http://www.digitalhumanities.org/companion/

A Companion to Digital Humanities, ed. Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, John Unsworth. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004.

Now free online!

Joseph L. Sax : Playing Darts with a Rembrandt
Public and Private Rights in Cultural Treasures, Ann Arbor 1999

Considers the limits to the rights of private owners of great works of art or cultural treasures, such as historic papers, to destroy these works or to deny public access to them

TOC

The Diego Rivera mural -- Artists' rights and public rights -- The bonfires of loyalty and the flames of ambivalence -- Our architectural heritage -- Collectors: private vices, public benefits -- Presidential papers -- Papers of Supreme Court justices -- Access to library and museum collections -- Heirs, biographers, and scholars -- An academic scandal par excellence: the Dead Sea Scrolls -- The privatization of scholarly research -- Antiquities business.

A really great book I can highly recommend!

More on this book:

http://www.press.umich.edu/titleDetailDesc.do?id=16038
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/stores/detail/-/books/0472110446/excerpt/ref=pm_dp_ln_b_3/104-9910575-6211962

Reviews
http://www.museum-security.org/99/089.html#6
http://onthecommons.org/node/657

http://cf.hum.uva.nl/bai/home/eketelaar/Ethicspreserving.doc

Published in: Argiefnuus/Archives News 43/4 (June 2001) [Festschrift Verne Harris] pp. 70-77

From Peter Suber's Open Access-Newsletter 2007 January

http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/01-02-07.htm

Exzerpt:

In 2006, for the first time, I discovered more useful new peer-reviewed literature by searching blogs than by searching journal tables of contents or general indices. Bloggers are very good at finding new articles, often because they are the authors or colleagues of the author. And unlike other discoverers of new articles, bloggers tend to share what they've found. There are more bloggers than ever before, including more academic bloggers than ever before. Bloggers are early birds because they're willing to cover preprints and conference presentations. But they can even scoop journals in announcing published articles because so many journals take inexplicably long to publicize their own work. (Have you noticed that many journals publish a new issue on Day 0, update the online table of contents on Day 2, send out the email or RSS alert on Day 4?) Blogs are better connected to one another and to search engines than journals or even repositories. And for most people, running a couple of blog searches is much easier than running a dozen vertical searches at separate sites. For all these reasons blogs are becoming the Vehicle of First Exposure for a growing body of new research --if not the net's very first notice of a new article, then its first widely noticed notice.

http://www.copyrightwatch.ca/?p=38

In the life+70 universe, today marks the entry into the public domain of published works of sole or last-surviving authorship by British statistician Karl Pearson; German historian and polymath Oswald Spengler; British anthropologist Joseph Daniel Unwin; British surgeon and medical professor Sir Berkeley Moynihan; Australian novelist and war correspondent Alfred Arthur Greenwood Hales; American writer and novelist George Allan England; American author Edward Hagaman Hall; British historian Charles Sanford Terry; Alaska governor Scott C. Bone; American publisher William Webster Ellsworth; British historian Sir Richard Lodge; English poet and humorist Harry Graham; English writer and poet Edmond Gore Alexander Holmes; French historian and journalist Jacques Bainville; Scottish-Canadian journalist and archivist Alexander Fraser; French poet and historian Pierre de Nolhac; Russian composer Aleksandr Glazunov; Canadian poet Ruth Collie (pseud. “Wilhelmina Stitch”); American evangelist William Haven Daniels; American anthropologist Thomas Talbot Waterman; American writer Marie Van Vorst; German geophysicist and engineer Conrad Schlumberger; Canadian historian and archivist Arthur George Doughty; American legal scholar Thomas Adkins Street; British botanist Margaret Jane Benson; British author and popular historian Louise Creighton; Newfoundland Governor David Murray Anderson; Spanish author Joaquín Abati y Díaz; Austrian-Swedish physician Robert Bárány; American Vice-President Charles Curtis; Canadian journalist and historian Arthur Hugh Urquhart Colquhoun; American writer Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews; Canadian theologian George Coulson Workman; Scottish journalist and author Donald Alexander Mackenzie; German Egyptologist Alfred Wiedemann; Irish writer Justin Huntly Mccarthy; Scottish Physiologist John Scott Haldane; American writer Elizabeth Robins Pennell; spiritualist author Violet (Nee)Chambers Tweedale; British ghost story writer M. R. James; Icelandic electrical engineer Frímann Bjarnason Arngrímsson; American historian Ellis Paxson Oberholtzer; Australian journalist and politician George Mure Black; Italian composer Ottorino Respighi; British author John Collis Snaith; Canadian fisheries biologist Edward Ernest Prince; Canadian professor Edmund Kemper Broadus; Canadian legal scholar and politician John Augustus Barron; Canadian historian and antiquarian Gerald Ephraim Hart; French writer Juliette Adam; American novelist and women’s rights campaigner Mary Johnston; French economic historian Henri Eugène Sée; French historian Marc de Villiers du Terrage; American historian James Harvey Robinson; German philosopher Moritz Schlick; British author Lilian Julian Webb (pseud. “Cynthia Stockley”); New Zealand poet and journalist Arthur Henry Adams; Field Marshal Edmund Henry Hynman Allenby, 1st Viscount Allenby; English author G. K. Chesterton; American detective novelist Arthur B. Reeve; English scholar and poet A.E. Housman; pioneering American “muckraker” journalist Lincoln Steffens; British surgeon Sir Charles Alfred Ballance; Spanish dramatist and novelist Ramón del Valle-Inclán; British military officer Edmund Henry Hynman, Viscount Allenby; American legal scholar and politician James Montgomery Beck; British author Rudyard Kipling; American diplomat Charles Hitchcock Sherrill; Russian author Maxim Gorky; Prince Edward Island Premier Walter Maxfield Lea; British novelist and playwright Emily Morse Symonds; British novelist and suffragette Beatrice Harraden; Canadian historian Charles Napier Bell; Spanish poet and dramatist Federico García Lorca; Irish physicist Alexander Anderson; American politician and author William Hope Harvey; Victoria state Premier John Allan; German-born mathematician Stefan Cohn-Vossen; French musicologist and composer Julien Tiersot; Russian medical scientist Ivan Pavlov; French poet and critic Gustave Kahn; British writer Effie (Adelaide) Maria Albanesi; Spanish author and philosopher Miguel de Unamuno; Dutch poet and novelist Jan Jacob Slauerhoff; Italian novelist and dramatist Luigi Pirandello; Scottish author and nationalist politician R.B. Cunninghame Graham; British economist and journalist Harold Cox; Indian author Dhan Gopal Mukerji; “Father of Indian Co-operation” Sir Frederick Augustus Nicholson; Canadian historian and author Agnes Christina Laut; Joseph Conrad’s wife Jessie Conrad; Norwegian-American author and diplomat Rasmus B. Anderson; French poet and novelist Henri de Régnier; and Canadian historian and editor Thomas Guthrie Marquis; among many others.

And Karl Kraus, see http://log.netbib.de

.. to all (estimated 3) readers of the "English Corner"!

Source:
http://ephemera.typepad.com/ephemera/images/misccard7.jpg

Standards aren't laws, but complying to many laws requires to know them nevertheless. Therefore, and for the sake of technical innovation it's absolutely necessary that standards are easily accessible, and free (as in beer).

When I read that ASTM (an American association that develops all kinds of standards) now offers practically all of their publications in a "digital library", I thought that once again the U.S. were far ahead to old Europe where these standards are very expensive. One example: In Germany, DIN standards are issued by a publisher which probably makes considerable money from its monopoly position.

However, a closer look at ASTM's "Digital Library" reveals that this is at best a digital bookstore, and not at all a library. The same old story, but now you can download expensive documents as a PDF.

by Joseph J. Esposito, espositoj gmail.com, Liblicense-l, 24 Dec 2006 22:05 EST
http://www.library.yale.edu/~llicense/ListArchives/0612/msg00101.html

Ongoing discussions about various mass digitization projects, driven primarily by the Google Libraries program but including the respective activities of Microsoft, the Open Content Alliance, and others, prompts these comments about what should be taken into account as these programs proceed. My concern is a practical one: Some projects are incomplete in their design, which will likely result in their having to be redone in the near future, an expense that the world of scholarly communications can ill afford. There are at least four essential characteristics of any such project, and there may very well be more.

As many have noted, the first requirement of such a project is that it adopt an archival approach. Some scanning is now being done with little regard for preserving the entire informational context of the original. Scanning first editions of Dickens gives us nothing if the scans do not precisely copy first editions of Dickens; the corollary to this is that clearly articulated policies about archiving must be part of any mass digitization project. Some commercial projects have little regard for this, as archival quality simply is not part of the business plan; only members of the library community are in a position to assert the importance of this. An archival certification board is evolving as a scholarly desideratum.

Archives of digital facsimiles are important, but we also need readers' editions, the second requirement of mass digitization projects. This goes beyond scanning and involves the editorial process that is usually associated with the publishing industry. The point is not simply to preserve the cultural legacy but to make it more available to scholars, students, and interested laypeople. The high school student who first encounters Dickens's "Great Expectations" should not also be asked to fight with Victorian typography, not to mention orthography. In the absence of readers' editions, broad public support for mass digitization projects will be difficult to come by.

As devotees of "Web 2.0" insist with increasing frequency, all documents are in some sense community documents. Thus scanned and edited material must be placed into a technical environment that enables ongoing annotation and commentary. The supplemental commentary may in time be of greater importance than the initial or "founding" document itself, and some comments may themselves become seminal. I become uneasy, however, when the third requirement of community engagement is not paired with the first of archival fidelity. What do we gain when "The Declaration of Independence" is mounted on a Web site as a wiki? Sitting beneath the fascinating activities of an intellectually engaged community must be the curated archival foundation.

The fourth requirement is that mass digitization projects should yield file structures and tools that allow for machine process to work with the content. Whether this is called "pattern recognition" or "data mining" or something else is not important. What is important is to recognize that the world of research increasingly will be populated by robots, a term that no longer can or should carry a negative connotation. Some people call this "Web 3.0", but I prefer to think of it as "the post-human Internet," which may not even be a World Wide Web application.

To my knowledge, none of the current mass digitization projects fully incorporate all four of these requirements.

Note that I am not including any mention of copyright here, which is the topic that gets the most attention when mass digitization is contemplated. All four of these requirements hold for public domain documents. Copyright is a red herring.

Joe Esposito

Joseph Esposito, a regular contributor to liblicense-l, is a former president and CEO of Encyclopaedia Britannica (he was the one who rolled out the Internet version). Since then he has served as CEO of Tribal voice the McAfee Internet community and and communications company that started PowWow, one of the first internet based instant message and chat programs, and now is president of Portable CEO, an independent consultancy focusing on digital media.

In 2003 he published a speculative essay about the future of electronic texts, "The processed book" (First Monday, volume 8, number 3 (March 2003), with an update of Oct 2005, URL: http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue8_3/esposito/ ).

The "processed book" is about content, not technology, and contrasts with the "primal book"; the latter is the book we all know and revere: written by a single author and viewed as the embodiment of the thought of a single individual. The processed book, on the other hand, is what happens to the book when it is put into a computerized, networked environment. To process a book is more than simply building links to it; it also includes a modification of the act of creation, which tends to encourage the absorption of the book into a network of applications, including but not restricted to commentary. Such a book typically has at least five aspects: as self-referencing text; as portal; as platform; as machine component; and, as network node. An interesting aspect of such processing is that the author's relationship to his or her work may be undermined or compromised; indeed, it is possible that author attribution in the networked world may go the way of copyright. The processed book, in other words, is the response to romantic notions of authorship and books. It is not a matter of choice (as one can still write an imitation, for example, of a Victorian novel today) but an inevitable outcome of inherent characteristics of digital media.

Another provocative essay of his that is well worth reading is entitled
The devil you don’t know: The unexpected future of Open Access publishing
by Joseph J. Esposito, First Monday, volume 9, number 8 (August 2004),
URL: http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue9_8/esposito/