http://cdrh.unl.edu/nebpubdocs/

Nebraska Public Documents is a collaborative effort between the Nebraska Library Commission, the Nebraska State Historical Society, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and the University of Nebraska-Omaha.

Welcome to Nebraska Public Documents! This project provides free public access to digitized historic annual reports of state agencies in Nebraska for the use of students, scholars, and the general public. Through this digitization project, we provide keyword searching options never before available. Eventually, the intent of the project is to provide access to state government agency reports from 1891 through 1956, with metadata enhancements as funds become available. Earlier reports will be provided as they are located and digitized. This site is made possible through the funding and support of the Nebraska Library Commission, the Nebraska State Historical Society, the Nebraska State Records Board, the University of Nebraska at Omaha, and the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Hprints.org is an Open Access archive aiming at making scholarly documents from the Arts and Humanities area publicly available to the widest possible audience. The archive is now open for submission and browsing (as of spring 2008).

The archive aims at being a direct tool for scientific communication between academics. Scholars can upload full-text research material to www.hprints.org, e.g. articles, conference papers, book chapters etc. The submission policy is that content of the posted material should be comparable to that of a paper that could in principle be accepted for publication in a scientific journal.

This is an opportunity for scholars to gain longstanding visibility. First of all, it is possible to search and find the paper by defined topics through an Internet search. Secondly, all submitted papers will be stored permanently and receive a stable web address.

Hprints.org is initially a Nordic project (funded by the Nordbib funding agency), but it is open to all humanities scholars world-wide. The archive is also part of HAL: The French national Open Access database with more than 100.000 full text preprints in all fields of research. Readers get free access to the latest scholarly research within their field, through RSS and email alerts.
The Nordic arts and humanities e-print archive (hprints.org)
Att. Jesper Mørch
The Royal Library of Denmark
Postbox 2149
DK-1016 Copenhagen K
Denmark
Email: help@hprints.org
Visit the website at http://www.hprints.org

This are excellent news. I deeply regret that Suber and Kahle aren't able to launch the UNIVERSAL REPOSITORY they announced in 2005:
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/04-02-05.htm#100

I have asked Hprints in which languages submissions are accepted and will update this entry if I will get an answer.

http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/04/georgia-state-case-and-rise-of-oers.html

On this law suit see also
http://digital-scholarship.org/digitalkoans/2008/04/17/georgia-state-copyright-infringement-suit-coverage-and-commentary/

http://www.cdlib.org/inside/projects/massdig/faq.html#content

What rights to the digitized content does UC have in the projects; will access be limited in any way?

All contracts specify that UC digital images will be available to the UC Libraries to download and manage. The UC Libraries’ digital copy is subject to certain rights and restrictions regarding use and distribution. The University of California’s use or ability to display the downloaded copies of the full text of all books is subject to the restrictions of copyright law. Full-text searching will be possible for all of the digitized books, but some scanned books will not be completely viewable due to copyright restrictions. Specifics include:

Google

* UC Libraries have the right to use the UC Libraries digital copy at the University’s sole discretion, subject to copyright law, as part of the services offered to University Library patrons (including all individuals and organizations served from the UC Libraries websites).
* UC Libraries must implement technological measures to restrict automated access by crawlers, robots, spiders etc. to the UC Libraries digital copy.
* UC Libraries may not permit downloading for commercial purposes.
* UC Libraries may not knowingly permit the automated downloading and redistribution of the UC Library digital copy by third parties. UC Libraries must develop methods for ensuring that substantial portions of the UC Libraries digital copies are not downloaded from the UC Libraries website or otherwise disseminated in bulk.
* UC Libraries are permitted to distribute no more than 10% of the UC Libraries digital copy to other libraries and educational institutions for non-commercial, research, scholarly, or academic purposes (but not any portion of image coordinates).
* UC Libraries are permitted to distribute all or any portion of public domain works contained in the UC Libraries digital copy (but not any portion of image coordinates) to other research libraries for use by those libraries’ authorized students, faculty, and staff for research, scholarly, or academic purposes.
* Image coordinates, which link words in the OCR’d full text to specific locations on the viewable page, may not be shared with any entity.

Microsoft

* UC Libraries may use, copy, transmit, distribute, perform, display and create derivative works of the UC Libraries digital copy of non-copyrighted works to enable users of the UC Libraries and the end users of the UC Libraries websites to access and use these digital copies for personal, research or educational purposes, including, but not limited to, searching, viewing, printing and downloading by the UC Libraries end users.
* UC Libraries must use reasonable efforts not to knowingly enable any third party to download or host the UC Libraries digital copy or access or copy the UC Libraries digital copy via automated crawlers, robots, spiders, or similar data mining or extraction methods.
* UC Libraries may not permit third-party use of UC Libraries digital copies for revenue generating purposes.
* UC Libraries may license for non-commercial purposes the UC Libraries digital copy of non-copyrighted works and/or derivative works to non-commercial institutions such as other universities, libraries and archives.

Open Content Alliance

* There are no restrictions on access or redistribution placed on the UC Libraries digital copy.

There seems no hope (the text isn't quite clear) that in near future links to digitized content would be available via MELVYL. I don't think that OCLC's local WorldCat pilot is available for non-UC-users.

Among the current Google partners, at present only the University of Michigan has exposed the mass digitized content through its OPAC, with significant effort (including development of an ancillary rights database).

The quoted text is from April 2008 but this is evidently wrong:

In April 2007 Harvard's Crimson announced that Harvard's HOLLIS has links to Google's digitized books:
http://archiv.twoday.net/stories/4088388/ (in German, July 2007)

Since September 10, 2007, NYPL is offering access via CATNYP to the digital copies of its collections scanned by Google.
http://archiv.twoday.net/stories/4455443/ (November 2007)

It's a shame that most Google library partners (including UC) don't catalogue the digitized books by Google (or MS/IA) in their OPAcs.

March 13, 2008 Google has released, quoting the Google Blog, "a new API that lets you link easily to any of our books. Web developers can use the Books Viewability API to quickly find out a book's viewability on Google Book Search and, in an automated fashion, embed a link to that book in Google Book Search on their own sites." There is a link to the OPAC of a small Public Library in Oregon. (Harvard's HOLLIS is also using the API.)

Google Book Search provides a standard linking format that allows developers to link to books using ISBNs, LCCNs, and OCLC numbers. And rich universities like UC aren't able to negotiate with Google that they could get a specific API with an additional parameter (library partner) that would allow to link only to the own digitized copies?

http://chabadlibrarybooks.com/

The central Chabad-Lubavitch library in New York made 1,000 Passover Haggadahs, many of them rare, available on the Internet for browsing by the public.

http://www.chabad.org/news/article_cdo/aid/665216/jewish/Library-Makes-1000-Rare-Haggadahs-Available-Online.htm

Come and explore the Titanic disaster as featured in The Daily Graphic and The Sphere, two British newsmagazines from April - May 1912 — detailed maps, diagrams, photographs and news articles covering one of the landmark events of the early 20th century. This new content joins the virtual exhibit and 'List of Bodies' already featured on our Titanic Website.

http://www.gov.ns.ca/nsarm/virtual/titanic/

http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=401386&c=1

Excerpt:

All reports produced by the House of Commons have, for example, been scanned by a company called ProQuest. Its site is great - pages are searchable backwards and forwards. The only problem is that access is restricted and comes with a charge. Each downloaded parliamentary report bears a little inscription: "Copyright © 2006, ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights reserved."

Think about this for a second. Here is a company that lays exclusive claim to material produced by the elected representatives of the people. A company whose business idea it is to restrict access to our common heritage. This is upsetting first of all because it goes against the rights of citizens in a democracy to have the documents produced by their parliament freely available. Second, ProQuest is claiming copyright to material whose copyright has long expired. And finally it makes academic research far more difficult. Unless you belong to a university that's prepared to pay for the stuff, you won't get to read it.

So, I've taken it upon myself to start an organisation called MLOP, the "Movement for the Liberation of Old Papers". What I do is hack into restricted websites, download the documents I'm interested in, and then use my favourite open-source paint program to remove the copyright statements from each page. Next I assemble the pages into one single pdf file and upload it to the Internet Archive, where it will become universally available to both researchers and citizens. Yes, it does take a bit of time, but it's a very worthy cause (and I have a hardworking research assistant to help me).

I feel strongly about this, and I'm prepared to live with the legal consequences of my actions. This, after all, is the new frontier of civil rights - the right of access to information.

Erik Ringmar is professor of social and cultural studies at the National Chiao Tung University, Hsinchu, Taiwan. His books are available at the Internet Archive.

On Copyfraud see:
http://archiv.twoday.net/search?q=copyfraud

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/12/AR2008041201973_pf.html>

A Maker of Books Destroys 100,000
Inquiry Has Been Launched, UNESCO Director Says

By Molly Moore and John Ward Anderson
Washington Post Foreign Service

Sunday, April 13, 2008; A17

PARIS -- For more than two decades, 250 historians and specialists labored to produce the first six volumes of the General History of Latin America, an exhaustive work financed by UNESCO, the United Nations organization created to preserve global culture and heritage.

Then, over the course of two years, UNESCO paid to destroy many of those books and nearly 100,000 others by turning them to pulp, according to an external audit.

"This is the intellectual organization of the United Nations system," Aziza Bennani, Morocco's ambassador to UNESCO, said in an interview. "How could an employee of UNESCO make a decision to destroy these books?"

Homero Aridjis, Mexico's ambassador, said at the organization's executive council meeting this week, "This is not only a blow to the culture and knowledge of entire populations and nations, it contradicts the mandate entrusted to UNESCO." He demanded an internal investigation.

UNESCO Director General Koichiro Matsuura said it was "completely incomprehensible and inappropriate" that some of the organization's "most important and successful collections" were ordered destroyed, including histories of humanity and Africa, and surveys of ancient monuments.

It was unclear who was responsible, he said. "We have launched an inquiry, consulting publications officers of the period, now retired, in order to discover the reasons which led them to take this decision and not to consider other options," the audit report quotes him as saying.

South African Ambassador Nomasonto Maria Sibanda-Thusi told the executive board: "We believe that some decisive disciplinary action is needed. The main player may have retired, but what about those that knew but chose to remain silent?"

According to the report, the destruction occurred in 2004 and 2005, when UNESCO's overflowing book storage warehouses in Paris were relocated to Brussels. Rather than pay to move 94,500 books, auditors reported, UNESCO officials ordered them destroyed. The books were turned to pulp for recycling, the audit says.

Nino Muñoz Gomez, director of UNESCO's Bureau of Public Information and chief of the publishing division, said that at least half of the destroyed volumes were outdated and contained obsolete statistical data.

The audit notes that some publications were out of date but says others "on historical or purely literary themes (poetry anthologies, stories from all lands in translation) were not at all affected by obsolescence." It says a "solution other than destruction" should have been considered, "such as free distribution to libraries."

Several irate African and Latin American ambassadors said libraries and schools in their impoverished countries would have been eager to receive comprehensive history books.

The auditors found that at least 4,990 copies of the General History of Latin America -- one-quarter of those published -- were destroyed. Records show that pulping of the first six volumes -- which sell for 30.5 euros each, or about $48, at the UNESCO bookstore -- was ordered even as historians and authors were working on the final three volumes of the nine-book set.

In addition, more than 10,000 French and English copies of "General History of Africa" (about $72 each) were destroyed, as were 3,572 copies of "The Different Aspects of Islamic Culture" ($72 each) and 2,944 paperback copies of the French-language "History of Humanity," a 1,500-page tome that sells for about $41.

The list of pulped publications also included books about the ancient Incan capital, Cuzco, in Peru, and the 2,000 Buddhist monuments at the ancient Burmese capital of Pagan.

Auditors made the discovery during a wide-ranging investigation of abuses and waste in UNESCO's book publication and distribution operations.

Because too many books often were ordered and others were never distributed properly, tens of thousands piled up in UNESCO's storage facilities at a cost of about $100,000 a year, until the agency decided to shift distribution functions to a Brussels company and move its stocks there.

Muñoz Gomez, who assumed his post in April 2005 and was chief of the publishing section for nine months while the book destruction was taking place, said he did not learn of it until early 2006, when a new employee showed him thousands of dollars in bills for the pulping.

He said he authorized payment of those bills "of several thousand euros each" but did not realize the magnitude of the operation. "All we knew is the bills were sent by the company and we had to pay the bills," he said in an interview.

He contacted the company to halt the pulping, he said, but "by 2006 there was nothing more to destroy."

Muñoz Gomez said he wrote in February to the now-retired chief of the publications section, requesting details on the decision to destroy the books, but has received no reply. He would not identify the former employee or provide information about current whereabouts.

Researcher Corinne Gavard contributed to this report.

Comment:

"He who destroys a good book, kills Reason itself …" – said John Milton. One cannot say better.
Found at:
http://www.unesco.org/webworld/points_of_views/yushkiavitshus.shtml

Some feedback to
http://archiv.twoday.net/stories/4853394/
http://archiv.twoday.net/stories/4851871/

Peter Murray-Rust: A better interpretation of "green" and "gold"
http://wwmm.ch.cam.ac.uk/blogs/murrayrust/?p=1034

Heather Piwowar: Make All Research Results CC-BY
http://researchremix.wordpress.com/2008/04/10/make-all-research-results-cc-by/

http://wwmm.ch.cam.ac.uk/blogs/murrayrust/?p=1033

As today is part of “Open Access Week” (April 7 was when the NIH mandate took effect), I’m trying to write a post a day on the topic…

For newcomers, there are loosely two forms of Open Access - Green (which allows humans to read an article without charge - priceFree) and Gold (which allows anyone to do more or less whatever they like (datamine, mashup, republish, annotate, etc.) as long as they acknowledge the original author in any derivative works.

The heroic and immensely important BBB declarations (Berlin, Budapest, Bethesda) all unequivocally declared that the phrase “Open Access” meant Gold access. One of the heroes was Stevan Harnad and last week at Southampton I paid tribute to his tireless campaigning..

Recently, however, Stevan has said that he regrets having included the Gold-like clauses in BBB and wants to see the declarations revised to emphasize Green. Many others, including Peter Suber and myself, do not agree. I’ll expand my position later as to why Green Open Access is of very limited value to scientists. Here Klaus Graf shows why he has the same position. No apologies for giving it in full.

There is no need to update the BBB definition!

[Quoting http://archiv.twoday.net/stories/4851871/ ]

PMR: [the extension to data is:
* MAKE ALL RESEARCH RESULTS CC0 or PDDL
PMR: Klaus gives excellent arguments and the German copyright law is particularly compelling. No “green” label can override this whereas a CC-BY can. The idea of local datamining is - as Klaus says - nonsense (sorry Stevan). I have legitimate scientific reasons for downloading every chemistry paper ever published - I want to use OSCAR to check which published results are valid. I want to extract NMR spectra and asses their consistency. I want to plot the use of hazarous solvents against a timeline. etc. We can easily analyse 100,000 papers a day for this sort of thing - the only barrier is Closed access. Science is impoverished

As Peter Suber (see above) and others have made clear it is not a question of Green or Gold. They can be pursued at the same time. Many publishers do not yet realise the value of Gold publishing and when explained they become positive about it (I answered a question on this yesyterday - more later).

In haste

Comment: It was not a good but confusing Harnadian idea to choose the same colors as in the road metaphor, see my comment at PMR's weblog (awaiting moderation).