Microsoft's out of this picture

Microsoft has dropped out of the Open Content Alliance. I can't say I'm surprised, and not for the reason you think - since they (or more accurately, Gates) have gotten into philanthropy, they have a real point. Since they focus on global health, their considerable money is probably better spent there. After all, the dead can't read online books (or, the cynic in me says, buy MS products).

But in any case, they were gracious enough to leave their equipment and not lock up their content. Good for them!

What will this mean for the OCA? One less partner, less money, neither of which is good. Will it stop the OCA? I doubt it. There are too many well-endowed partners with too wide a base of support, plus considerable technical knowledge.

Will it ever be a rival to Google? Yes. It does have its niche, as does Project Gutenberg; they appeal to open source fans and people with slow connection rates, and they're serious about access. No silo here.

What is seriously threatened are the silos of online books - NetLibrary and its ilk. While Google may not make all public domain works available and only show snippets of copyrighted works, at least they're findable. What good is full text, if you don't know it's there?

Business models will not be the only thing to change in the next few years, merely the early victims. Libraries are in line, as are publishers. Who else? Who knows? Brave new world!

Copyright considered as a standup routine

As I was looking over the many permutations of copyright terms and requirements, ending with the current morass, I suddenly was reminded of Bill Cosby's old routines. Remember "No one will ever touch anybody ever again!" in the car ride with children?

That's what the current scheme is like. Like among all the clamoring voices arguing about whose term is longer and who has to renew, frustrated Papa Congress said "Okay, everything will be copyrighted forever, now SHUT UP!!!!"

And we have. And we shouldn't.

In reality, only a few people even care about copyright. Those that hold it on commercially viable works do, since they produce income. They should, that's what copyright is for, although the phrases limited terms and public good seem to have been forgotten.

The other people who care are librarians and archivists. We should, our profession depends on the intellectual property of others, and both legally and ethically we should respect it.

But we shouldn't fear it. And we do. Millions of archival items and books languish because people, mostly administrators, fear a lawsuit if they digitize or even just copy. Despite Lolly Gasaway's infinitely useful chart, they don't understand the law and they don't understand risk assessment.

Does it matter that no one has produced the documentation to prove that great-great-great grandad wrote that letter? Let alone got all 187 heirs to agree on who owns what portion of the hypothetical copyright? Would they then be able to agree how to split the 187th of a dollar they earned from the copyright?

In reality, most heirs are just glad to find a digital copy of their ancestor's letter, which they didn't know existed. They understand that they would spend more to research and defend a hypothetical copyright than they would ever earn.

Why don't administrators?

I researched a collection of some academic interest and maybe even a little financial one. The possible corporate owner (after many mergers) has no interest in the rights. There is documentation that they freely gave away the images without restrictions. They were then published in the 40s and 50s without copyright notice. They have been reproduced since they have been in an archive these last 30 years without anyone claiming copyright. Heirs who were contacted say they don't have any rights to them, because they were works for hire. I researched at the Copyright Office and found no records.

Where's the risk here, or in the hundreds of other lesser known collections?

Still, administrators there say they can't be digitized until any possible copyright expires. These are people so risk aversive that when they sneeze they say "Hand me a Kleenex, a trademarked name duly registered and enforced".

ARL is heading up a slow and painful study of the proposed Orphan Works Act, while the Google Guys forge ahead and Brewster Kahle fights on the legal battleground. Meanwhile, millions of people post copyrighted work (perhaps unknowing that it is) online in Flickr and YouTube and blogs and Facebook.

Except adminstrators and congressmen from the last century. Let's all write them letters and put stamps on them and see if the Pony Express can reach them.

Where are we going?

That's a collective "we" - what's going to happen to academic libraries - and librarians - in the next five years?

I see us becoming archivists, as the physical book loses importance. We may be the caretakers for the copy of record. And I use "the" advisedly. Will we spend the money to have two copies in the library - or even in the state? Or will distributed copies suffice?

Maybe we'll be responsible for printing a physical copy of electronic books and theses. Why even do that? Because electronic documents have two prime characteristics - they are mutable and they are fugitive. You can change them when you want: something we don't want for official documents like laws and vital records. And while paper copies can and do burn or decay, they are longer lasting than bytes, which can be gone in nanoseconds.

Perhaps we'll be teachers and not caretakers or collection builders. As more information is out there, it takes more skills to locate it and evaluate it. We are good at that, and we have two options (or at least two obvious ones): we can do it as a pro-bono service subsidized by our school, or freelance in a just-in-time pay-as-you-go system. Either way, we are information brokers and not warehouse managers, labeling and stamping books. That's been a waste of our skills for a long time.

We may also be information creators. We've done that for a long time, too. We've indexed and cataloged, in ways that are outdated now, but what about new ways? Can we not build KM systems to synthesize the sources we manage? To build recommender systems? People say that IT folks can do all that, but they can't. They're really good at the software and the hardware, but don't care about the content. We do.

This is just step one in my trying to think ahead of the curve. This week maybe I'll think about how other fields have outrun us in our own field - or what we thought was our field, and synergy with other fields.

Or maybe I'll relax and enjoy the holiday. Naw....

Getting rid of originals?

I was reading the notes of the digitization meeting at RBMS, and thought - WHO thought of the "digitize, then dispose" comment? Some very young person? The first digitization project I worked on followed the LC standards of the time - 150 dpi. What were we thinking? Well, we weren't thinking ahead, we weren't thinking in economic terms that mass production means cheaper, we weren't thinking of the future.

What if we had thought of scan&toss then? What would we make the better scans from? Other than deteriorating nitrate and acetate negatives, which can spontaneously combust or can suddenly turn to dust, what would be good enough to scan but not good enough to keep?

I was shocked that this came from RBMS people - what books would we have left if we tossed the shabby used ones? I hope this isn't an offshoot of the googlescan mindset of administrators, or maybe I hope it is and isn't from the librarians and archivists!

I know that archivists are reputed to be packrats, but are RB librarians conspicuous consumers?

Out of the box software

I've been looking at open source software lately, and I like what I'm looking at. I haven't migrated to Linux yet, but I'm replacing many of the expensive brand names with better OS software. GIMP isn't instinctive, but neither is Photoshop.
Open Office is much better than the built-in boobytraps of MS Office, and I'm in love with Google Docs - not for all purposes, but great for collaboration and easy transfers while traveling.
So now I'm looking at content management systems and thinking of wikis as documents and teaching platforms as well as "wikipedia" clones. Maybe just starting as a supplement to Blackboard, since I get paid to use that, but also as an alternative for people who are having issues with firewalls. That seems to happen once a year, at least!
I'll let you know what the results are, let me know your favorites.

Shaking things up at MAC

I'm back from Lovely Louisville and the Midwest Archives Conference. It was a good conference, if a little shaky - yes, we felt the second midwest earthquake in the middle of a session. And no, it wasn't ours, on disaster recovery, and we had to spend Friday apologizing for mis-cuing the special effects.

We had a good response on our workshop on co-operative disaster recovery, and we hope to take it on the road and online, so feel free to give us feedback! And feel free to contact us if you're interested in a session where you are. Have powerpoint and manuals, will travel.

Thanks to all of you who gave us such a warm welcome back in the old stamping grounds - no, I haven't lost all my Kentuckisms yet!

Taxing our patience

As I work on my taxes and look at the piles and piles of forms, I had a thought.

There are boxes to donate a dollar to a political party - no big surprise. Why can't we have a box to donate a dollar to: a library? PBS? NEH? A national college scholarship fund?

These are all non-political non-sectarian good things, right? The public good? And ignored by the present administration.

So let's start a movement. Let's let people make a difference in a positive way!