http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/04/books/review/Heilbrunn-t.html?_r=1

"Adolf Hitler may be better known to posterity for burning rather than cherishing books, but as Timothy W. Ryback observes in “Hitler’s Private Library,” he owned more than 16,000 volumes at his residences in Berlin and Munich, and at his alpine retreat on the Obersalzberg. Ryback, the author of “The Last Survivor,” a study of the town of Dachau, has immersed himself in the remnants of Hitler’s collection, which are mostly housed at the Library of Congress. In poring over Hitler’s markings and marginalia, Ryback seeks to reconstruct the steps by which he created his mental map of the world. The result is a remarkably absorbing if not wholly persuasive book."

See also

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200305/ryback

The best of 2008:

10. The launch of Europeana. Already large and valuable, on track to be more so, unifying many smaller projects, and committed to OA for its public-domain contents.

Europeana is not large, nor valuable, see

http://archiv.twoday.net/search?q=europeana

It's a very small amount of the large bulk of digitized European materials.

For digitized books in Europe see

http://wiki.netbib.de/coma/DigiMisc

For the large photographic online archives in the Netherlands:

http://www.fotostoria.de/?page_id=181

Drenthe with 50.000+ photos is not an exception. All these collections are not in Europeana.

And commited to OA?

It's absurd that a TA project, SCRAN of Scotland http://www.scran.ac.uk/ , can merchandise via Europeana. SCRAN is only showing thumbnails. The picture resoultion of Europeana pics is often low but having only a thumbnail is worthless.

Letter from Edinburgh in original size from SCRAN "free"

Here is the rights statement at

http://www.europeana.eu/portal/termsofservice.html

You are allowed access to browse the site for your personal use only. Users may print off or make single copies of web pages or objects for personal use only. Users may also save web pages or objects electronically for personal use. Electronic dissemination or mailing of web pages or objects articles is not permitted, without prior permission from the EDL Foundation, the rights holders of the material and/or the contributing content partner concerned

Under no circumstances does permitted usage include any commercial exploitation of the material. For this, permission is required from EDL Foundation, the rights holders of the material and/or the contributing content partner concerned.

Unreasonable use, including the systematic downloading of content without a written license, will result in access to the site being blocked.

What does Suber mean with "committed to OA for its public-domain contents"? If this has any sense then the sense that PD remains PD and that re-use is allowed in every way you like.

OA to PD contents cannot mean anything else that there are NO permission barriers.

Europeana is cleary supporting the Copyfraud of its main partners claiming IPR rights for digitizing the PD.

For this Copyfraud the e.g.

http://www.geheugenvannederland.nl/?/en/paginas/over_het_geheugen/copyright

The Europeana collections should make publicly available their OAI-PMH interfaces (necessary for Europeana harvesting). This would be
the better way than the disappointing Europeana.

http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/01-02-09.htm

10. The Elsevier rules for electronic interlibrary loan: make a printout, scan the printout, and loan the scan. Not unique to Elsevier, but still a kludge to avoid taking advantage of 20th century technology.

9. The State of Oregon's claim of copyright in its statutes. An indefensible claim leading to groundless legal threats. Relinquished when challenged.

8. The American Psychological Association's $2,500 fee for depositing author manuscripts in PubMed Central. An attempt to charge for green OA as if it were gold OA. Withdrawn when publicized.

7. The UK Ordnance Survey use of public funds to pay a lobbying firm to push back against public pressure to provide OA to its publicly-funded mapping data. It was bad enough to charge taxpayers a second fee for access to publicly-funded data. Now it charges them for the lobbyists who work against their interests.

6. The 35 year embargo adopted by the American Anthropological Association for the OA backfiles of its two leading journals. The longest embargo or moving wall I've ever seen a publisher boast about. More than 10 times longer than the runner up.

5. The Google settlement's effects on fair use. The settlement has many compensatory gains, but Google dropped a winning case and its willingness to pay for fair-use copying may force others to pay as well.

4. The 12 month embargo allowed by the NIH policy. Twice as long as the embargo used by any OA-mandating medical research funder in the world. A needless sop to the publishing lobby, and one that slows down medical research.

3. The American Association of University Presses support for the Conyers bill (a.k.a. Fair Copyright in Research Works Act). The presses said they were not opposing the NIH policy but so far have not refined their support for the bill to target the practices they dislike and spare the NIH policy.

2. The continuing slow pace of spontaneous self-archiving. Still due to inertia more than opposition, but still a problem. Habits die hard, especially when the proposed alternative is unfamiliar, widely misunderstood, and orthogonal to entrenched incentives.

1. The Fair Copyright in Research Works Act. Amending copyright law to block an OA policy consistent with current law, while pretending to be motivated by the policy's copyright violations. Harmful bill + misleading title + deceptive rhetoric, brought to you by lobbyists paid with your subscription dollars.

http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/36647

Via
http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2008/11/when-google-scholars-integration-with.html

http://hurstassociates.blogspot.com/2008/12/more-on-life-photo-archive-hosted-by.html

Excerpt:

Unbeknownst to you (Time Inc.), your users are web 2.0 savvy. They are not necessarily interested in printed framed copies of photos, but in digital versions that they can use in a variety of ways. Many don't want to use the images illegally, so they expect to understand how to gain legal access to the images. And if older images are marked as not being in the public domain, they need to know why.

Unfortunately for you, if you don't tell your users what you expectations really are and give them the correct tools, you're going to be disappointed with the results.

We have noticed a great many broken links for Google books. When we have tried to locate the books we have noticed an error message that the books is not on the server. Appears that Google have either changed the location of many of their books or, for reasons known only to Google, removed them altogether.

http://book-academy.co.uk/blog/2008/09/30/news-on-google-books/

http://www.wired.com/politics/onlinerights/news/2008/12/open_pacer

If you want to search federal court documents, it's not a problem. Just apply online for an account, and the government will issue you a user name and password.
Through the postal service.
And once you log in, the government's courthouse search engine known as Public Access to Court Electronic Records or PACER, will charge you 8 cents a page to read documents that are in the public domain — a fee that earned the federal judiciary $50 million in profits in 2006.
With its high cost and limited functionality, critics call the system an absurdity in the era of Google, blogs and Wikipedia, where information is free and bandwidth, disk space and processing power are nearly so.
"The PACER system is the most broken part of our federal legal mechanism," says Carl Malamud, who runs the nonprofit open-government group Public.Resource.Org ."They have a mainframe mentality."
Now Malamud is doing something about it. He's asking lawyers to donate their PACER documents one by one, which he then classifies and bundles into ZIP files published for free at his organization's website. The one-year-old effort has garnered him 20 percent of all the files on PACER, including all decisions from federal appeals courts over the last 50 years.

An examination of the licensing
policies of open educational organizations and projects
A Report to The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. December 2008.

http://learn.creativecommons.org/cclearn-reports

http://liber.library.uu.nl/publish/articles/000263/index.html

Excerpt:

I have been involved in a number of digitisation initiatives since the late 1980s all dealing with special collections. In each case, preservation was a key objective. Appropriately then, we would identify the highest quality standards feasible at the time and adhere to them, assuming that we were only going to get one chance to digitise, so we’d better get it right.

Since then, I have come to think that digitising special collections for preservation no longer makes sense.

The careful, high-quality capture projects that I and others worked on over the last twenty years resulted in some delightful digital collections. But collectively, our efforts were not making an impact. Innovative at the time, our gorgeous, expensive, hand-crafted websites attracted very few users. Times are changing and we need to keep up.

Google has completely changed the way we think about digitisation of books. We considered books the hardest part of library digitisation (with their sequence and hierarchy, hundreds of images, illustrations, and text conversion) — we did not imagine we would ever digitise all the books. But by focusing on quantity over quality, Google has made the seemingly impossible appear quite doable. And users are swarming. Google supplied — and changed demand.

Now, with millions of books flying off the shelves and ‘into the flow’, we need to change the way we think about digitisation of special collections. Soon students will only search online — what is not there, will not be considered.

The National Archives’ computer system may not be able to cope with the vast quantities of digital data it will receive when President Bush leaves office on Jan. 20.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/27/washington/27archives.html?emc=tnt&tntemail1=y