Manuscripts of the Abbey Library of St. Gall, Switzerland online

- free access: www.cesg.unifr.ch
- high resolution digital images: over 57'000 facsimile pages
- regularly updated: now 144 complete manuscripts (including the musical manuscripts)
- manuscript descriptions and many search options
- accessible in:
German: www.cesg.unifr.ch
French: www.cesg.unifr.ch/fr
English: http://www.cesg.unifr.ch/en
Italian: www.cesg.unifr.ch/it

Please recommend it to your colleagues and put a link to CESG on your homepage.

The University of Texas at Austin's Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center and the Reading University Library have created Firms Out of Business (FOB), an online database containing the names and addresses of copyright holders or contact persons for out-of-business printing and publishing firms, magazines, literary agencies and similar organizations that have archives housed in libraries and archives in North America and the United Kingdom.

FOB can be accessed at http://www.fob-file.com .

FOB is a companion project to the Writers, Artists and Their Copyright Holders (WATCH), an online database containing the names and addresses of copyright holders or contact persons for authors and artists. The WATCH file is accessible at http://www.watch-file.com .

http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/news/press/2007/fobfile.html

http://www.ibimus.it/page/petizione_en.html



To all Experts and Institutes of Culture all over the World

The news that the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana is going to be closed for a period of three years preoccupies all of us, since we consider this Biblioteca to be a universal essential tool. We have prepared the following petition to send to the Holy Father who we are sure will appreciate and consider with competence and particular awareness. If you would like to partecipate in our request, please fill in the following table.

Thank you for your attention and collaboration.

The text of the petition that will be sent to the Holy Father follows:

To His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI

Holy Father, in these last days the public has been informed that the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana would be kept closed for at least three years, from next July, because of refurbishment activity in the restoration laboratories and other divisions of the whole complex. All the body of experts does appreciate a lot this initiative to maintain, improve and increase the value of such a universal cultural heritage, placed with such great generosity and faultless method to the service of researchers and scientists from all the world. At the same time, however, this body feels the need to share with you, Holy Father, its great concern for all those specialists from all over the world who, at this time, are already engaged with study and research, perhaps having also imposed on them didactic and editorial deadlines. With the closing of the Biblioteca, they would certainly have to suspend their work, interrupting, thus, years of research and editorial projects in various fields of humanistic, religious, and scientific study. Such concern is also shared with all those foreign cultural and diplomatic organisms who consider the Biblioteca as a privileged tool in their support from their own premises to research and study exchange. Therefore, the already mentioned institutions (universities, academies, Italian and foreign cultural institutes) and all other experts concerned, present You, Holy Father, with their humble request of, if it is possible, leaving the Biblioteca accessible to the public, even during this period of refurbishment. Our request involves also that essential division “Manoscritti”. We would appreciate a lot if it continues to render service to the public, especially in the consultation of historical material. While being certain that the Holy Father is going to take an enlightened and positive consideration of our request, we already express our gratefulness for his gentleness in examining our demand and ask respectfully and devotionally for his blessing.

http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007_06_10_fosblogarchive.html#9066657008656328979

By Peter Suber

Peter Murray-Rust, “open access” is not good enough, A Scientist and the Web, June 10, 2007. Excerpt:

I have ranted at regular intervals about the use of “Open Access” or often “open access” as a term implying more than it delivers. My current concern is that although there are are tens of thousands of theses described as “open access” I have only discovered 3 (and possibly another 15 today) which actually comply with the BOAI definition of Open Access.

The key point is is that unless a thesis (or any publication) explicitly carries a license (or possibly a site meta-license) actually stating that it is BOAI compliant, then I cannot re-use it. I shall use “OpenAccess” to denote BOAI-compliant in this post and “open access” to mean some undefined access which may only allow humans to read but not re-use the information...

By contrast...the term “Open Source” is completely self-explanatory within a large community....

So I believe that “open access” should be recast as “toll-free” - i.e. you do not have to pay for it but there are no other guarantees. We should restrict the use of “Open Access” to documents which explicitly carry licenses compliant with BOAI. (A weaker (and much more fragile approach) is that a site license applies to all content. The problem here is that documents then get decoupled from the site and their OpenAccess position is unknown.)

If the community wishes to continue to use “open access” to describe documents which do not comply with BOAI then I suggest the use of suffixes/qualifiers to clarify. For example:

* “open access (CC-BY)” - explicitly carries CC-BY license
* “open access (BOAI)” - author/site wishes to assert BOAI-nature of document(s) without specific license
* “open access (FUZZY)” - fuzzy licence (or more commonly absence of licence) for document or site without any guarantee of anything other than human visibility at current time. Note that “Green” open access falls into this category. It might even be that we replace the word FUZZY by GREEN, though the first is more descriptive.

Comments.

* I agree with much but not all of what Peter MR says. I'm responding at length because I've often had many of the same thoughts.
* I'm the principal author of the BOAI definition of OA, and I still support it in full. Whenever the occasion arises, I emphasize that OA removes both price and permission barriers, not just price barriers. I also emphasize that the other major public definitions of OA (from Bethesda and Berlin) have similar requirements.
* I don't agree that the term "open access" on its own, or apart from its public definitions, highlights the removal of price barriers and neglects the removal of permission barriers. There are many ways to make content more widely accessible, or many digital freedoms, and the term "open access" on its own doesn't favor or disfavor any of them. Even at the BOAI meeting we realized that the term was not self-explanatory and would need to be accompanied by a clear definition and education campaign.
* The same, BTW, is true for terms like "open content", "open source", and "free software". If "open source" is better understood than "open access", it's because its precise definition has spread further, not because the term by itself is self-explanatory or because "open access" lacks a precise definition.
* I do agree that many projects which remove price barriers alone, and not permission barriers, now call themselves OA. I often call them OA myself. This is only to say that the common use of the term has moved beyond than the strict definitions. But this is not always regrettable. For most users, removing price barriers alone solves the largest part of the problem with non-OA content, and projects that do so are significant successes worth celebrating. By going beyond the BBB definition, the common use of the term has marked out a spectrum of free online content, ranging from that which removes no permission barriers (beyond those already removed by fair use) to that which removes all the permission barriers that might interfere with scholarship. This is useful, for we often want to refer to that whole category, not just to the upper end. When the context requires precision we can, and should, distinguish OA content from content which is merely free of charge. But we don't always need this extra precision.
* In other words: Yes, most of us are now using the term "OA" in at least two ways, one strict and one loose, and yes, this can be confusing. But first, this is the case with most technical terms (compare "evolution" and "momentum"). Second, when it's confusing, there are ways to speak more precisely. Third, it would be at least as confusing to speak with this extra level of precision --distinguishing different ways of removing permission barriers from content that was already free of charge-- in every context. (I'm not saying that Peter MR thought we should do the latter.)
* One good way to be precise without introducing terms that might baffle our audience is to use a license. Each of the CC licenses, for example, is clear in it own right and each removes a different set of permission barriers. The same is true for the other OA-friendly licenses. Like Peter MR, I encourage providers to remove permission barriers and to formalize this freedom with a license. Even if we multiplied our technical terms, it will usually be more effective to point to a license than to a technical term when someone wonders exactly what we mean by OA for a given piece of work.

My comments:

* Removing permission barriers is an underestimated issue in the OA community.

* Who is referring to the Berlin Declaration should not ignore the implications for re-use.

The University of London Research Library Services (ULRLS) launched its
new electronic catalogue for archives and manuscripts on 31 May 2007.
[...]

The range of archive material held across ULRLS is extraordinarily
diverse, covering many different aspects of British and world history
over more than 1,000 years. Prominent among the collections held at Senate House Library is the University of London archive, the historic documents of which provide a unique insight into the growth and
development of the University since 1836. Other strengths include:
medieval manuscripts, literary manuscripts, papers of scholars
associated with the University, and material relating to changes in
politics, industry and society between the mid 18th and mid 20th
centuries.

The ULRLS archival database is available for library users to search at:
http://archives.ulrls.lon.ac.uk/.

All documents about the Netherlands' Royal Family will be immediately destroyed following the shock discovery of classified information about Queen Beatrix and her family in a dustbin.

http://www.allheadlinenews.com/articles/7007517804

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/31/business/31scene.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Excerpt:

When some librarians at Carnegie Mellon University tried to request permissions to digitize a collection of out-of-print books, they were unable to find more than 20 percent of the rights holders, despite persistent efforts.

Failing to locate rights holders can be costly since copyright infringement may be subject to statutory damages of up to $150,000 an incident.

The costs of locating rights holders are an example of what economists call transactions costs. Not surprisingly, high transactions costs tend to discourage transactions from occurring.

The so-called orphan works problem was examined by the Copyright Office in a 2006 report in which it proposed legislation to address the transactions costs issues.

Under its proposal, if you conducted a “diligent search” to locate a rights holder and still failed to find the owner, you would be off the hook. You could then incorporate the work in question into your own work, as long as you provided proper attribution. If the legitimate rights holder was subsequently found, he or she could not require that your work be withdrawn from circulation, but could collect “reasonable compensation” for use.

But what is a “diligent search?” The report leaves the interpretation of this phrase up to the courts but suggests some relevant considerations: whether the work includes identification, the age of the work, whether the work can be found in public databases like Copyright Office records, and so on.

When I'm in doubt about where I've found links (as in this post), there is a good chance that some came via Klaus Graf and also the mysterious bibliparis4, who is the librarian (I think) at the Sorbonne University in Paris - they both always find excellent cultural/digital material.
http://bibliodyssey.blogspot.com/2007/05/on-fly.html

Thanks!

You can see the findings of Bibliparis4 when subscring the del.icio.us feed
http://del.icio.us/bibliparis4/biblioth%C3%A8que_num%C3%A9rique

Tom Wayne has amassed thousands of books in a warehouse during the 10 years
he has run his used book store, Prospero's Books.

His collection ranges from best sellers, such as Tom Clancy's "The Hunt for
Red October" and Tom Wolfe's "Bonfire of the Vanities," to obscure titles,
like a bound report from the Fourth Pan-American Conference held in Buenos
Aires in 1910. But when he wanted to thin out the collection, he found he
couldn't even give away books to libraries or thrift shops; they said they
were full.

So on Sunday, Wayne began burning his books in protest of what he sees as
society's diminishing support for the printed word.

"This is the funeral pyre for thought in America today," Wayne told
spectators outside his bookstore as he lit the first batch of books.

The fire blazed for about 50 minutes before the Kansas City Fire Department
put it out because Wayne didn't have a permit for burning.

Read more http://www.wtopnews.com/index.php?nid=104&sid=1151853

Discussion in a travel forum:
http://fodors.com/forums/threadselect.jsp?fid=134&tid=35006563

See also
http://www.bookthing.org/
"Our mission is to put unwanted books into the hands of those who want them."