old student admitted it was a hoax, Williams said.

‘’I made it up,” the professor recalled him saying. ‘’I'm sorry. . . . I’m so relieved that it’s over.”

iRex Technologies has announced The Illiad, a competitor to the Sony Librie. According to the product specs it will have an 8.1-inch 1024 x 768 ePaper display, a 400MHz INTEL X-Scale Processor, about 224MB internal FLASH memory for content and will support PDF, XHTML, TXT and MP3 when released in April 06.

It looks like Sanger is finally putting his ideas for a more “authoritative” Wikipedia alternative to the test with Digital Universe. Sanger’s well-publicized criticisms of what he sees as Wikipedia’s lack of respect for expertise have contributed to widespread debate how the wiki model’s accuracy compares to traditional reference resources, particularly with respect to how it is viewed in academia. Digital Universe aims to find a balance between user contributions and expert contributions, using what it’s calling “stewards” to maintain quality of various section. A list of those involved.

Hot on the heels of widespread criticism of Wikipedia’s authority, Nature conducted a comparison and found that the difference in accuracy between science articles in Britannica and Wikipedia is not that big. See the Nature article for details.

However, as noted in the Slashdot posting, some folks at Wikipedia found that the Wikipedia samples used by Nature were, on average, 2.5 times longer than the Britannica ones.

This is not the first comparison with similar results (here’s one from Freedom to Tinker) and there have been other examples of Britannica’s errors.

What I found particularly interesting was the knee-jerk reaction to Seigenthaler’s article, with people at many discussion boards declaring that “Wikipedia is Totally Inaccurate!!!” and therefore a useless reference source that only the most irresponsible person would touch. This is an extremely unfortunate view, and it doesn’t help that it has been echoed by many librarians.

For instance, as quick reference sources, Wikipedia and Answers.com are fantastic. Say you want some quick information on whales and even a quick list of species in the order cetacea with links to information on each species, nothing really compares to wikipedia’s combination of organization, ease of use and fairly detailed entries.

With Musipedia you can use this applet to translate the whistle into Pasons Code and search the database for matching tunes.

Parsons Code is a neat way of encoding melodies:

Each pair of consecutive notes is coded as “U” (”up”) if the second note is higher than the first note, “R” (”repeat”) if the pitches are equal, and “D” (”down”) otherwise. Rhythm is completely ignored. Thus, the first theme from Beethoven’s 8th symphony that is shown above would be coded DUUDDDURDRUUUU. Note that the first note of any tune is used only as a reference point and does not show up explicitly in the Parsons code. You can enter an asterisk (*) in the Parsons code field for the first note.

If that’s not your thing, you can just use this keyboard for entering your tune.

I wonder if it can find Cage’s 4′33″

George Washington University’s Daniel J. Solove asks “What If Copyright Law Were Strongly Enforced in the Blogosphere?”

I think that it is a fair generalization to say that the use of copyrighted material is much more liberal in the blogosphere than in regular print publications. If I were writing something in print, for example, I would be much more cautious about the extent to which I’m quoting and using images. But I feel more emboldened on the Internet. Why?

The reason is that the blogosphere has developed a set of copyright norms in an area where there is very little enforcement. These norms about the use of copyrighted material are probably at odds with existing copyright law. The mainstream media and other websites have not been going after bloggers for copyright violations all that much. Although the music and movie industries have been on the copyright offensive, beyond them, the enforcement of copyright on the Internet has been rather laid back.

[…]

I fear that one day copyright enforcement rain on the blogosphere’s parade if mainstream media entities and other mainstream websites see the blogosphere getting too profitable or powerful.

from BB

John Seigenthaler tells his story.

The Yahoo! backed Open Content Alliance is planning to work with university libraries and other archives to create an open web library. From SFGate:

The Open Content Alliance, a project that Yahoo is backing with several other partners, plans to provide digital versions of books, academic papers, video and audio. Much of the material will consist of copyrighted material voluntarily submitted by publishers and authors, said David Mandelbrot, Yahoo’s vice president of search content.

Other participants in the alliance announced Monday include Adobe Systems Inc., Hewlett-Packard Co., the Internet Archive, O’Reilly Media Inc., the University of California and the University of Toronto.

Although Yahoo will power the search engine located at , all the content will be made available so it can be indexed by all the other major search engines, including Google’s.

More info at The Chronicle of Higher Ed

Yes, you read that right:

A public library in Holland has been swamped with queries after unveiling plans to “lend out” living people, including homosexuals, drug addicts, asylum seekers, gipsies and the physically handicapped.

The volunteers will be borrowed by users of the library, in Almelo, who can take them to a cafeteria, and ask them any questions they like for up to an hour, in a scheme designed to break down barriers and combat prejudice.

…

Mr Krol, who said he was inspired by a similar scheme in Sweden, has already filled many of his volunteer slots, and hopes to launch the project next month.

He said: “I’ve got several gay men, a couple of lesbian women, a couple of Islamic volunteers, I’ve got a physically handicapped woman, and a woman who has been living on social security benefits for many years in real poverty. ”

Mr Krol said he was especially keen to find members of Holland’s small Roma gipsy community after a recent attack on two gipsy families in the city of Enschede.

Under the scheme, photographs and short biographies of the volunteers will appear in the library, and on its website. Library users who wish to take a person out can apply for an appointment. Mr Krol said he had not cleared the scheme with his municipal bosses.

read on @ the Telegraph

Abstract:

This paper looks at aspects of Wikipedia’s structure and process, with specific focus on its community (or organisational) learning. Learning is conceptualised as a collective, collaborative process, whereby multiple perspectives are shared and meanings are constructed. Fundamental to this learning are Wikipedia’s policies and the procedure of collaboration in an often conflicting environment. Conflict is viewed as a key component in the process of creating the content of Wikipedia as well as a key factor in people’s participation in the project. The consequence of conflict is of central importance, both in terms of how or to what extent it is resolved, and how a number of users end up leaving the project as a result. Throughout, the focus is on how individual users communicate their opinions and feelings to other users and how these communications are read and/or understood by individuals and/or the community, especially in the light of it being mainly a text-only medium. How experiences are shared between and within projects is seen as a crucial factor in its organisational learning – Wikipedia as an organisation has both traditional and radical features, but its learning, as well as so many other aspects of its proclaimed success, is seen to be predicated on its structure, as well as its policies. Therefore, to what extent Wikipedia’s structured process eases and/or inhibits its ability to learn is examined, in the light of its growing size and number of individual language projects.

Link

via Loomware

The director of the Valparaiso (Fla.) Community Library was suspended without pay in early August after city officials found that a registered sex offender had used library computers to access pornographic websites.

Read on at AL Online

Classrooms are crowded, and the all-too-familiar scenario of children sharing outdated textbooks is still very much in evidence.

However, in Class Five, things are just a little bit different. Fifty-four 11-year-old students are willing guinea pigs in an extraordinary experiment aimed at using technology to deliver education across the continent.

In the Eduvision pilot project, textbooks are out, customised Pocket PCs, referred to as e-slates, are very much in.

They are wi-fi enabled and run on licence-free open source software to keep costs down.

Read on at BBC News…

In 2002, the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers sent an open letter to Jeff Bezos, the chief executive of Amazon.com, which has a market for used books in addition to selling new copies. “If your aggressive promotion of used book sales becomes popular among Amazon’s customers,” the letter said, “this service will cut significantly into sales of new titles, directly harming authors and publishers.”

But does it?

as the NYTimes goes on to say, it’s far more complicated than that, but, the Times argues:

All in all, it looks like the used book market creates a lot more value than it destroys.

And a large part of the reasoning behind this is the nature of the long tail.

The Times cites two studies concluding that markets for used books play positively into consumers’ purchasing decisions of new books:

• Internet Exchanges for Used Books: An Empirical Analysis of Product Cannibalization and Welfare Impact by Anindya Ghose of New York University and Michael D. Smith and Rahul Telang of Carnegie-Mellon.
• Are Durable Goods Consumers Forward Looking? Evidence from College Textbooks (pdf) by Judith Chevalier of the Yale School of Management and Austan Goolsbee at the Chicago Business School

Ever have trouble getting your Internet Explorer-specific Web applications to work with Mozilla? This article covers common issues associated with migrating applications to the open source Mozilla-based browser. You’ll first learn basic cross-browser development techniques, and then develop strategies for overcoming the differences between Mozilla and Internet Explorer.”

read at IBM developerWorks

Most obvious problem: bad images. They even have really bad ones for manhattan! (Google’s image for comparison)

From Ars:

A new study published today claims that users who share and download music files online also buy four and a half times more music online than your average music listener, at least in the UK.

The Guardian article explains more…

Steve Johnson, author of Everything Bad Is Good For You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter, has a great open letter to Sen. Clinton in the LA Times going over the benefits of video games. He makes a number of good points, including noting that video games are more intellectually stimulating than other games and entertainment and that violent crime by kids has actually gone down since the rise of video games. The best quote:

I’d like to draw your attention to another game whose nonstop violence and hostility has captured the attention of millions of kids — a game that instills aggressive thoughts in the minds of its players, some of whom have gone on to commit real-world acts of violence and sexual assault after playing.

I’m talking, of course, about high school football.

Read on at the LA Times