May 07, 2008
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Categories:
Identity management, IPR and e-commerce
I have just received a copy of Web-based learning through educational informatics from my helpful colleagues in the OCLC Library and Information Center.
I have not yet read it, although I look forward to it. The author, Nigel Ford, describes educational informatics as the integration of three major R&D emphases: information and communication technology, education and library/information science. He defines it as follows:
The development, use, and evaluation of digital systems that use pedagogical knowledge to engage in or facilitate resource discovery in order to support learning.
Flicking through the pages, I was interested to see the following on the bottom of each page:
Copyright © 2008, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited.
This was interesting as an example of how practice and thinking in the electronic environment is influencing practice and thinking in the print environment.
Jeanette Winterson's remarks on book swapping sites I quoted the other day was another example, where she seems to be suggesting greater limits on the use of books than now exist.
Of course, those churches and charity shops that made money from second-hand book sales stand to lose out, as do the publishing industry and authors. "In the music industry, this kind of thing would be called 'file sharing', and technically illegal," the author Jeanette Winterson wrote of book-swapping sites recently. [Charlotte Northedge on book-swapping websites | Environment | The Guardian]
[Lorcan Dempsey's weblog]
May 01, 2008
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Categories:
Books, movies and reading ...
, Identity management, IPR and e-commerce
There is an interesting short article on book swapping sites in the Guardian, placing them in a 'recycling' context.
For eco-aware readers, the environmental benefits of swapping rather than buying are clear. In 2003, Greenpeace launched its book campaign, producing evidence that the UK publishing industry was inadvertently fuelling the destruction of ancient forests in Finland and Canada. It found that one Canadian spruce produces just 24 books, which means that if you get through one book every two weeks your reading habits destroy almost one large tree every year. (In the same year, Greenpeace persuaded Raincoat Books to produce the Canadian edition of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix on recycled paper, saving an estimated 39,000 trees.) But despite the campaign, only 40% of the UK book industry has introduced paper with a high level of recycled content, largely choosing to use paper certified by the Forest Stewardship Council instead.
Beyond using the country's dwindling network of libraries, until recently the opportunities for exchanging paperbacks have been limited to friends, community schemes and book groups. But in the past two years, a spate of online book-swapping sites have emerged. Inspired by the goodwill schemes operated by hostels around the world, whereby travellers can leave behind books they have read and pick up something new, these sites generate little profit for their founders. The books are swapped directly between users, who pay the postage; the sites simply facilitate the meeting and identifying of potential exchanges. [Charlotte Northedge on book-swapping websites | Environment | The Guardian]
I was surprised to read the following:
Of course, those churches and charity shops that made money from second-hand book sales stand to lose out, as do the publishing industry and authors. "In the music industry, this kind of thing would be called 'file sharing', and technically illegal," the author Jeanette Winterson wrote of book-swapping sites recently. [Charlotte Northedge on book-swapping websites | Environment | The Guardian]
One of the more interesting things to me about the mass digitization initiatives is that they have highlighted that libraries do not 'own' many of the books in their collections, if by 'own' we mean the ability to repurpose at will. Of course, they do own the cost of processing and making them available, and of storing them over time, but for the larger part of their collection, there are limits on what they can do with the content.
April 25, 2008
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Categories:
General - systems and technologies
, Identity management, IPR and e-commerce
 We have been looking at Etsy at home recently: "your place to buy and sell all things handmade". It is just nice to use. I especially like the useful search by color ;-)
They have an alchemy section:
Turn your ideas into reality with Alchemy!
Buyers can post requests for custom handmade items, and then sellers bid on the opportunity to make the goods. Please check out the Alchemy overview help guide and the rules for Alchemy before getting started. Have fun! [Etsy :: Alchemy - Public Listings]
They have a range of interesting looking community sections, including virtual labs (billed as "live workshops and online classes"), but I have not tried them out so don't have a sense of how active they are. They look nice though!
I was interested to see that Etsy had made the WebWare top 100 Web apps for 2008 list.
Just slightly more than half of all the votes cast in the Webware 100 went to the top 10 vote-getters. Six of these top 10 are no surprise at all: Facebook, Firefox, Google, iTunes, MySpace, and YouTube. But the other four may not be as familiar to most Webware readers: - DeviantArt. A strong online arts community.
- Friendster. A social network that was big, became small, and may be making a resurgence.
- Gaia Online. A graphical social networking site for teenagers. As I said, a big winner in last year's Webware 100.
- Maxthon. It's a browser that's huge in China, not so much here in the US.
[And the Webware 100 Winners are... | Webware : Cool Web apps for everyone]
Webware top 100 via John Naughton.
March 31, 2008
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Categories:
Identity management, IPR and e-commerce
, Metadata
, OCLC
My Programs colleagues have released an interesting review [pdf] of copyright investigation practices across several RLG Partners.
In this project, staff from eight partner institutions participated in copyright investigation interviews between August and September 2007 to share the ways in which their institutions currently obtain copyright permission to provide users with access to high-risk or special collection materials. [Copyright investigation summary report - PDF]
It’s also important to note that staff who participated from almost every institution expressed a sense of “just getting started” or “realigning efforts to be more consistent across campus and across library units.” Almost all of the staff interviewed were in newly created positions; several noted that conducting copyright investigations in a centralized fashion was a new area of focus for their institutions. [Copyright investigation summary report - PDF]
This report is interesting in its own right as a review of practices. It also contributes background information to ongoing work at OCLC exploring a Registry of Copyright Evidence.
Related entry:
January 03, 2008
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Categories:
Books, movies and reading ...
, Digital asset management
, General - systems and technologies
, Identity management, IPR and e-commerce
, Search
Google Book Search: Document Understanding on a Massive Scale [PDF] is a brief treatment of issues faced by Google as they grow their corpus of digitized books and work to make it useful in various ways.
Luc Vincent of Google discusses OCR (issues of many languages occurring unpredictably in variously formatted volumes, at scale), and then focuses on issues of document understanding.
In addition to OCR, making these books easily accessible and useful on http://books.google.com has required developing a number of additional state-of-the-art systems. These include systems for automatically deskewing, cropping and cleaning-up scanned book pages, which is critical as pre-processing prior to OCR, but also to generate clean and small images for efficient web serving. While this may be a well understood problem for high-quality documents, doing this well on scanned century-old book pages is no small feat. Most of the advanced systems developed for Google Book Search however involve some form of Document Understanding and as such, come after OCR in the book processing pipeline. Systems that have been developed, are being developed or are being considered as interesting research challenges include: [Google Book Search: document understanding on a massive scale PDF]
These challenges include: page ordering, language identification, chapter identification, content linking (relate table of contents to appropriate boundaries, index entries to pages, ...); summarization; metadata extraction and cross validation; topic identification; book clustering and linking (create relationships between volumes).
He also discusses ranking:
Specifically, how should books that match a particular query be ranked? The web is notorious for its rich graph of hyperlinks, famously exploited by Google’ PageRank algorithm [6]. This structure applies somewhat to technical publications, which typically contain numerous references to other technical publications. However the universe of books is different and most books (eg, novels) do not contain any references. Novel approaches therefore had to be developed, exploiting an array of new signals. Additionally, these techniques were recently extended to allow “blending” of book search results with web search resuts when appropriate. [Google Book Search: document understanding on a massive scale PDF]
The paper outlines presentation options based on copyright status and also discusses how Google supports the document understanding community through the release of software and data sets.
I was interested that there was no discussion of social features.
Via SEO by the Sea.
November 17, 2007
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Categories:
Digital asset management
, Identity management, IPR and e-commerce
Constant readers - there are a few ;-) - will have noticed several references to outputs from the Eduserv Foundation of late, as well as links to their blog, eFoundations. They are producing a nice body of work.
They have just released a new report "Snapshot study on the use of open content licences in the UK cultural heritage sector" [PDF].
Simply placing digital resources on a website, without any licensing information or terms and conditions, does not necessarily make these resources truly accessible to users of the resource. From the standpoint of the public, this content must be assumed to be fully covered by copyright and therefore permission from the rightsholder needed for use and re-use of the resource (subject to possible fair dealing defences). An image of a painting available on a museum’s website would not without a licence come with permission to place that image on your own website, use it in a presentation, or place it in a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE). ... ... Open content licensing is a way of generally granting a wide range of permission in copyright for use and re-use of the work via a copyright licence, whilst retaining a relatively small set of rights. As mentioned above, copyright operates so that permission is needed for any use except for a limited number of cases. In contrast, open content licensing reverses this default and grants permission for a very wide range of uses but asks that users seek permission only in a limited number cases – often known as a ‘some rights reserved’ model. This style of licensing, like any other, can only be used on works by someone who owns the rights over the work or otherwise has permission to do so. ["Snapshot study on the use of open content licences in the UK cultural heritage sector" PDF.]
October 07, 2007
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Categories:
Identity management, IPR and e-commerce
, ebooks and other e-resources
It is now conventional to make a distinction between what libraries own (e.g. books, DVDs, ...) and what they license (e.g. e-journals).
However, we can only use 'own' in a circumscribed way. This has been made clearer in the mass digitization projects. Libraries cannot do as they wish with the digitized copies of copyrighted material. And we know that in most library collections, a large part, maybe a majority part, is still covered by copyright.
What the library in fact 'owns' is the cost of managing the physical materials and of making them available to users. They do not 'own' the content, and are limited in what they can do with it.
In fact, they may end up licensing the very content that they thought they owned once it has been digitized.
July 25, 2007
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Categories:
Identity management, IPR and e-commerce
, User experience
 I installed Sxipper a few days ago.
Sxipper is a free Firefox extension that saves you time on the web, enabling you to easily control the release and management of your identity data. With a single click, Sxipper is trained to securely log you in with a username or an Identity 2.0 authentication mechanism such as OpenID. [Sxipper: FAQ]
Before this experience I had not really connected the name of the company - Sxip Identity - with its service ambitions. This picture makes it clear. Skip those login screens!
July 07, 2007
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Categories:
Identity management, IPR and e-commerce
, Learning and research - distributed environments
, Research, learning and scholarly communication
, The cultural and scholarly record
, ebooks and other e-resources
Alma Swan has an interesting post discussing the value added by the publisher in copy editing and concludes that it is ... variable. She notes a publisher study:
Wates and Campbell looked at copy editing changes carried out on a set of science, humanities and social science articles at Blackwell Publishing (as was) and reported that the biggest category of corrections by the publisher was concerned with the references (42.7% of all copy editing changes), the next biggest category (34.5%) was concerned with minor syntactical or grammatical changes and a small proportion (5.5%) of changes corrected author ‘errors that might otherwise have led to misunderstanding or misinterpretation’. [OptimalScholarship]
I was interested in the attention to references. And I wondered whether the variety of tools introduced in recent years to help with the capture and management of such citation data (RefWorks, Zotero, etc) had reduced the number of errors spotted in a paper's references. It would be interesting to know how the corrections break down, as between errors in bibliographic sources, transcription errors, stylistic or completeness errors, and so on.
In the longer term, it will be interesting to see whether such data flows more easily with the potential introduction of citation microformats (I don't know what the status of this work is), or, say, if it were to happen, the introduction of support in something like Microsoft Word to allow structured data of this sort to be imported or exported. I still believe that we will see greater use made of a new 'bibliographic tissue' which connects the user environment and database resources through resources like citation managers, reading lists, social bookmarking, microformats and RSS feeds.
Incidentally, the discussion of copy-editing is by way of introducing a JISC-funded project looking at differences between versions of articles (different author versions, publisher version):
VALREC will ask stakeholders what levels of validation they would like to see, and what broad categories of differences would be helpful, such as ‘editorial differences’ and ‘content differences’. The project will then develop the technology to measure differences and generate a digital certificate for any article detailing the differences. An example of such a certificate is on the VALREC website. Not only will there then be a means to itemise the exact differences between the author-final and published version, but between other, earlier, versions of an article too, perhaps those first exposed on blogs or wikis. This will permit better formalisation and monitoring of the scholarly record, especially as authors move to early-use of repositories and informal web tools as part of the communications process. [OptimalScholarship]
The project is a joint one between Alma's company, Key Perspectives, which has done a lot of empirical work on open access and researcher behaviors, and the University of Southampton, which has been a major producer of tools, systems and data analysis in support of open access directions (see, for example, the eprints.org site).
Related entries:
May 11, 2007
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Categories:
General - distributed environments
, Identity management, IPR and e-commerce
, Learning and research - systems and technologies
OpenID has been generating quite a bit of interest as a lightweight decentralized approach to identity management on the web. There is a nice overview article by Andy Powell (Eduserv) and David Recordon (VeriSign) in the current issue of Ariadne, with some reflections on OpenID in an e-learning environment. In the future, it may be the case that our institutions remain as Identity Providers (i.e. as the providers of usernames and passwords) in the way they are now. But it also seems increasingly likely that our students will begin turning up at schools, colleges and universities with perfectly good online identities (in much the same way that they now turn up with perfectly good email addresses) and that our educational institutions will have to begin functioning as Relying Parties (i.e. as the recipients of externally authenticated users). In short, students are part of the wider online community and their educational identity (persona) is only one facet of their lives. [Main Articles: 'OpenID: Decentralised Single Sign-on for the Web', Ariadne Issue 51]
This Ariadne issue carries its usual interesting range of contributions.
December 23, 2006
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Categories:
Identity management, IPR and e-commerce
, Miscellaneous
The Gowers Review of Intellectual Property [report home page] was released recently in the UK, and was welcomed by those opposed to the extension of the existing copyright term. More of that later ...
I recently watched Out of Ireland: from a whisper to a scream again, a video documentary account of the emergence of popular music in Ireland. A social context is emphasized and many artists are discussed. Rory Gallagher, Thin Lizzy, and Van Morrison emerge as focal points. And of course U2. The film is a reminder of the social importance of U2 as a part of, and symbol of, emergent Irish prosperity and confidence in the 90s. Importantly, U2 were based in Ireland: emigration was not a necessary precursor of success.
I was reminded of this because Bono has just been given an honorary knighthood by the Queen for "his services to the music industry and for his humanitarian work". Honorary because he is not a citizen of the UK or of a country of the Commonwealth. He thus joins that other Irish musical humanitarian and honorary knight, Bob Geldof, whose Boom Town Rats and whose work on Live Aid were also central parts of the story told in the video.
Now, Bono and U2 have also been in the news for other reasons. U2 recently moved their music publishing company to the Netherlands where they pay less tax. And there has been some discussion about whether there is any inconsistency between this and their lobbying of national and world organizations to assist others. But earlier this year Bono, a multi-millionaire, was accused of hypocrisy over taxes after moving U2's business operations from Ireland to Holland, where there is virtually no tax on royalties. U2 were the world's biggest musical earners last year, raking in around £145m. They have reportedly sold 170 million albums worldwide. [Bono joins Geldof as an honorary Dublin knight | UK News | The Observer]
But let us come back to the Gowers Review of Intellectual Property [Wikipedia entry]. This was broadly welcomed by library and educational bodies. Here is an excerpt from the British Library response: We are particularly pleased that the Gowers Review recommends allowing private copying for research and copying for preservation reasons by libraries to cover all forms of content. It has also made positive recommendations around dealing with orphan works. And we look forward to playing a key role in the Strategic Advisory Board for IP policy (SABIP). [The British Library response to the Gowers Review of Intellectual Property (IP)] And from JISC: The current IP regime severely restricts the ability of staff in FE and HE to make copies for educational use. This is especially true in the case of materials in e-learning packages, virtual learning environments, etc. JISC welcomes those recommendations (2, 8, 9, 10a, 10b, 11, 12) which will support greater use of varied teaching and learning approaches, typical of those which may be funded by JISC, as well as assist librarians to better preserve our academic and cultural heritage . [JISC welcomes Gowers review of Intellectual Property : JISC] Jisc also welcomed the recommendation that the current copyright term of 50 years be retained.
The Confederation of British Industry also broadly welcomed the report but was not in favor of this recommendation. The shorter copyright term in the UK directly impacts the asset value of recordings, record companies, musicians' pension funds, and the music industry itself. For independent and major record companies that have built up a catalogue over many years, the effect on the value of the companies in the UK is significant. [CBI response pdf] And it argues that this will reduce the UK's competitiveness as a music business venue.
The Financial Times disagrees: The problem with debate about intellectual property is that those who own it tend to be rich and well organised. Society at large, which pays for IP, finds glamorous pop stars hard to resist. But longer copyright, especially if applied to works already written, would be less a boost to creativity than a pension for wealthy rock stars. [FT.com / Comment & analysis / Letters - Intellectual propriety]
And a group of musicians took out a full-page advert in the FT: Paul McCartney and U2 were among thousands of musicians who signed a full-page newspaper ad that appeared Thursday, calling on the British government to extend copyright protection for their work. [CBC.ca Arts - British musicians fight for copyright extension] We will have to wait and see how the Government responds to the report, and whether Bono and others will have those additional years.
October 11, 2006
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Categories:
Identity management, IPR and e-commerce
, Metadata
ACAP is an interesting initiative from a group of publishing organizations. It has been noted in several places. ACAP stands for Automated Content Access Protocol. It is jointly sponsored by the World Association of Newspapers (WAN), the European Publishers Council (EPC) and the International Publishers Association (IPA). Here is how their main focus is described on the website: ACAP will enable the providers of all types of content published on the World Wide Web to communicate permissions information (relating to access and use of that content) in a form that can be automatically recognized and interpreted, so that business partners can systematically comply with the publishers' policies. In the first instance, ACAP will provide a framework that will allow any publisher, large or small, to express access and use policies in a language that search engines' robot "spiders" can be taught to understand. It is anticipated that, in future, the scope of ACAP will be extended to other business relationships and other media types. [ACAP - Automated Content Access Protocol] The technical specification of ACAP will emerge in a pilot project.
This project recognizes the value to publishers of exposure in the search engines and represents an attempt to communicate information about how content exposed in this way can be used. I presume that the project will converge on a small number of terms so as to encourage participation and adoption by publishers and search engines alike. Success will depend on incentives to search engines to participate. I will watch what happens with interest.
June 26, 2006
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Categories:
General - distributed environments
, Identity management, IPR and e-commerce
I was recently pointed at the Amazon Web Services Solutions Catalog, an interesting list of applications which mobilze Amazon Web Services to generate various service offerings. Welcome to the new Amazon Web Services Solutions Catalog. Developers are constantly innovating with Amazon Web Services to build software that empowers a multitude of audiences. The Amazon Web Services Solutions Catalog is a venue where businesses, consumers, Amazon Associates, Sellers, and other developers can find AWS-based solutions that meet their needs. [Amazon Web Services Solutions Catalog : AWS Solutions Catalog]
May 22, 2006
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Categories:
General - distributed environments
, Identity management, IPR and e-commerce
Jim Gray of Microsoft interviews Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon, in the current issue of ACM Queue. It is a very interesting discussion of the importance of the service-oriented approach at Amazon, and also gives a fascinating glimpse of internal working practices. Vogels suggests that Amazon is primarily a technology company, developing a major e-commerce platform on which others can build services. The introduction notes that about a million retail partners use this platform to do business. Here are a couple of extracts, but the full interview is well worth a read. Next to the things that we already talked about—the service-oriented architecture, the way we scale, the way we serve our customers—I think our biggest success has been that Amazon has become a platform that other businesses can benefit from. If you are one of the million retail partners on Amazon.com, if you're this very small bookshop somewhere in southern Florida, your products are immediately integrated into the Amazon.com recommendation system. You also instantly become part of our search system and customers can discover your products the same way they can discover Amazon.com products. All of the Amazon.com platform technologies become available to you as a seller on Amazon.com. [ACM Queue - A Conversation with Werner Vogels - Amazon's CTO explains what's behind its growth from online bookstore to e-commerce juggernaut.] This fast response to new ideas is enabled through the loosely coupled services model, both in technology and at the developer and operations level. From the outside, the services in our platform may appear chaotic, but chaotic in a good sense—in that we try not to impose a rigid structure on the different functional pieces, but we expect there to be order when looking at it from a different dimension. Thinking about this whole system as a big deterministic system would be unrealistic. Life is not deterministic, and a large-scale distributed system such as Amazon has many organic and emerging properties that can come to life only if you do not constrain it. [ACM Queue - A Conversation with Werner Vogels - Amazon's CTO explains what's behind its growth from online bookstore to e-commerce juggernaut.]
May 14, 2006
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Categories:
General - systems and technologies
, Identity management, IPR and e-commerce
, Learning and research - systems and technologies
Educause Review publishes its latest top ten IT issues list: The elevation of Security and Identity Management to the number-one spot among the top-ten IT issues caps a steady four-year rise. Whether it retains this ranking will depend on its perceived importance relative to Funding IT and Administrative/ERP/Information Systems, which have dominated the top-two positions in the last six years. A related challenge that the Current Issues Committee has wrestled with in the past two years is whether Security and Identity Management should be split into two distinct issues. The EDUCAUSE Identity Management Services Program (http://www.educause.edu/imsp), launched in 2005, is just one measure of the complexity and attention that this aspect of the issue has engendered. [EDUCAUSE REVIEW | May/June 2006, Volume 41, Number 3] It is interesting to note most of these issues identified are general across other types of enterprise also: ERP, disaster recovery/business continuity, the introduction of web services, identity management, and funding and leadership issues. Interesting also is the fact that enterprise portals have dropped off the list. The authors (Barbara I. Dewey and Peter B. DeBlois) offer two suggestions: the portal may be wrapped up in a wider ERP application, and in many institutions deployment is mature enough no longer to be an issue at this level.
April 18, 2006
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Categories:
Books, movies and reading ...
, Identity management, IPR and e-commerce
, Libraries - organization and services
, ebooks and other e-resources
Jack Ammerman has an interesting point in relation to my entry about what 'owning' a book might actually mean (Sharable and licensable). I note that given the restrictions on what one can do with the intellectual content of a book which is still in copyright that the gap between our putatively owned materials and our licensed materials may be smaller than we are used to thinking about. His point is well-taken. I especially appreciate his inclusion of the ongoing cost of storing and preserving the item. What he's describing may be more akin to a "lease-to-own" plan. If the library (or individual that purchases the book) keeps a book long enough, the rights of ownership do eventually include the right to copy, digitize, etc. The work eventually moves into the public domain. But the cost is quite high. [TheoLib » Blog Archive » Sharable and licensable: cost models for collection development] He then goes on to discuss the actual use costs of little-used collections, contrasting just-in-time to just-in-case collection strategies. Interestingly, he notes that it costs him $50 to retrieve an item from, and return it to, off-site storage. These remarks relate to my long tail discussion in these pages, libraries, logistics and the long tail, an adapted version of which has just been published in D-Lib Magazine. The costs, and more importantly, the opportunity costs, of managing just-in-case print collections will increasingly play a role in library resource discussions.
Related entries:
April 10, 2006
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Categories:
Books, movies and reading ...
, Identity management, IPR and e-commerce
, Libraries - organization and services
, ebooks and other e-resources
We have several mass digitization initiatives underway. And there seems to be an expectation that these will continue, that more of our current collective book and journal collection will be digitized. There are a variety of drivers for this, both for libraries and for the other organizations which have stepped up to serve and to resource such initiatives.
We are used to thinking that the library 'owns' its print collections, that subject to certain restrictions, it can do what it will with them. Among these restrictions are copyright ones.
Our Google 5 analyis suggested that more than 80% of books in the Google 5 library collections were published post 1923. This means that about 20% of books in those collections are out of copyright.
We do not currently have very easy ways of knowing which post-1923 works have gone through the copyright renewal process.
And one of the interesting service requirements to emerge around the mass digitization initiatives is rights tracking and notification. Libraries want to know the copyright status of materials at various points in potential workflows, including at the point of selection for digitization.
What this means is that a large part of library collections is still in copyright. The library 'owns' the cost of storing it, shelving it, keeping it at the right temperature, and so on. It can be shared and borrowed in its current form. However, the library does not 'own' it to the extent that they can freely re-format it and allow it to be used by many parties.
In this sense, the gap between the materials that libraries 'own' and the materials that libraries license is smaller than we are used to thinking about.
Related entry:
February 16, 2006
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Categories:
Identity management, IPR and e-commerce
There is an interesting story in the WSJ about Amazon's plans to take on Apple in the music download business. The story is framed by the context of a move from atoms to bits. That is from CDs, DVDs and books which comprise a large part of Amazon sales to digital downloads. The move is crucial for the Seattle-based retailer's long-term strategy. Despite offering a vast array of products from gourmet coffee to garden hoses, Amazon depended on physical media like CDs, DVDs and books for 70% of its 2005 sales. To maintain its dominant position, Amazon will need to hang on to consumers as they migrate to digital delivery of those products. [WSJ.com - Amazon Plans Music Service To Rival iTunes]
January 31, 2006
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Categories:
Identity management, IPR and e-commerce
, OCLC
 Identifiers are a topic of ongoing investigation in a variety of contexts, and as more of our activities are driven by network workflows, supply chains and other data flows, they become more important. There are multiple active identifier discussions underway in our community as we speak.
It is this topic that my colleague Stu Weibel is exploring while he is based at the University of Washington this year, doing work, we hope, which will explicate the current state of the art and give some pointers as to sensible directions (and many thanks to the iSchool and to Tony Hey, Corporate VP for Technical Computing, and his colleague Randy Hinrichs at Microsoft, for their collegial support in this endeavor).
Prompted by a post by Sean McGrath on the permanence of URLs (check out the comments), Stu has been thinking about this topic in several posts over on Weibel Lines (here, here and here). Stu makes the point that the promise is more important than the protocol; it is organizational commitment that assures persistence, not a technical fix. For this reason, we can expect to see more identifier services as we move forward.
Incidentally, Sean McGrath is CTO of Propylon which has offices in Enniscrone in County Sligo, Ireland. Several years ago we holidayed near there: the seaweed baths are wonderfully restorative!
January 03, 2006
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Categories:
Digital asset management
, Identity management, IPR and e-commerce
, Libraries - organization and services
, Research, learning and scholarly communication
, ebooks and other e-resources
We are used to buying books. To sharing them. To giving and receiving them as gifts. To quietly marking them. Even sometimes to proclaiming ownership in a bookplate. We are used to copying parts of them for study, to quoting from them.
Books circulate - through libraries, private collections, bookstores and used bookstores. They are sold and resold. They exist redundantly: multiple copies are issued and they can be tracked down in various places.
A by-product of this redundancy is the persistence of the scholarly record: lots of copies keeps stuff somewhere.
My Concise Oxford Dictionary offers 'prepare and issue ... for public sale' as a definition of 'publishing'. 'Publishing' is a making 'public', and the materials published are available to the public in various ways. They are also available for use and disposal at the buyer's discretion.
However, this line of thinking may sometimes mislead. For example, John Sutherland, distinguished critic and historian of literature, writes about the Google digitisation initiatives and the announcement of Microsoft's support for digitization at the British Library: What is coming is something akin to the Oklahoma land rush of 1899. A half-dozen massively wealthy digital pioneers all going hell for leather to "propertise" the hitherto democratically owned "public domain" - that deposit of printed material that currently (but not for much longer, alas) you, I, and nobody own. It will be the biggest privatisation in history, and the most profitable. Once the public domain is propertised, it will remain proprietary material forever. [EducationGuardian.co.uk | E-learning | Ivory towers will fall to digital land grab] He goes on to talk about the knowledge base of the university, and how it "is added to and refreshed, in the form of new books for the library and so on" and says "but it is essentially a university-owned asset."
But it is not a university-owned asset, or it is only partly a university-owned asset, if by 'own' we imply unrestricted use and re-use. 'Publication' does not put materials into the 'public domain'; they are only in the public domain when copyrights expire or are not in place. The ongoing proprietary interest of the copyright holder has always been something that libraries have managed, and its interpretation, as we know, has sometimes been a cause of tension between publishers and libraries. Like books, journals were published and distributed, and often have institutional and personal subscription rates which recognise institutional and library patterns of use. In the print world, however, even when copyrights were still in force the sharing, distribution, and occasional re-sale of the materials could make institutional 'ownership' more visible than the ongoing proprietary interest of rights holders.
Of course, moving into the digital arena changed this. And we have seen with journals a very different model emerge where institutional 'ownership' has given ground before the proprietary interest of the copyright holder. 'licensing' has replaced 'buying' as the visible model. And there is an ongoing library discussion about appropriate models for sharing and preserving journal materials which are not now 'owned' redundantly by libraries.
Two recent initiatives have made this type of discussion of much more general interest. The first is the mass digitization initiatives of Google and others where the interests of the copyright holders has been asserted, questioning whether the Universities can in fact do as they will with the 'knowledge base' that they have acquired.
The second is more recent still and is more interesting given its potential impact. As people realize what restrictions they face when they 'buy' music on iTunes, the changing nature of 'publishing' will become apparent. In many cases 'rent' may be a more apt description than 'buy'. And from music back to books, here is Adam Green: While waiting in my dentist's office this morning I started reading BusinessWeek and came across a story about Sony's new ebook reader. The hardware sounds nice, but there is no way copy-protected ebooks are going to succeed. As I keep telling my kids when it comes to music, if there is DRM you are renting not buying. A day will surely come when you switch hardware or the company switches DRM schemes and your music will go away. Personally, I don't care that much about music, but when DRM is applied to books I get a little crazy. For book buyers owning the book is at least as important as reading it. I'm not even going to talk about the way books smell or the way they feel in your hands. I accept that digital books may replace physical ones, but interfering with my ability to own a book, and even pass it on to my kids or future grandkids is not something I will tolerate. When people predicted the effects of computer technology on society 20 years ago, nobody imagined that software licenses would eventually spread to books and music. I'll predict now that ebooks will never become popular while DRM is in place. [Darwinian Web: Adam Green's thoughts on the evolution of the Internet] So, moving forward we are looking at an environment where individual consumers will become more aware of the issues of the shift in models, and some pressure to change may come as a result.
For libraries, in addition to current access issues, it highlights the longer term question of what their responsibility to the cultural and scholarly record is, and how it will be discharged. In the print world, the 'publication' and distribution of multiple copies of materials, and the individual behavior of libraries and related institutions, have resulted in a collective record lodged in many individually curated collections. Some few institutions have significant parts of this 'knowledge base', readily accessible to their users. With persistence, a large part of the collective 'knowledge base' is accessible through catalogs, bibliographies, finding aids, and so on.
The changed pattern of distribution of digital 'publications' will need a different model, one which requires more concerted systemwide strategizing and action.
December 13, 2005
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Categories:
Identity management, IPR and e-commerce
I had not come across ip2ipo before. This is a UK company which partners with universities to exploit their IP in new ventures. It has a prestigious list of partners. UK universities are originators of some of the best novel intellectual property ("IP") in the world. IP2IPO's business is to generate commercial value from IP created by its university partners. [IP2IPO - Home] It has just made an arrangement with the University of Bristol: Under a 25-year deal with IP2IPO, an intellectual property commercialisation company, Bristol academics will be able to seek seed corn and early-stage finance for their ideas from an initial investment fund of 5m, the university said today. [EducationGuardian.co.uk | Special Reports | Bristol signs commercial research funding deal]
October 09, 2005
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Categories:
General - distributed environments
, Identity management, IPR and e-commerce
, Libraries - distributed environments
 The Task Group on access management from the NISO Metasearch Intiative - chaired by my colleague Mike Teets - has made a very useful report [pdf] available. This provides a framework within which to examine existing authentication and authorization methods, and describes those methods. It encapsulates nicely current understanding of issues and approaches.
Within the academic community, Shibboleth is the subject of much discussion. I sometimes wonder, though, if in a few years time we will be using something that emerges within the social networking space where identity management has become an issue given, among other things, the hassle caused by comment and trackback spam.
August 13, 2005
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Categories:
Digital asset management
, Identity management, IPR and e-commerce
, OCLC
There is a long posting on the O'Reilly Radar site bringing together some of Tim O'Reilly's thoughts on Google and the publishers. It is interesting to remember that Tim O'Reilly is a publisher while reading it. Publishers have been stalling for years in getting their content online. Now someone may have a model that will take us in new directions, and they want to stop it till they can figure out how they will be the ones to profit from it. [O'Reilly Radar > Google Library vs. Publishers] It is nice to see WorldCat get a mention in the comments.
August 10, 2005
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Categories:
General - systems and technologies
, Identity management, IPR and e-commerce
, Libraries - systems and technologies
, OCLC
Spotted a while ago on a vendor t-shirt at a conference: 'we help make open source affordable' ;-)
Whatever about using other people's code, we have not found it as straightforward as we had expected making our own code available to others. Which license to chose? How to reduce the need for a case-by-case discussion of use?
Thom discusses the issue. Check out our Open Source page.
July 29, 2005
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Categories:
Identity management, IPR and e-commerce
I sometimes find it hard to understand why we don't have better identity management solutions given the pain we and the organizations we work for suffer. Sure, there are some initiatives which may help but none that is going to be widely deployed today or tomorrow. From the Financial Times: Industry experts say that companies spend $100 a year per employee alone on manually creating and resetting passwords. Meanwhile the average company has over 100 different direcetories in which identity management information is stored. IBM estimates that up to 60 per cent of company access profiles are orphaned accounts (for example employees who have left the company or changed jobs) creating serious security gaps. [Paul Taylor. Managing the digital identity crisis. FT IT Review. July 27 2005] Sound familiar?
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