s. http://informationatrix.wordpress.com/2007/07/23/archivists-are-a-class-in-dungeons-and-dragons/

http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/07/moving_images_d.html

Lot 49

This last Friday (the 13th!), at U.C. Berkeley, the Digital Library Federation was honored to host a landmark meeting of a group that we have labeled "Lot 49" on the topic of moving image digitization. Our group's aim is to facilitate broader access to the incredible trove of film and video held in our archives, libraries, museums, broadcast stations, and other sources. [...]

The motivation for our gathering was the belief that our institutions have a narrow but critical opportunity to draw ourselves together to draft a set of shared understandings that inform our dealings with future partners as a community, rather than a collection of individual actors. We seek to maximize the public good - not vaguely-perceived near-term institutional goals, but rather the larger goals of our organizations: to educate, to teach, to inspire, to inform, and to delight.

Together, we accept as a key principle that access is key to the survival of archives, and digitization the best enabler of access.

Peter Murray-Rust at:
http://wwmm.ch.cam.ac.uk/blogs/murrayrust/?p=420

I am campaigning for CC-BY (== Attribution) as the mainstream scientific license and am still trying to find out how many of the “open access” chemistry journals are CC-NC or worse. Be quite clear, CC-NC restricts science. CC-ND is worse. It destroys the re-use of scientific data.

See also:
http://archiv.twoday.net/stories/3493112/

http://chronicle.com/temp/reprint.php?id=3bclcsg3cf3d42whbrwtcy03f9zqrqnv

The battle over Jacques Derrida's papers began even before the philosopher died. It ended in victory for his family — and a black eye for the University of California at Irvine.

Economist calculates optimum term of copyright: 14 years!

Rufus Pollock, a PhD candidate in economics at Cambridge University, has just released "Forever Minus a Day? Some Theory and Empirics of Optimal Copyright," a brilliant new paper on the economically optimal term of copyright. He's presenting it in Berlin this week, but it's already online. Here's the abstract:

The optimal level for copyright has been a matter for extensive debate over the last decade. This paper contributes several new results on this issue divided into two parts. In the first, a parsimonious theoretical model is used to prove several novel propositions about the optimal level of protection. Specifically, we demonstrate that (a) optimal copyright falls as the costs of production go down (for example as a result of digitization) and that (b) the optimal level of copyright will, in general, fall over time. The second part of the paper focuses on the specific case of copyright term. Using a simple model we characterise optimal term as a function of a few key parameters. We estimate this function using a combination of new and existing data on recordings and books and find an optimal term of around fourteen years. This is substantially shorter than any current copyright term and implies that existing copyright terms are too long.

Source:
http://www.boingboing.net/2007/07/12/economist_calculates.html

CC-BY-NC

http://www.fairuseday.com/

http://wwmm.ch.cam.ac.uk/blogs/murrayrust/?p=398
http://wwmm.ch.cam.ac.uk/blogs/murrayrust/?p=396

The Associated Press
Published: July 5, 2007

MOSCOW: The United States on Thursday formally turned over 80 czarist- and
Soviet-era documents that had been stolen from Russian archives and found at American antiquities dealers.

The documents range from a declaration signed by Empress Catherine the Great
in 1792 to orders signed by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev; none appears to
reveal any secrets but some give a glimpse into the lives and styles of the
country's leaders.

[...]

The documents were stolen during the 1990s, when the collapse of the Soviet
Union undermined security at archives.

James McAndrew, a U.S. Department of Homeland Security agent, said the
investigation that led to the papers' recovery began in 2003 when he was
contacted by a scholar who had concerns about the provenance of a document
being offered for sale.

Eventually, agents found 80 suspicious documents at two companies that deal
in antiquities and historical material, he said. He declined to identify the
companies, but said they are located in Connecticut and Las Vegas.

After working with Russian archival officials to determine that the
documents had been stolen, agents seized the papers, he said.

"The SWAT team didn't get all ramped up, but there was resistance" from the
companies' officials, he said.

No arrests in the United States have been made in the case.

No estimate was given of the documents' total value, but Viktor Petrakov of
the Russian agency that oversees cultural objects' protection said
czarist-era documents typically sell for at least US$5,000 (E3,700) apiece.

Another agency official, Boris Boyarskov, said some 4,000 documents were
stolen from Russian archives in the 1990s, of which about 3,500 have been
recovered. He said two people have been convicted of the thefts and that
another suspect has been identified in Israel.

http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/07/05/europe/EU-GEN-Russia-US-Archives.php

http://digital-scholarship.org/digitalkoans/2007/07/02/how-many-creative-commons-licenses-are-in-use/

In his "Creative Commons Statistics from the CC-Monitor Project" iCommons Summit presentation, Giorgos Cheliotis of the School of Information Systems at Singapore Management University estimates that there must be more than 60,000,000 Creative Commons licenses in use.

Based on backlink search data from Google and Yahoo, he also provides the following license breakdown highlights:

* 70% of the licenses allow non-commercial use only (NC)
* Share-Alike (SA) also a very popular attribute, present in over 50% fCC-licensed items (though SA is anyhow self-propagating)
* 25% of the licenses include the ND [no derivative] restriction

http://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/images/3/31/CC-Monitor_Findings_-_iSummit.pdf

http://www.dia.org/the_collection/provenance_information/index.asp

Burial sites have been a focus for grave robbers as far back as ancient Egypt and such robbery continues today with illicit excavation being carried out in many countries around the world. Unscientific excavation – recklessly digging a hole to uncover objects sought by collectors mainly in Europe and America – disrupts the surrounding area and destroys valuable contextual information. As long as there is a market for the world’s antiquities, this kind of looting will continue and, to avoid directly stimulating such activity, the AAMD has issued guidelines (Report of the AAMD Task Force on the Acquisition of Archaeological Materials and Ancient Art, 2004) for museums that collect antiquities.

Because the remains of ancient civilizations are located in many different countries, the situation with regard to archaeological materials and ancient art is extremely complex and involves many different laws, regulations, and bilateral agreements. The DIA, which actively collects antiquities, endorses the AAMD report and adheres to the procedures recommended when considering an acquisition with a suspicious or incomplete provenance. Such procedures include: rigorous research into likely origin, history of ownership, and publication and/or exhibition history; concerted efforts to obtain complete export and import documents; prominent publication, with illustration, on the museum’s web site; and establishment of a minimum number of years that the work can be demonstrated to have been out of its likely country (or countries) of origin. The DIA uses 20 years as a rule.

Many archaeologists vehemently oppose collecting antiquities altogether on the grounds that such activity is, by its very nature, an encouragement to robbers, and that objects deprived of their archaeological context are rendered meaningless. In the firm belief that aesthetic qualities and other information can be found in objects deprived of archaeological context, and that such “orphaned” objects are more likely to be given the exposure that enables potential claimants to come forward, the DIA will continue to acquire works of art from ancient civilizations.