From "Suing Georgia" (©ollectanea, April 22, 2008 9:05 AM), a brilliant piece by Georgia Harper, UMUC's Center of Intellectual Property's Scholar.

So, 5th piece: what's left if you really, really, really believe that educators ought to be able to use whatever they need to and want to use in their classrooms without worrying about what it costs or whether it's fair use?

Consumer resistance, or OA.

Read it in ©ollectanea. Highly recommended.

http://thesocietyofqualifiedarchivists.blogspot.com/2008/04/church-of-englands-hidden-agenda.html

In 2005 Pusey House, Oxford sold most of its pre-Tractarian library; Truro Cathedral sold Bishop Philpott’s Library; and writing in The Church Times, Professor Jonathan Clark in an article entitled The C of E is losing its own history reports the sale of cathedral libraries from Bangor, Canterbury, Ely, Lincoln, Llandaff, Lichfield, Exeter, St. Asaph and Wells on AbeBooks. Manuscript items are included in these various sales.

The critics of these actions mainly express concern about the Church’s financial incompetence. The Truro sale, described by one eminent librarian as a disaster, raised £36,000 for stock eventually sold on for half a millon pounds.

Excerpts from the Clark article which is online at
http://www.churchtimes.co.uk/content.asp?id=55172

Unremarked, Anglican institutions are selling the contents of their ancient libraries. A search on Abebooks.com shows a swath of volumes for sale from cathedral libraries: Bangor, Canterbury, Ely, Lincoln, Llandaff, Lichfield, Exeter, St Asaph, Wells.

Even at Oxford, Pusey House, established as a think tank with a scholarly as well as a pastoral remit, in 2005 sold much of the ancient contents of its library for the years before the Tractarians. A friend, viewing this sale at Christie’s, and appalled at the rows of venerable volumes, described it as “like a scene from the dissolution of the monasteries”. Yet that, in present-day form, is too close to the truth.

One can imagine it. Accountants add up the retail value of the collections, calculate the number of borrowers or readers, and advise that there is no option but liquidation. Senior clergy, who no longer read the books, are all too happy to accept expert advice. The auction houses promise a professional service, and the best prices (which are not always realised). The Charity Commissioners make no complaint. There is little publicity.

Such sales are more than minor inevitabilities: together, they become a historical phenomenon. They signify the Church of England losing the argument, and turning away from an attempt to sustain a heavyweight historical rationale for itself. One wonders whether the libraries of most Anglican clerics now consist not of formidable works of scholarship, but of paperbacks from the 1970s, already disintegrating.

A generation ago, Anglican priests could count in their ranks historians of the scholarly stature of Henry Chadwick, Owen Chadwick, and Jack McManners; today, their number is diminishing radically, and their lack of preferment is almost assured. It is a trend that has been going on for some time.

On the Truro case see

http://archiv.twoday.net/stories/4251379/

http://www.missingmaps.info

The database is empty! (Has a thief stolen the contents??)

Source - Stolen map from Madrid

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/news/20080417/chron.htm

EB on E-Mails: http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/183816/e-mail

The publishing wave of the future for scholars will be open access: electronic books freely available on the web. Scholars rarely make money on their monographs. And few individuals or libraries can afford to buy from print publishers all of the monographs they'd like to access (think dollar/page Brill books). Open Access is the solution. Now we just have to get scholars and tenure review committees to accept it.

http://bibleandancientneareast.blogspot.com/2008/04/open-access-monograph-series-that.html

An exhibit highlighting the rising cost of library journal subscriptions to support faculty and student research.

http://astech.library.cornell.edu/ast/engr/about/StickerShock2.cfm

On April 13, 2008 Britannica.com announced:

All of us at Encyclopaedia Britannica are very pleased to introduce WebShare, a new initiative that lets web publishers and bloggers link to Britannica articles. Your readers will be able to follow those links without an account.

This site is dedicated to the WebShare initiative and includes a variety of tools and guides to help you make the most out of WebShare. To start with, read through the FAQs (they’re short). This will tell you exactly how the program works and what you have to do to get started. Then complete the registration form for your free account. It’s not an instant process, I’m afraid, but you’ll get your userid and password in a day or two.

We also have a lot of resources for you here on this site. There’s this blog, for instance, where we’ll keep you up to date on the program, how people are using it, tools, and resources. We’ll be producing screencasts to show you how to use the various tools; we already have one on the Assets page to show you how to insert a link to a Britannica article into a web page or blog post, just in case you’re new to web publishing.

We’re particularly excited about two features of this site. “Topic Clusters” are collections of links to material from throughout Brittanica.com related to news and current events. We’ll add these regularly. And we have a Twitter feed. If you are a Twitter user, you can choose to follow Britannica — our id is EBWebShare. We’ll send out a tweet a day with a link to something we think you’ll enjoy. We’ll also tweet to inform you of new blog posts here at Britannicanet.com.

On April 20 I applied for Archivalia and twoday I received the mail which enables me to have free access (for one year) to

http://www.britannica.com

I now can enrich Archivalia entries with links to EB articles which could be used for free like

archives. (2008). In Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved April 25, 2008, from Encyclopædia Britannica Online:
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/33033/archives

http://www.boingboing.net/2008/04/14/general-accounting-o.html

Carl Malamud writes:

Readers may remember a previous Boing Boing post Did the US gov't sell exclusive access to its legislative history to Thomson West? Well, the answer is now a definitive yes, that data has been sold down the river and is out to sea.

Public.Resource.Org sent in a FOIA request to GAO on this topic seeking access to the scanned data. Today's letter answering our FOIA request spells out the bad news. Turns out the GAO doesn't even get the data, they simply are given an account on Thomson's service. The rest of the government doesn't get access to this data, and the public is invited to stop by the GAO headquarters and pay 20 cents per page to copy paper.

This is one of those deals where the public domain got sold off ... GAO gets a bit of convenience by having their stuff scanned for them, but they gave up way more than they got in the deal, and the public (including government workers and public interest groups who need to consult this data) lost big-time.

See also:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/2537243/Answer-to-FOIA-Request-2

http://www.archivists.org/statements/IraqiRecords.asp

The Society of American Archivists (SAA) and the Association of Canadian Archivists (ACA) are deeply concerned about the whereabouts, current custody, and ultimate fate of records captured or otherwise obtained by the United States of America, and those removed by private parties, during the first and second Gulf Wars.

http://www.indymedia.ie/article/83829

http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/8208

On Tuesday, April 29, Creative Commons, the Art Law Committee of the New York City Bar Association, the College Art Association, and ARTstor are cosponsoring “Who Owns This Image?: Art, Access, and the Public Domain after Bridgeman v. Corel”, a public panel discussion on the issues surrounding the reproduction of public domain works.

UPDATE

Reports and comments:
http://tushnet.blogspot.com/2008/04/bridgeman-v-corel-9-years-on.html
http://blog.librarylaw.com/librarylaw/2008/05/bridgeman-and-t.html