Semantic Web & Libraries 'Planet Lite'

Panlibus: Karen Calhoun completes a conversation with Talis

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 09:29:21 -0800

When recording my previous Talking with Talis podcast with OCLC’s Karen Calhoun, in a hotel lobby over the road from the British Library in London, we suffered a technology failure loosing the last third of our conversation.

Karen kindly agreed to spend some time in a follow up conversation so that listeners could get to hear her thoughts on a couple of further questions I asked, including one about the future for library metadata formats.

In addition I also gained the opportunity to ask her reflect upon the presentation she gave on that day. The slides for which are available to view from the OCLC site. The other benefit being that we were not competing with the music, staff, and hotel guests during the recording.

Technorati Tags: Karen Calhoun,OCLC

Allan's Library: Are We Getting Stupider or What?

Allan Cho — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 01:47:00 -0800

In one of the long-standing intellectual pillars of publishing, the Atlantic Monthly has recently came out with an article, Is Google Making Us Stupid? which continues the debate whether the computer age has indeed resulted in our over-reliance on compact, readily-available information.

As Nicholas Carr believes, we’re simply decoding information as we scan text on the web. For probably many of us like him, deep reading of densely formulated text has become a struggle. But here’s another worry that Carr ponders: the web’s simplification of information decoding has ultimately reduced our ability to think deeply as well. Our brains are so used to reading short blog posts or text messages under 140 characters that we’ve no longer the time nor patience to thoughtfully carry out our thoughts cogently. As Carr puts it:

Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged.

However, we’ve been paralyzed with fear about technological advancements since the earliest days of thought: Plato feared that writing would cause our memorization capacities to fade; Gutenberg’s press would lead to intellectual laziness; and thinking changed as Nietzsche’s words morphed from rhetoric to telegram style.

On other extreme end is futurist Jamais Cascio, who argues that “Google isn’t the problem; it’s the beginning of a solution.” Indeed, with intelligence augmentation, new technologies would be able to “filter” what we are interested in; and seamlessly tailor our information absorption according to our needs. This opposite end of the spectrum argues that civilization requires diversity and innovation – and technology is a means to that end. Information professionals must be aware of this dichotomy: when much information is too much information? As Herbert Simon once said, "wealth of information creates a poverty of attention." How can we scan when we must interpret and decode?

Jodi Schneider: Ribbit: Google Voice with social web, your own number, (and eventually a fee)

Thu, 26 Nov 2009 03:33:40 -0800

Based in Silicon Valley, Ribbit is an internet telephony startup and a subsidiary of British Telcom. Ribbit has an “open platform for voice innovation”, with API access for developers (see also getting started) and several end-user products.

Ribbit Mobile is similar to Google Voice: it’s a next-generation phone system currently aimed at the US and UK markets. You use your own (presumably mobile) number. What really got my attention, though, was a new social feature they call “Caller ID 2.0″:

Ribbit wants to leverage your social networks for Caller ID

When a call comes in, Ribbit Mobile will reach into the social web and bring you the recent LinkedIn updates, Facebook updates, Tweets, and Flickr photos of the person calling you. Ribbit Mobile lets you know not just who is calling but what the caller has been up to on the web.

I was already excited about Ribbit when I first encountered them.

I guess it’s time to try out their Google Wave gadgets! And if Google Voice or VoIP with your mobile number has any appeal, I’d advise you to request an invite for their beta. Note that they’ve already got plans to charge for their services.

Go to Hellman: Publish-Before-Print and the Flow of Citation Metadata

Eric Hellman — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 02:38:00 -0800

Managing print information resources is like managing a lake. You need to be careful about what flows into your lake and you have to keep it clean. Managing electronic information resources is more like managing a river- it flows though many channels, changing as it goes, and it dies if you try to dam it up.

I have frequently applied this analogy to libraries and the challenges they face as their services move online, but the same thing is true for journal publishing. A journal publisher's duties are no longer finished when the articles are bound into issues and put into the mail. Instead, publication initiates a complex set of information flows to intermediaries that help the information get to its ultimate consumer. Metadata is sent to indexing services, search engines, information aggregators, and identity services. Mistakes that occur in these channels will prevent customer access just as profoundly as the loss of a print issue, and are harder to detect, as well.

A large number of journals have made the transition from print distribution to dual (print+electronic) distribution; many of those journals are now considering the transition to online-only distribution. As they plan these transitions, publishers are making decisions that may impact the distribution chain. Will indexing services be able to handle the transition smoothly? Will impact factors be affected? Will customer libraries incur unforeseen management costs?

I was recently asked by the steering committee of one such journal to look into some of these issues, in particular to find out about the effects of the "publish-before-print" model on citations. I eagerly accepted the charge, as I've been involved with citation linking in one way or another for over 10 years and it gave me an opportunity to reconnect with a number of my colleagues in the academic publishing industry.

"Publish-before-print" is just one name given to the practice of publishing an article "version of record" online in advance of the compilation of an issue or a volume. This allows the journal to publish fewer, thicker issues, thus lowering print and postage costs, while at the same time improving speed-to-publication for individual articles. Publish-before-print articles don't acquire volume, issue and page metadata until the production of the print version.

Before I go on, I would like to recommend the NISO Recommended Practice document on Journal Article Versions (pdf, 221KB). It recommends the use of "Version of Record" as the terminology to use instead of "published article" which is widely used in a number of circumstances:

Version of Record (VoR) is also known as the definitive, authorized, formal, or published version, although these terms may not be synonymous.
Many publishers today have adopted the practice of posting articles online prior to printing them and/or prior to compiling them in a particular issue. Some are evolving new ways to cite such articles. These “early release” articles are usually [Accepted Manuscripts], Proofs, or VoRs. The fact that an “early release” article may be used to establish precedence does not ipso facto make it a VoR. The assignment of a DOI does not ipso facto make it a VoR. It is a VoR if its content has been fixed by all formal publishing processes save those necessary to create a compiled issue and the publisher declares it to be formally published; it is a VoR even in the absence of traditional citation data added later when it is assembled within an issue and volume of a particular journal. As long as some permanent citation identifier(s) is provided, it is a publisher decision whether to declare the article formally published without issue assignment and pagination, but once so declared, the VoR label applies. Publishers should take extra care to correctly label their “early release” articles. The use of the term “posted” rather than “published” is recommended when the “early release” article is not yet a VoR.

"Version of Record before Print" is a bit of a mouthful, so I'll continue to use "publish-before-print" here to mean the same thing.

It's worth explaining "Assignment of a DOI" a bit further, since it's a bit complicated in the case of publish-before-print. Crossref issued DOIs are the identifiers used for articles by a majority of scholarly journal publishers. To assign the DOI, the a publisher has to submit a set of metadata for the article, along with the DOI that they want to register. The Crossref system validates the metadata and stores it in its database so that other publishers can discover the DOI for citation linking. In the case of publish-before-print, the submitted metadata will include journal name, the names of the authors, the article's title, and the article's URL, but will be missing volume, issue and page numbers. After the article has been paginated and bound into an issue, the publisher must resubmit the metadata to Crossref, with added metadata and the same DOI.

What happens if the online article is cited in an article in another journal during the time between the version of record going online and the full bibliographic data being assigned? This question is of particular importance to authors whose citation rates may factor into funding or tenure decisions. Since the answer depends on the processes being used to publish the citing article and produce the citation databases, so I had to make a few calls to get some answers.

As you might expect, journal production processes vary widely. Some journals, particularly in the field of clinical medicine, are very careful to check and double check the correctness of citations in their articles. For these journals, it's highly likely that the editorial process will capture updated metadata. Other publishers take a much more casual approach to citations, and publish whatever citation data the author provides. Most journals are somewhere in the middle.

Errors can creep into citations in many ways, including import of incorrect citations from another source, mispelling of author names, or simple miskeying. DOIs are particularly vulnerable to miskeying, due to their length and meaninglessness. One of my sources estimates that 20% of author keyed DOIs in citations are incorrect! If you have the opportunity to decide on the form of a DOI, don't forget to consider the human factor.

It's hard to get estimates of the current error rate in citation metadata; when I was producing an electronic journal ten years ago, my experience was consonant with industry lore that said that 10% of author-supplied citations were incorrect in some way. My guess, based on a few conversations and a small number of experiments, is that a typical error rate in published citations is 1-3%. A number of processes are pushing this number down, most of them connected with citation linking in some way.

Reference management and sharing tools such as RefWorks, Zotero, and Mendeley now enable authors to acquire article metadata without keying it in and link citations even before they even submit manuscripts for publication; this can't help but improve citation accuracy. Citation linking in the copy editing process also improves the accuracy of citation metadata. By matching citations to databases such as Crossref and PubMed, unlinked citations can be highlighted for special scrutiny by the author.

Integration of citation linking into publishing workflow is becoming increasingly common. In publishing flows hosted by HighWire Press' Bench>Press manuscript submission and tracking system, Crossref and Pubmed can be used at various stages to help copyeditors check and verify links. Similarly, ScholarOne Manuscripts, a manuscript management system owned by Thomson Reuters, integrates with Thomson Reuters' Web of Science and EndNote products. Inera's xStyles, software that focuses specifically on citation parsing and is integrated with Aries Systems' Editorial Manager, has recently added an automatic reference correction feature that not only checks linking, but also pulls metadata from Crossref and Pubmed to update and correct citations. I also know of several publishers that have developed similar systems internally.

In most e-journal production flows, there is still a publication "event", at which time the content of the article, including citations, becomes fixed. The article can then flow to third parties that make the article discoverable. Of particular interest are citation databases such as Thomson Reuters' Web of Science (this used to be ISI Science Citation Index). The Web of Science folks concentrate on accurate indexing of citations; they've been doing this for almost 50 years.

Web of Science will index an article and its citations once it has acquired its permanent bibliographic data. The article's citations will then be matched to source items that have already been indexed. Typically there are cited items that don't get matched - these might be unpublished articles, in-press articles, and private communications. Increasingly, the dangling items include DOIs. In the case of a cited publish-before-print article, the citation will remain in the database until the article has been included in an issue and indexed by Web of Science. At that point, if the DOI, journal name, and first author name all match, the dangling citation is joined the the indexed source item so that all citations of the article are grouped together.

Google's PageRank is becoming increasingly important for electronic journals, so it's important to help Google group together all the links to your content. The method supported by Google for grouping URL's is the rel="canonical" meta tag. By putting a DOI based link into this tag on the article web pages, publishers can ensure that the electronic article will be ranked optimally in Google and Google Scholar.

An increasingly popular alternative to publish-before-print is print-oblivious article numbering. Publishers following this practice do not assign issue numbers or page numbers, and instead assign article numbers when the version-of-record is first produced. Downstream bibliographic systems have not universally adjusted to this new practice; best paractices for article numbers are described in an NFAIS Report on Publishing Journal Articles (pdf 221KB).

In summary, the flow of publish-before-print articles to end users can be facilitated by proper use of DOIs and Crossref.

Prompt, accurate and complete metadata deposit at the initial online publication event and subsequent pagination is essential.
DOI's should be constructed with the expectation that they will get transcribed by humans.
Citation checking and correction should be built into the article copyediting and production process.
Use of DOI in rel="canonical" metatags will help in search engine rankings.

Panlibus: OCLC’s Karen Calhoun Talks with Talis

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 16:14:57 -0800

I caught up with Vice president of OCLC WorldCat and Metadata Services, Karen Calhoun, in the lobby of a hotel across the road from the iconic British Library building in London. Karen was preparing for her presentation at the 2009 OCLC Tech Forum to be held in the Library conference centre.

I took the opportunity to talk to her about the last twelve months since the announcement about changes to the OCLC record reuse policy. We then moved on to discuss how new entrants, Biblios and SkyRiver, in to the record supply sector may alter that landscape.

As well as discussing the themes for her presentation later that morning, we also explored the blurring of the boundaries between OCLC’s traditional record supply focus and the ILS vendor community offering library automation software.

Technorati Tags: Karen Calhoun,OCLC

Allan's Library: Web 2.0 Five Year Anniversary

Allan Cho — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 20:36:00 -0800

As we approach the six-year mark from the original Web 2.0 thesis, Tim O'Reilly and John Battelle come together in a refocusing session of where the social web is going. Once applications live in the cloud, the key to success will be harnessing network effects so that those applications literally get better the more people use them. In the recent Web 2.0 Summit, O'Reilly and Battelle penned a white paper which they argue,

today we see that applications are being driven by sensors, not just by people typing on keyboards. They are becoming platforms for collective action, not just collective intelligence. The "data shadows" that people and things leave in cyberspace are becoming richer and deeper, and are being exploited in new ways. All this is adding up to something profound and different. When web meets world, we get Web Squared.

1. Sensory Input - We're not searching via keyboard and search grammar; we're talking to and with the Web. With new search applications such as Google's Mobile App for the iPhone, speech recognition is detected as soon as the application detects movement of the phone to the ear. The Web is growing, and is to the point of getting smart enough to understand things without us having to tell it explicity.

2. Implied Metadata - Because the Web is "learning," meaning is being learned "inferentially" from the body of data each day, and speech recognition and computer vision are examples of this kind of machine learning. The Web 2.0 era is about discovering such implied metadata, and then building a database to capture that metadata and fostering an ecosystem around it.

3. Information Shadows - Real world objects have "information shadows" in cyberspace. Because of sensor applications like the iPhone's, a book that has information shadows on Amazon, Google Book Search, LibraryThing, eBay, Twitter, and in a thousand blogs.

4. Digital Returns to the Physical - As a result, these shadows are linked with their real world analogues by unique identifiers: an ISBN, a serial number, etc. Real-world objects can be "tagged" and its metadata on the Web. Libraries have long been innovators in this field (as information managers), with some cataloguing systems based on the idea of FRBR, which represents a holistic approach to retrieval and access as the relationships between the entities provide links to navigate through the hierarchy of relationships.

5. Rise of the Real-Time - The Web has become a conversation - meaning, search has gotten faster. Microblogging (such as Twitter) has required instantaneous updating -- a significant shift in both infrastructure and approach. Search has become real-time and human participation has added a layer of structure (and metadata). This new information layer being built around Twitter could rival existing services such as search, analytics, and social networks. Moreover, real-time is not limited to social media or mobile. As the authors point out, Walmart has been doing such instantaneous information cascading for many years: real-time feedback (from customers) drive inventory. As a "Web Squared" company, its operations are infused with IT, and innately driven by data from their customers -- the physical being driven by the digital and vice-versa.

What does this all mean? Librarians have a role to play. We've been doing it for years with FRBR and RFID. It's time we turn the page and write the first sentence for this new Web.

Go to Hellman: Putting Linked Data Boilerplate in a Box

Eric Hellman — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 07:06:00 -0800

Humans have always been digital creatures, and not just because we have fingers. We like to put things in boxes, in clearly defined categories. Our brains so dislike ambiguity that when musical tones are too close in pitch, the dissonance almost hurts.

The aesthetics of technical design frequently ask us to separate one thing from another. It's often said that software should separate code from content and that web-page mark-up should separate presentation from content. XML allows us to separate element content from attribute data; well designed XML schemas make clear and consistent decisions about what should go where.

In ontology design, the study of description logics has given us boxes for two types of information, which have been not-so-helpfully named the "A-Box" and the "T-Box". The T-Box is for terminology and the A-Box is for assertions. When you're designing an ontology, an important decision is how much information should be built into your terminology and how much should be left for users of the terminology to assert.

It's not always easy to decide where to draw the terminology vs. assertion line. For example, if you're building a dog ontology, you might want to have a BlackDog class for dogs that are black. Users of your ontology could then make a single assertion that Fido is a BlackDog, saving them the trouble of making the pair of assertions that Fido is a Dog and Fido is colored black. The audience, on the other hand, would have to understand the added terminology to be able to understand what you've said. In one case, the binding of color to dogs is done in the T-Box, in the second, the A-Box. The A/B box choice boils down to a question of whether users would rather have a concise assertion box and a complex terminology box, or a verbose assertion box and a simple terminology.

Although I designed my first RDF Schema over ten years ago, I had not had a chance to try out OWL for ontology design. Since OWL 2 has just just become a W3C Recommendation, I figured it was about time for me to dive in. I was also curious to find out what kind of ontology designs are preferred for linked data deployment, and I'd never even heard of description logic boxes.

Since I gave the New York Times an unfairly hard time for the mistakes it made in its initial Linked Data release, I felt somewhat obligated to do what I could to participate helpfully in their Linked Open Data Community. (Good stuff is going on there- if you're interested, go have a look!) The licensing and attribution metadata in the Times' Linked Data struck me as highly repetitive, and I wondered if this boilerplate metadata could be cleaned up by moving it into an OWL ontology. It could; if you're interested in details, go to the Times Data Community site and see.

It's not obvious which box this boilerplate information should be in. It's really context information, or assertions about other assertions. The Times wants people to know that it has licensed the data under a creative commons license, and that it wants attribution. If it's really the same set of assertions for everything the Times wants to express (i.e. it's boilerplate) then one would think there would be a better way than mindless repetition.

My ontology for New York Times assertion and licensing boilerplate had the effect of compacting the A-Box at the cost of making the T-Box more complex. I asked if that was a desirable thing or not, and the answer from the community was a uniform NOT. The problem is that there are many consumers of linked data who are reluctant to do the OWL reasoning necessary to unveil the boilerplate assertions embedded in the ontology. Since a business objective for the Times is to enable as many users as possible to make use of its data and ultimately to drive traffic to its topic pages, it makes sense to keep technical barriers as low as possible. Mindlessness is a feature.

I could only think of one reason that a real business would want to use my boilerplate-in-ontology scheme. Since handling an ontology may require some human intervention, the use of a custom ontology could be a mechanism to enforce downstream consideration of and assent to license terms, analogous to "click-wrap" licensing. Yuck!

The conclusion, at least for now, is that for most linked data publishing it is desirable to keep the terminology as simple as possible. Linked Data Pidgin is better than Linked Data Creole.

Jodi Schneider: What types of data do social networks have? See Schneier’s Taxonomy.

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 02:01:03 -0800

Rights to data may depend, says Bruce Schneier, on what type of data it is and who provided it. He provides a useful enumeration:

1. Service data. Service data is the data you need to give to a social networking site in order to use it. It might include your legal name, your age, and your credit card number.

2. Disclosed data. This is what you post on your own pages: blog entries, photographs, messages, comments, and so on.

3. Entrusted data. This is what you post on other people’s pages. It’s basically the same stuff as disclosed data, but the difference is that you don’t have control over the data — someone else does.

4. Incidental data. Incidental data is data the other people post about you. Again, it’s basically same same stuff as disclosed data, but the difference is that 1) you don’t have control over it, and 2) you didn’t create it in the first place.

5. Behavioral data. This is data that the site collects about your habits by recording what you do and who you do it with.

See Schenier’s post for discussion. Via a pointer on Rob Styles’ blog, in turn via Rob’s tweet.

Have you come across other taxonomies for social networking data?

Here’s a simple but far less expressive one way to characterize data on social networks. Is it “about you” or “from you”? Either the first, the second, neither, or both. “Aboutness”, however, is ontologically challenging. Any use for this?

Collaboration/shared control isn’t considered in this taxonomy. For instance, “entrusted data” doesn’t capture the notion of “shared data” in a collaborative system such as wave, a wiki, or perhaps even email.

For behavioral data in libraries, see also “intentional data”, as used by Lorcan Dempsey, back to 2005 (and many times since) [for instance, in discussion with "emergent knowledge"]. I prefer “behavioral data” since much data about intention is by no means deliberate/intentional!

Panlibus: Adrian Dale looks forward to Online Information 2009

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 10:00:31 -0800

The twelve months that have elapsed since the previous Online Information Conference has seen an explosion in technologies that influence the information world and life in general. What was being talked about as up coming trends last year, are now core to the agenda of this years conference.

Conference Chair, Adrian Dale, joins me in conversation to discuss these trends an to explore his hopes for the highlights of this years conference.

Technorati Tags: Online Information,online09

Jodi Schneider: Wave: mostly a rant

Sun, 15 Nov 2009 06:35:24 -0800

I’ve been on Google Wave for about a week and a half. So far I only have things to complain about.

I watched, with rapt fascination, the hour-long intro video¹ back in May. Though video is usually something I consume for entertainment, not information.

So it may be that my hopes were too high. Given that Wave is a ‘preview’ (is that one level below beta?), there’s still hope for the future.

Things I don’t like about wave:

The new stuff isn’t always at the bottom, and ‘diff’ is a video
I have to add my own contacts all over again, and they’ve got new “email” addresses
Closed system–so I can’t communicate with just anybody
Feels very slow
Need to click to edit–yet I’m still always creating errant blank notes
I can’t tell what I can edit and what I can’t
What’s the etiquette?²
Doesn’t separate content and discussion
Waves with lots of people get really long really quickly
Other maintenance–like, I guess I’m supposed to add a picture for myself?
The ‘inbox’ is really a list of things I’m paying attention to. ‘inbox’ seems a misnomer.
I can’t subscribe to wave alerts via email (e.g. if I haven’t logged in in some amount of time, remind me by email that I might want to)
Those damn arrows! I DON’T WANT TO SCROLL!!!!!
I want a list of bots, and to add a bot by clicking a button.
I want a ‘make this public’ button, rather than having to scramble for an email address to add.

For more information about wave, check Google’s About pages, Wikipedia’s overview, or the in-progress wiki aiming to The Complete Guide to Google Wave. At the moment, I’ve still got a few invites to give away, if you’d like to try it out for yourself.

Overall, I’m struck by the length and lack of summarization in Wave. One of the reasons I keep using gmail is that it (often but not always) helps me to keep track of the conversation. Wave doesn’t do that right now: the ‘preview’ or subject line just pulls from the first blip. (Even just pulling from the latest blip would help!)

I have a few active collaborations in Wave (SIOC, the ‘unofficial code4lib conference wave’, and a small advertising/new media conversation we’re testing moving from email). Perhaps as time goes on I’ll have a better understanding of what it’s good for in practice. Meanwhile, I welcome pointers to others’ experiences, especially easy-to-digest tips about how you’re using Wave!

oops–make that 1:20!
For instance, I *am* going to delete blips and extraneous comments to make things easier to follow. In a wiki this would be expected. In my own inbox it’s up to me. But in a public listserv conversation it’s verboten, except perhaps for spam deletion.

Go to Hellman: The Book Rights Registry Unclaimed Works Fiduciary: Powerful Regent or Powerless Figurehead?

Eric Hellman — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 10:24:00 -0800

In college, I did physics problem sets with a study group that called themselves the "Fish Heads" after a song frequently played on the radio by Dr. Demento. We would start work after dinner on the night before the problem set was due, and we'd work till we were done, which was seldom before midnight and more usually like 3 or 4 AM.

I thought of the Fish Heads late last night while racing through the newly revised settlement agreement of the Google Book Search lawsuit. The parties to the lawsuit had already asked for, and received, a four-day extension, and you just knew they were going to stretch out their work to meet the midnight deadline with not much room to spare. Sure enough, at 11:45 PM EST came word that the revised agreement had been filed. A few minutes after midnight, I was racing through the document to find out what the changes were, tweeting along the way. James Grimmelmann and Ken Crews were doing the same thing in our different ways. It was really nerdy. Danny Sullivan was reporting on the Conference call with Dan Clancey, Paul Aiken and Richard Sarnoff.

Here's your basic reading list for Google Book Search Settlement Agreement 2.0:

Start with the New York Times summary (Brad Stone and Miguel Helft)
Then read Danny Sullivan's report on the Conference call.
Having gotten the big picture, read James Grimmelmann's instant analysis of the revised agreement.
Then graze through the coverage overview at Gary Price's Resource Shelf.

Having slept on it and having had some time to think it through, I have a bunch of questions, and they mostly focus on the one demon that has not been exorcised from the agreement, orphan works.

The revised agreement attempts to address the peculiar situation of orphan works by introducing a new entity, the Unclaimed Works Fiduciary (UWF) which, as part of the Book Rights Registry, is to act as a spokesman for the rightsholders of the unclaimed works. The key question for your problem set is this: is this new regime a powerful Regency over Orphandom, or is it a powerless Figurehead masking a Google Autocracy of Zombies?

Here is how the revised agreement defines the UWF

Unclaimed Works Fiduciary. The Charter will provide that the Registry’s power to act with respect to the exploitation of unclaimed Books and Inserts under the Amended Settlement will be delegated to an independent fiduciary (the “Unclaimed Works Fiduciary”) as set forth in [other sections of the Agreement] and otherwise as the Board of Directors of the Registry deems appropriate. The Unclaimed Works Fiduciary will be a person or entity that is not a published book author or book publisher (or an officer, director or employee of a book publisher). The Unclaimed Works Fiduciary (and any successor) will be chosen by a supermajority vote of the Board of Directors of the Registry and will be subject to Court approval.

The section about the Registry Charter provides that

in the case of unclaimed Books and Inserts, the Unclaimed Works Fiduciary may license to third parties the Copyright Interests of Rightsholders of unclaimed Books and Inserts to the extent permitted by law.

James Grimmelmann calls that that last sentence "words of equivocation". The reason is that he and other commentators think there is almost nothing that the law, absent an act of Congress, would allow the UWF to license to a third party. The rule of "Nemo dat" should apply- you can't give something away that isn't yours to give.

The Open Book Alliance goes even further. In a post somehow released earlier than the revised agreement, it calls the revised agreement a "sleight of hand" meant to distract people from Google's monopoly grab, its usurpation of Congress, its shredding of contracts, its destruction of libraries, ~~its bioterror weapons stockpile and its threatening the sanctity of marriage~~.

Michael Healy, who has been named Executive Director of the Book Rights Registry, which would be the home of the UWF, seems to have a different perspective. In a post on the Publishing Point website, Healy notes

The Registry will now include a Court-approved fiduciary who will represent rightsholders of unclaimed books, act to protect their interests, and license their works to third parties, to the extent permitted by law.
The new version of the settlement removes the “most favored nation” clause contained in the previous version. The Registry will now be able to license unclaimed works to other parties without ever extending the same terms to Google.

"Extent permitted by law" is a hard phrase to argue with. How could a settlement go any further? Grimmelmann's theory is that the phrase is meant to be an enticement to Congress to pass a narrow law aimed at neutralizing Google's exclusive access to orphan works exploitation.

A closer look at the UWF suggests that its other powers may be less constrained. Here's what it will be able to do, as enumerated by the revised agreement:

UWF may direct Google to change the classification of a Book to a Display Book ~~or to a No Display Book or to include in, or exclude any or all Unclaimed Works from, one or more of the Display Uses (note added- see comments)~~.
UWF may allow Google to
- alter the text of a Book or Insert when displayed to users;
- add hyperlinks to any content within a page of a Book or facilitate the sharing of Book Annotations
and may exclude from Advertising Uses one or more unclaimed Books if Google displays animated, audio or video advertisements in conjunction with those Books.
UWF may approve the use of additional or different Pricing Bins for unclaimed Books
UWF may:
- dispute Google’s categorization of a Book as Fiction
- allow Google to offer to users copy/paste, print or Book Annotation functionalities as part of Preview Uses; allow Google to conduct tests to determine if another Preview Use category increases sales and revenues of such Books
- adjust the Preview Use setting for a particular Book in exceptional circumstances for good cause shown.
UWF may authorize Google to make special offers of Books available through Consumer Purchases at reduced prices from the List Price.
the Unclaimed Works Fiduciary and Google may agree to one or more of the following additional Revenue Models for unclaimed works:
- Print on Demand (“POD”) - This service would permit purchasers to obtain a print copy of a non- Commercially Available Book distributed by third parties. A Book’s availability through such POD program would not, in and of itself, result in the Book being classified as Commercially Available.
- File Download. This service would permit purchasers of Consumer Purchase for a Book to download a copy of such Book in an appropriate file format such as PDF, EPUB or other format for use on electronic book reading devices, mobile phones, portable media players and other electronic devices (“File Download”).
- Consumer Subscription Models – This service would permit the purchase of individual access to the Institutional Subscription Database or to a designated subset thereof (“Consumer Subscription”).
UWF may license to third parties the Copyright Interests of Rightsholders of unclaimed Books and Inserts to the extent permitted by law. (discussed above.)
allow the Registry to use up to twenty-five percent (25%) of Unclaimed Funds earned in any one year that have remained unclaimed for least five (5) years for the purpose of attempting to locate the Rightsholders of unclaimed Books.
UWF can challenge the classification of its Book or a group of its Books as In-Print or as Out-of-Print

All in all, it seems to me that the most significant power of the UWF is not the theoretical power to deal with third parties, but rather the power to control the display status of unclaimed works. (note added- see comments).

Under what circumstances might the UWF turn off display uses? Since the UWF is subject to the approval of the court, the court could, in principle, direct UWF to manage the unclaimed works to minimize antitrust issues. If that happened, Google's monopoly would not go much further than a release of liability for uses that might be considered fair use. Or, the UWF could use its leverage to force Google to open its unclaimed works scans to competitors.

On the other hand, the UWF, being selected by the Registry Board, and being dependent on the Registry for support, would have built-in incentives to enable revenue generating use by Google, not to mention its responsibilities to the orphan rights-holders.

In the end, whether the Unclaimed Works Fiduciary becomes a powerful Regent or a powerless Figurehead depends to a great extent on the Court's willingness to wield power. Good Luck, Denny Chin!

Ask a fish head anything you want to
they won't answer they can't talk.

Jodi Schneider: Litl, the explictly social webbook, for the living room

Sat, 14 Nov 2009 11:40:34 -0800

The litl is a $695 ‘webbook’ with a 2-year money-back guarantee. via Scott Janousek¹

cc licensed flickr photo shared by litl

The company is selling the litl as the no-fuss way to get online at home. It reminds me of the olpc more than anything I’ve seen:

“practically sunlight readable” screen
explicitly social (more below)
has a handle
converts to an easel
its own new, linux-based Litl OS
keyboard changes and simplification: “We’ve eliminated the inscrutable function keys and buttons with weird symbols. We also took out the cap locks key, which everyone uses only by mistake.” They’ve also added a ‘Litl button’ to get back to the home screen.
everything is always full screen²
3 pounds
sturdy: only moving part is a small fan

It’s also something of an ambient information device, with focus on viewing rather than typing, and ‘distracted interaction’.

Like the chumby, litl is

invites others to build widgets
advertises itself as a clock
has channels (which can be synced with the other lidls)
unusual navigation (in litl’s case: a roller-wheel and remote control)
has upgraded packaging

Marketing is snazzy, with a lot of thought into packaging, including card illustrations by David Macaulay (flickr) (company blog post).

cc licensed flickr photo shared by litl

Litl has a strong social media presence. For instance, they advertise their minimalist packaging with a company-made unboxing video:

litl webbook unboxing from litl on Vimeo.

Aside from the company website, the most detailed information is from Wade Roush’s xconomy Boston review.

In place of a desktop, the Webbook has a home screen that displays up to 12 boxes that Chuang calls “Web cards.” Some represent Web pages, others represent RSS feeds, and still others represent widgets or “channels” that are the Webbook’s closest thing to native applications—for example, there’s an egg timer widget for use in the kitchen and a Weather Channel widget that shows the temperature outdoors.

The litl is explicitly social: “By linking multiple litls, you can synchronize channels automatically.”
A ’share’ button also pushes the current content to another Litl.

Convenience features

cloud-computing
- synch multiple litls (whole machine or only certain channels)
pulls in images (e.g. from flickr and Shutterfly)
TV-integration: “What if we could combine the limitless amount of content on the web with the ‘lean back’ experience of the TV?”
- HDMI port
- has an optional remote control

Scott is a Boston-based flash developer I first discovered when following the chumby. Scott has started his own blog devoted to the litl, which, like the chumby, uses widgets. More details from his regular blog.
well, except that you get 12 widgets on the homescreen

Allan's Library: The Facebook Era

Allan Cho — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 03:15:00 -0800

Clara Shih is a rising star in the social media world. The Facebook Era is a new technology model, way of thinking, and cultural phenomenon. Whereas the last decade was about the World Wide Web of information and the power of linking web pages, today, we are seeing a World Wide Web of people emerge. I think Shih introduces some interesting concepts to the social media hemisphere:

1. The Social Graph -- Called the fourth revolution of "social computing", the social networking movement has blurred the lines of the private and the public, a movement that afffects us all personally first, professionally second -- it ultimately blends the old dichotomies of the personal and the professional.

2. Social Sales -- The social web has become one large Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system. Social networking businesses and organizations to view profiles of their accounts, capture deal information, track performance, communicate with contacts, and share information internally. As a result the social CRM becomes a bidirectional relationship between vendor and customer.

3. Social Capital -- the social graph reaches far beyond technology and media. It is one of the most signficant sociocultural phenomena of this decade. Weak ties used to require a lot of effort to sustain; however, with the social web, people now are accustomed to accumulating and never losing contacts throughout the rest of their lives

Clara Shih became an important name in corporate social networking when she developed Faceconnector (initially named Faceforce) in 2007, which was the first business application on Facebook. The application integrates Facebook and Salesforce CRM, pulling Facebook profiles and friend information into Salesforce account, lead, and contact records. Although the book is aimed at the business and technology, it is also has an intellectual premise about a sociocultural transformation that requires a change in our thinking and a new language to articulate our strategies and observations.

It will be interesting to see the continued impact of the The Facebook Era in the upcoming years as social media is still ever-evolving. Although it is a required textbook for the Global Entrepreneurial Marketing course at Stanford and social media course at Harvard Business School, there's no gurantee that these tools will continue to dominate.

Jodi Schneider: Joining the W3C

Sat, 14 Nov 2009 08:26:43 -0800

DERI is a W3C member, so one of the perks of studying here is getting nominated for W3C membership. Yesterday I got my W3C account. While I’ve yet to explore the Member area, I’ve been thoroughly briefed on the dissemination and confidentiality policies.

18 months ago, I wrote about the W3C for Wendell Piez’s Document Processing class. This particular assignment was to research a standard or standards organization, and to prepare a wiki page summarizing it for our colleagues. I’ve shared this below. Among other things, it shows what (little) I know about the W3C to date.

March 15, 2008 (with markup revisions)

Who are they? What does the acronym stand for?

W3C, the World Wide Web Consortium, is an international membership organization founded in 1994. Their mission: “To lead the World Wide Web to its full potential by developing protocols and guidelines that ensure long-term growth for the Web.”

How are they organized? Who pays for their operations?

The Members—over 400 organizations in 40 countries—pay the bills for the W3C. The W3C also has a Team of 68 full-time staff headed by founding director Tim Berners-Lee (http://www.w3.org/Consortium/about-w3c.html). Management and Oversight functions are provided by an Advisory Committee (a representative body of the Members), an Advisory Board, a Technical Architecture Group, and Host Institutions. Further details about Membership and Oversight are available below.

What does the W3C do? What are their most important standards and what sorts of standards do they create?

The W3C “develops open specifications (de facto standards) to enhance the interoperability of web-related products.” Webstandards.org

The W3C’s best-known standards (’Recommendations’) are HTML, XML, CSS, and xHTML. XSL and XSLT are also W3C Recommendations. Many XML-related technologies are also Recommendations of the W3C. See the full list of W3C Recommendations.

How do they go about creating these standards?

Specifications originate from Working Groups and pass through a multi-step process in order to become a W3C Recommendation:

Working Draft (WD)
Candidate Recommendation (CR)
Proposed Recommendation (PR)
Recommendation (REC)

During this process, Working Groups are expected to publish a new draft at least every 3 months under the heartbeat rule. Frequent publication allows for early, frequent feedback, and the Working Group is expected to attend to issues raised by the community. Public comment, as well as the endorsement of W3C Members and the W3C Director, are an important part of the Recommendation Track.

Recommendation Track

“The W3C Recommendation Track process is designed to maximize consensus about the content of a technical report, to ensure high technical and editorial quality, and to earn endorsement by W3C and the broader community.” The Organizational Process document provides details about the documents produced on the Recommendation Track:

“Working Draft (WD)
A Working Draft is a document that W3C has published for review by the community, including W3C Members, the public, and other technical organizations.
Candidate Recommendation (CR)
A Candidate Recommendation is a document that W3C believes has been widely reviewed and satisfies the Working Group’s technical requirements. W3C publishes a Candidate Recommendation to gather implementation experience.
Proposed Recommendation (PR)
A Proposed Recommendation is a mature technical report that, after wide review for technical soundness and implementability, W3C has sent to the W3C Advisory Committee for final endorsement.
W3C Recommendation (REC)
A W3C Recommendation is a specification or set of guidelines that, after extensive consensus-building, has received the endorsement of W3C Members and the Director. W3C recommends the wide deployment of its Recommendations. Note: W3C Recommendations are similar to the standards published by other organizations. ”

Other publications

Recommendations may also become Rescinded Recommendations, and Working Groups may decide to abort work and publish a Working Group Note annotating their work to date (alternatives to Recommendations).

The W3C also publicizes selected content from their constituents, without endorsing this content. See Team Submissions and Member Submissions These submissions are not standards.

W3C’s work is organized into the 21 areas, called Activities. Activity summaries and homepages are a rich source of information about ongoing work of the W3C.

Who does this standards work?

Working Groups do much of the standards work of the W3C. Working Groups primarily consist of Member repesentatives and Team representatives; Invited Experts may also participate. Designated individuals work as Chair and Team Contact for these small groups “(typically fewer than 15 people)”. Typically, Working Groups last for 6 months to 2 years. Working Groups “typically produce deliverables (e.g., Recommendation Track technical reports, software, test suites, and reviews of the deliverables of other groups).” Working Groups are constituted when the W3C Director, currently Tim Berners-Lee, issues a Call for Participation, providing the Advisory Committee with a Charter of the group’s mission, duration, and deliverables. They are expected to invite and respond to public commentary about standards in progress.

The W3C also has Interest Groups and Coordination Groups. Interest Groups are larger bodies without deliverables formed around a technical interest. For some Interest Groups, participation on a public mailing list is the only criterion for participation. Like Working Groups, Interest Groups are originally created by a Call for Participation and Charter from the Director.

Coordination Groups “manage dependencies”. Coordination Groups consist of a Chair, the Chair of each coordinated group (to promote effective communication among the groups), invited experts (e.g., liaisons to groups inside or outside W3C), and Team representatives (including the Team Contact).

How do they promulgate their standards? What leverage, if any, do they have over their users or potential users?

The multi-step community process of the Recommendation Track publicizes draft standards and invites input from the community. So to some extent, W3C Recommendations are promulgated during development. Furthermore, many Members are large corporations, particularly technology companies which may wield influence over the adoption of standards.

While W3C doesn’t issue certifications for compliance implementations, in some cases they do sponsor compliance testing tools, for instance, HTML Conformance Testing. However, in some cases, standards may be only partially implemented or extended. HTML 4 provides an example: browsers such as Internet Explorer and Safari don’t exactly implement this Recommendation. Rather, they approximate the standard, by implementing the protocols designed by the companies that build them.

W3C Activities may have associated education groups such as the Semantic Web Education and Outreach (SWEO) Interest Group which may promote the W3C, its technologies, and the associated Recommendations.

W3C Membership

Membership is open, subject to approval by the W3C, and involves paying a fee to the organization. Rates are tiered, depending on the income-level of the country where the organization’s headquarters, as classified by the World Bank. (In 2008, the fees range from $953/year to $63,500/year. U.S. organizations pay $6,350 or $63,500, depending on their non-profit status and income.)

A list of current Members is available. Representatives of Member organizations make up the Advisory Committee, composed of one representative from each Member organization.

Oversight and management of the W3C

Oversight and management functions are handled by various groups: Advisory Committee, Advisory Board, Technical Advisory Group, and Host Institution.

Advisory Committee

Handles: Meets twice a year about overall direction of the W3C
Composition: 1 participant per Member Organization

Advisory Board (AB)

Handles: Business oversight, including Member concerns and matters of “strategy, management, legal matters, process, and conflict resolution”
Composition: 10 participants: 9 elected participants and a Chair (currently Tim Berners-Lee)

Technical Advisory Group (TAG)

Handles: Technical oversight and stewardship of the Web architecture, especially consensus-building and collaboration relating to Web architecture.
Composition: 9 participants: 5 elected by Advisory Committee, 3 appointed by Directory, 1 Chair (currently Tim Berners-Lee)

Host Institutions

Handles: Signing contracts, oversight of “Team salaries, detailed budgeting, and other business decisions”.
Composition: The W3C has 3 host institutions: MIT in Cambridge, MA, U.S.A., the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics (ERCIM) in France, and Keio University in Japan.

Note: The W3C is not legally incorporated. Instead, the host organizations (which are not members of the W3C) enter into contracts for the W3C. Membership documents, for example, are currently executed by each host organization.

Getting involved with the W3C as an individual

Go to Hellman: The New York Times Gets It Right; Does Linked Data Need a CrossRef or an InfoChimps?

Eric Hellman — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 06:34:00 -0800

I've been saying this long enough that I don't remember whether I was quoting someone else: whenever the internet disintermediates a middleman, two new intermediaries pop up somewhere else. It's disintermediation whack-a-mole, if you will. The reasons for this are:

The old middlemen became fat on mark-ups an order of magnitude larger than needed by internet-enabled middlemen.
Internet-enabled middlemen add value in ways that the old ones didn't.

My last business functioned as an intermediary that aggregated linking data. We'd get data from publishers, clean it up and add it to our collection, then provide feeds of that data to our customers (libraries and library systems vendors). Our customers got good data and support if was a problem. The companies who provided the data didn't have to deal with hundreds of libraries or system vendors, and they came to understand that we would help their customers link to their content.

Some companies, especially the large ones, were initially uncomfortable with the knowledge that we were selling feeds of data that they were giving out for free. They felt that somehow there was money left on the table. Other companies were fearful of losing control of the information, even though they didn't really have control of it in the first place. Once we explained to them how their data contained mangled character encodings, fictitious identifiers, stray column separators and Catalan month names, they began to see the value we provided.

While my company focused on the data needs of libraries (and did pretty well), a group of the largest academic publishers put up some money and formed a consortium to pool a different type of linking data in a way that let the publishers have more control of the data distribution. This consortium, known as Crossref, just celebrated its 10th anniversary. Crossref has not only paid back the money that its founders invested in it; it has arguably done more to push academic publishing into the 21st century than any other organization on the planet.

As academic publishing companies began to understand the benefits of distributing linking data through Crossref, my company, and others like it, they became more comfortable opening up their content and reaping the financial benefits. Despite the global recession, and despite predictions of its impending collapse, STM publishing has been financially healthy with companies such as Elsevier reporting increased profits. This is rather unlike the newspaper industry, for example.

Before I get to the newspaper industry, I should note yesterday's news that InfoChimps are publishing a collection of token data harvested from Twitter.

Today we are publishing a few items collected from our large scrape of Twitter’s API. The data was collected, cleaned, and packaged over twelve months and contains almost the entire history of Twitter: 35 million users, one billion relationships, and half a billion Tweets, reaching back to March 2006.

InfoChimps is positioning itself as a marketplace to buy, sell, and share data sets of any size, topic or format. Yet another intermediary has popped up!

Two weeks ago, I wrote a somewhat alarmist article about problems in an exciting set of Linked Data being released by the New York Times. I am pleased to be able to be report that the New York Times is now getting it right! The most important thing that they're doing right is that they're listening to the people who want to consume their data. They've started a Google Group based community for the specific purpose of understanding how best to deliver their data. They've also corrected the problems pointed out by myself and others. It's not perfect, but it's not reasonable to expect perfect. The New York Times has set a very hopeful example for other companies that want to start publishing semantic linking information on the open web.

If, as many of us hope, many publishers decide to follow the lead of the Times and make more data collections available, will more intermediaries such as InfoChimps arise to facilitate data distribution, as happened with linking data in scholarly publishing? Will ad hoc groups such as "the Pedantic Web" become key participants in a less centralized data distribution environment? Or maybe large companies will turn off the spigots as "the suits" grow increasingly worried about their ability to control data once it is let out into the web of data.

Perhaps the time is ripe for a set of forward-looking publishers to emulate the nervous-but-smart journal publishers who started Crossref 10 years ago and start a similar consortium for the distribution of Linked Data.

Go to Hellman: The Uniqueness of Sentences and J. K. Rowling's (Non)Infringement of Tanya Tucker

Eric Hellman — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 00:15:00 -0800

Have you ever heard someone say something unusual and wonder to yourself if anyone in the history of humanity had ever said that before, ever? It happens a lot more than you might think.

In the discussion of my article on copyright salami, I suggested that copyright based on content as short as a sentence would not be very robust. I had reasoned that if the sentences were short enough, the would be a high probability that the same sentence had already appeared in a copyrighted work, or even in a work that was in the public domain. I imagined building huge databases of sentences that had already been used so as to clear them for reuse.

I decided to do some testing first. I chose a page at random (p. 447) from my (print) copy of J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. I extracted the sentences, and put each sentences into Google and into Google Book Search. The results surprised me.

My first test sentence was

"Get - off - her!" Ron shouted.

With only 5 words, none of them uncommon, I expected to get a a few close matches. The book search produced zero hits, and no results at all close. The general Google search was more interesting. Of the 7 hits, all of them exact matches, the top two of seven hits appear to be properly attributed fair use quotations from the book. Two other hits were to complete, unauthorized copies of the book. One of these, on SlideShare, offers this disclaimer:

"hey here i got this book in pdf format .. am i violating anything after .. uploading this stuff over here ... just let me know .. if any issue come in existence, will remove it

Although the item has had 34,000 views, it pdf itself appears to have been removed from SlideShare. The pdf posted by a Filipino web designer on his web site, though, is still available (and has been since August) and is of quite good quality.

The oddest hits are to a site which masquerades as a "game ranking" portal site.

RPGRank is a real-time online game ranking system which provide a best MMORPG ranking portal for both players and games of all genre with the exclusive news, press release, review, preview, interview, trailer and vedio. RPGRank strive to provide all gamers things that they never experienced before by newest game beta keys, live-event, and online tournamentsa with attractive giveaways from games.

It appears that this site generates pages of random text for the benefit of search engines by extracting sentences from books and feeding the sentences to Google in a random order. This site has convinced Google to index "about 318,000" pages of its meaningless "content", and offers to sell "background" advertising space on the site at $1200 per month.

The last hit appears to be to a site which is presenting a Vietnamese translation of the book alongside the complete English text. Although I can't read Vietnamese, I doubt very much that it is authorized use. Vietnam joined the Berne convention only 5 years ago, so this is certainly an illegal infringement.

Of the 26 sentences on page 447, I could find only three that had been used in places that Google knows about. The first, "Leave him alone, leave him alone!" is a line from a Tanya Tucker song. The second, "Harry's stomach turned over.", has been used in James Edward Amesbury's "bloody but weakly conceived thriller", A Sporting Chance and in D. Edwards Bradley's Harry's War.

The third,"Harry did not answer immediately." is firmly in the public domain, having done duty as a complete sentence in Smith Hempstone's A Tract of Time, as a fragment in Frances Elizabeth G. Carey-Brock's 1867 My father's Hand: and Other Stories, and in Adam Williams' 2007 gripping adventure of modern China, The Dragon's Tail.

Three sentences comprising bits of dialog: "Been Stung", "And your first name?", and "Vernon Dudley", turned up numerous matches to fragments of sentences in Google. It was also amusing to see matches for the sentence "What happened to you, ugly?" This phrase matched two people-search sites which specialize in feeding Google pages with text like "What happened to Joe Smith?" Apperently there is someone who uses the screen name "you_ugly", and the people search engines just leapt to the wrong conclusions!

Most of the sentences on page 447 appear to be purely original to J. K. Rowling. Was she lucky, or were the odds stacked in her favor? Word frequencies for English have been measured, so we can easily generate a simplistic estimate of sentence occurrence rate. Ignoring the proper name "Ron", the words "Get", "off", "her" and "shout" have occurrence frequencies of 0.22%, 0.046%, 0.22%, and 0.0055%, respectively. Multiplying these occurrence rates gives us a weighted occurrence probability of this combination of 1 per 8 trillion. If you had the entire population of earth speaking random four-word English sentences they might come up with this combination in a day or two. Add "Ron" into the mix, and they might take the greater part of a year to generate the sentence J. K. Rowling wrote.

For context, it's interesting to guess at the total number of sentences that humanity has written or spoken. It's estimated that 100 billion humans have lived so far. If those humans spent 16 hours a day for an average of 65 years generating 3 sentences per minute, we'd be up to about 20 million trillion sentences. The real number is probably a factor of 100 to a thousand less (half of us are men, after all!). This estimate roughly agrees with estimates of others that all the words ever spoken could be archived using 10 exabytes of storage.

Ten exabytes is not as much storage as it used to be. The Internet Archive currently has 0.003 exabytes; although Google is quite secretive about its hardware deployment, it seems likely that their current storage capacity is in excess of 10 exabytes. Yesterday, Google announced a pricing plan where they'll rent you 0.000016 exabytes for $4096 per year. I'll do the math for you. If you want to store everything anyone has ever said, Google will rent you the space for only $2.5 billion dollars per year!

Given that Google will soon have digitized a large fraction of the world's books, there are a few things we can learn from this exercise.

It will soon be very easy for Google to detect unauthorized copies of books in its index, and presumably to remove them. The benefit to publishers of doing this would hugely outweigh any damages they're suffering from the Google Books digitization program. Why have publishers overlooked getting this to happen as part of the agreement settling their lawsuit?
It will not be difficult for Google to accurately de-duplicate the Google Books index.
J.K. Rowling's hesitancy to release her books in ebook format is really, really stupid.

Before you get distracted with something useful, do this: pick about 5 random words, make a sentence from them, and become the first human ever to say that sentence. Depending on what you do next, you may also be the last!

Jodi Schneider: Scholarly Streams

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 09:18:47 -0800

Streams aren’t new. Funding for streams, though, that’s new.

MediaCommons has just announced funding from the NEH to create “digital portfolios”:
“Given this proliferation, what we need as scholars may be less a system that will manage our communication for us than a system that will allow us to manage our communication, a system than recognizes that the key aspect of scholarly communication into the future may be less the distribution of the products of our research than the management of the social networks through which our research is distributed.” [emphasis mine] MediaCommons as Digital Scholarly Network: Unveiling the Profile System. Via @kfitz.

So scholars don’t have to roll their own,¹ or depend on dubiously-funded startups.²

While the announcement implies “less is more”, Kathleen’s sample profile strikes me as a lifestream. Streams themselves are more “more” than “less”. (’Firehose’ comes to mind.) So streams alone aren’t going to solve scholarly communication. But streams can be sliced and diced any number of ways. First the data. Then, if there’s interest, maybe some services.

Personally I’m all for rolling your own. At least in theory. The first lifestream I ever noticed was code4lib’ber Mark Matienzo’s self-hosted planet , which aggregates his blog posts (both personal and work), tweets, youtube uploads, delicious bookmarks, and last.fm scrobbles. Brilliant, but thus far I’ve been too shy & lazy to follow suit.
FriendFeed popularized lifestreams. When Facebook bought FriendFeed back in August, my networks of librarians and scientists had several discussions of alternatives for scientists and other scholars.

Allan's Library: ASIS&T and Historians of Information

Allan Cho — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 12:07:00 -0800

Thomas Haigh is one of those rare individuals who speak elegantly, and write brilliantly interesting stories that superimpose very uninteresting topics in a thoughtful, academic manner. Not a librarian or LIS practitioner by trade, Haigh is actually a(n) historian by training and have taught an eclectic collection of subjects over the years. But now he teaches at the University of Wisconsin's School of Information Studies program. Haigh's panel challenges the historiography of information science, arguing that much is lacking due to the fact that information science poorly focuses on the training and engagement of historical topics. He argues, convincingly in my opinion, that the history of information science is actually written more succinctly and richly by those outside of the field itself.

On Day 2 of the The American Society for Information Science & Technology (ASIS&T) in Vancouver, BC (Thriving on Diversity - Information Opportunities in a Pluralistic World),I attended the panel, New Directions in Information History which included Haigh, Geoffrey Bowker, William Aspray, and Robert Williams. Haigh caught my attention the most as he challenged (often to an uncomfortable audience of LIS practitioners) thesocial and philosophical issues around technology, and in the relationship between the world of code and world of people. Haigh was trained in the History and Sociology of Science department at the University of Pennsylvania where he eventually became an historian specializing in 20th Century America, in the history of technology and in the social history of work and business.

Haigh is currently delving into the social history of the personal computer, where he argues that despite the shelves of books on the history of the PC, there has been "no serious historical study" of how people used their computers or why they brought them. In my session, Haigh was confronted heatedly about his argument that the history of information science is often weak and incomplete as information technology experts and scientists fail to capture the historical, social, and cultural contexts of proper history writing. Haigh touches on this briefly in his article, Sources for ACM History: What, Where, Why. It was very interesting seeing the giants of LIS such as Michael Buckland and Marcia Bates in the room debating with Haigh's externalist vision for historical inquiry of information science -- and is perhaps a microcosm of the state of the field today. Alas, the debate rages on.

Panlibus: Survival with the fittest: the story of a Google library partner

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 09:03:01 -0800

I hadn’t previously come across any of Google’s library partners, so it was great to listen to the experiences of Manuela Palafox from the Universidad Complutense in Madrid, Spain at the Eurolis seminar Doom or bloom: reinventing the library in the digital age. Complutense originally signed its digitisation agreement with Google back in 2006, and was the first non-Anglo-Saxon (her words) library to join the programme.

Based on books in the public domain, the agreement enables Complutense to offer universal free of charge full-text access to a large number of books. So I, for example, a former student from a Spanish university, can now explore a rich vein of Cervantes books without having to endure the punishing euro-sterling exchange rate.

In digitising Complutense’s public domain books, Google assumed all the costs of digitisation and transportation. Google also created an interface, something they do for all their library partners. In return, Complutense selected and provided the books, as well as technical staff. The overarching aim was to offer access to the university’s library heritage. It was also perceived as an important part of selling the Spanish language abroad – providing access to the vast number of Spanish speakers in the world.

The process started with an analysis of the collection to determine how many books were out of copyright. They then catalogued 70,000 books and established selection criteria – publication year and physical condition – and formulated workflows and logistics for digitisation. Using PDAs, for example, the selection team stored details of the physical condition of books against the book barcode.

As a result of this herculean effort, thousands of Complutense’s digitised books are already accessible in Google Books. It’s possible to navigate directly to the full text from the catalogue record. There are also links enabling users to buy the book. This is truly how to extract optimal value from materials that were formerly languishing in the library. And even in the short time that they’ve been available, 34% of the materials have already been used.

Meanwhile, Jason Hanley, one of Google’s partner managers who spoke immediately after Manuela, seemed anxious to dispel a number of myths about Google and its work with libraries. On the predominance of English language materials, he pointed out that of all Google’s library partners, 8 are outside the US – 2 being in Japan and the rest, such as Universidad Complutense, in Europe. He also believed the predominance of language, linguistics and literature over STEM subjects to be surprising – I’m not sure why.

The question and answer session at the end, involving both Manuela Palafox and Jason Hanley, may have inadvertently answered the question of Google’s motives in this. It’s not the library world that should be afraid of Google – it’s the competing search engines. Google’s longstanding mission – to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful – has clear benefits not only to library partners such as Universidad Complutense, but to the library world as a whole, and to bibliophiles like me. But Google will be imposing limits on the availability of digitised materials for indexing by other search engines for a certain (undefined in this session) period of time, although Hanley denied that Google was trying to be exclusive (which came across as being more than slightly defensive).

The session was a clear window into the aims and experiences of a library partner, and maybe into Google’s motives as well… As one speaker from the floor noted, what are the chances of any other search engine being able to compete fully with Google in the foreseeable future?.

Panlibus: Interesting developments at the Bibliotheque Nationale de France

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 06:04:26 -0800

Having read some documentation recently around the plans of the Bibliotheque Nationale de France (BNF) for what they call a “pivot” – a mechanism based on semantic technologies for optimising the value of the BNF’s entire web presence, including Gallica, its digital library, it was great to have the opportunity to hear Dominique Stutzmann from the BNF speak at the recent Eurolis Seminar in London.

The future of the library (Doom or Bloom?) was what the day event was all about, and according to Stutzmann, we’ve already invented it. We’ve got the nice buildings, and so ostensibly the library of the future will be the same as that of today. If the library space vanishes, he argued, it will only be the result of a self-fulfilling prophecy because librarians aren’t confident about what they’re doing. I think he’s really onto something – there is indeed an element of subjective crisis in the problem of the future of libraries. He admitted, though, that Web 2.0 re-presents the user-librarian relationship in quite a fundamental way; the user becomes both publisher and librarian. But users don’t want librarians to disappear. He seems to be saying that our library spaces continue to be successful, so leave them alone but engage with some interesting technological stuff as well, because libraries are well-positioned to do so. He added that users trust libraries with everything including long-term preservation of data, and BNF is clearly poised to exploit that trust, but not for its own ends, but for everyone, in the great universal tradition of libraries.

Stutzmann perceives the potential of semantic technologies very clearly in terms of the user experience – giving everyone improved and accurate access to the information available, and had an impressive array of exemplars to reel off, citing Google Book Search’s use of data mining tools taking city name from search results and pinpointing them on a map, and Bibliosurf’s map of novels as examples. Along similar lines, he demonstrated an interactive map with mashed up data from last-fm to produce a map of composers, where proximity indicates artistic commonality rather than geographical proximity – for example Beethoven is situated alongside Vaughan Williams.

As a Modern Languages graduate, I loved hearing about semantic search developments at the European Library and specifically in their TELplus project, where multilingual search (i.e. a search query with terms from more than one language) has been achieved. Stutzmann was clear that authority data is indivisible from semantic web developments, and that is where the librarian tradition really comes into its own; he demonstrated search results with LCSH headings as a facet on the side-panel. He pleaded with librarians to use metadata to give more accurate access to data.

The only downbeat element to his presentation was a survey carried out at BNF in 2008 to get a clearer picture of their users. A key finding was that the average user of the digital library 48, although there is an overall age range of 14-94. Europeana suffers from the same problem. Funnily enough, when I was out on Saturday night, a friend was saying how almost all the people who queued up recently in Birmingham to see the Anglo-Saxon treasures recently discovered in the West Midlands were white people aged 50+. Stutzmann pondered whether there was anything that could be done about it – does it come down to lifestyle fundamentals?

In the same survey, there was a fascinating finding about Library 2.0. Many users questioned felt that library sites should not be spoilt by the comments of user. They are happier to share their information and collaborate with the librarian than with other users. Obviously this goes against received Library 2.0 thinking, and left me wondering, is that a specifically “French thing”, or do UK users have more in common with their European counterparts than we think?