http://www.boingboing.net/2006/05/23/orphan_works_bill_in.html

Texas Rep Lamar Smith has introduced a bill to clear the way for the re-use of "orphan works" whose authors are unknown or unlocatable.
[...]
"For example, a local civic association may want to include old photographs from the local library archive in their monthly newsletter, but there are no identifying marks on the photo," explained Smith. "Under current law, the civic association must locate the owner to ask permission and in many cases may not be able to find the owner. Under the Orphan Works Act, they could follow guidelines posted by the Copyright Office as a show of due diligence to reduce the threat of litigation for simply doing the right thing."

More at http://www.copybites.com/2006/05/chairman_lamar_.html

http://lcb48.wordpress.com/

A weblog from a “lone arranger” archivist at a small college

http://www.teleread.org/blog/?p=4890

Thanks!

The American Jewish Committee, celebrating its 100th anniversary, has launched a new interactive archival website at:

http://www.ajcarchives.org.

The site includes:

# 75,000 pages of material, 40 films and 16 historical radio broadcasts.
# interactive timeline of 100 years of AJC history, ground-breaking research reports, historic correspondence, memorabilia, and other documents that until now have been stored in protective rooms, and rarely made available to researchers and scholars.
# radio and tv broadcasts from the 1930 and 40s promoting democracy and pluralism in America.
# Oral History Collection containing audio excerpts of interviews with a number of leading Jewish figures, including Bella Abzug, George Burns, Abba Eban, Hank Greenberg, Golda Meir, Arthur Miller, Neil Simon, and Isaac Bashevis Singer.
# All 105 volumes, 1899 to 2005, of the American Jewish Year Book are completely digitized.

S: H-Net

http://www.historycooperative.org/ahrindex.html

All the articles (not the book reviews!) starting with June 2005 are available online for free.

Source: http://historylibrarian.wordpress.com/2006/05/12/oa-for-history/#comments

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/14/magazine/14publishing.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print&oref=slogin

In the world of books, the indefinite extension of copyright has had a perverse effect. It has created a vast collection of works that have been abandoned by publishers, a continent of books left permanently in the dark. In most cases, the original publisher simply doesn't find it profitable to keep these books in print. In other cases, the publishing company doesn't know whether it even owns the work, since author contracts in the past were not as explicit as they are now. The size of this abandoned library is shocking: about 75 percent of all books in the world's libraries are orphaned. Only about 15 percent of all books are in the public domain. A luckier 10 percent are still in print. The rest, the bulk of our universal library, is dark.

5. The Moral Imperative to Scan

The 15 percent of the world's 32 million cataloged books that are in the public domain are freely available for anyone to borrow, imitate, publish or copy wholesale. Almost the entire current scanning effort by American libraries is aimed at this 15 percent. The Million Book Project mines this small sliver of the pie, as does Google. Because they are in the commons, no law hinders this 15 percent from being scanned and added to the universal library.

The approximately 10 percent of all books actively in print will also be scanned before long. Amazon carries at least four million books, which includes multiple editions of the same title. Amazon is slowly scanning all of them. Recently, several big American publishers have declared themselves eager to move their entire backlist of books into the digital sphere. Many of them are working with Google in a partnership program in which Google scans their books, offers sample pages (controlled by the publisher) to readers and points readers to where they can buy the actual book. No one doubts electronic books will make money eventually. Simple commercial incentives guarantee that all in-print and backlisted books will before long be scanned into the great library. That's not the problem.

The major problem for large publishers is that they are not certain what they actually own. If you would like to amuse yourself, pick an out-of-print book from the library and try to determine who owns its copyright. It's not easy. There is no list of copyrighted works. The Library of Congress does not have a catalog. The publishers don't have an exhaustive list, not even of their own imprints (though they say they are working on it). The older, the more obscure the work, the less likely a publisher will be able to tell you (that is, if the publisher still exists) whether the copyright has reverted to the author, whether the author is alive or dead, whether the copyright has been sold to another company, whether the publisher still owns the copyright or whether it plans to resurrect or scan it. Plan on having a lot of spare time and patience if you inquire. I recently spent two years trying to track down the copyright to a book that led me to Random House. Does the company own it? Can I reproduce it? Three years later, the company is still working on its answer. The prospect of tracking down the copyright — with any certainty — of the roughly 25 million orphaned books is simply ludicrous.

Which leaves 75 percent of the known texts of humans in the dark. The legal limbo surrounding their status as copies prevents them from being digitized. No one argues that these are all masterpieces, but there is history and context enough in their pages to not let them disappear. And if they are not scanned, they in effect will disappear. But with copyright hyperextended beyond reason (the Supreme Court in 2003 declared the law dumb but not unconstitutional), none of this dark library will return to the public domain (and be cleared for scanning) until at least 2019. With no commercial incentive to entice uncertain publishers to pay for scanning these orphan works, they will vanish from view. According to Peter Brantley, director of technology for the California Digital Library, "We have a moral imperative to reach out to our library shelves, grab the material that is orphaned and set it on top of scanners."

http://archivemati.ca/

Researching access to digital archives.

Newest entry:

Web 2.0 and Archival Institutions

I’ve been preparing my presentation for some upcoming conferences in Summer 2006 (IS&T Archiving, Association of Canadian Archivists, Society of American Archivists). I’m going to be talking about Web 2.0 as a set of enabling technologies and practices that can enhance the quality of archives access systems.

Of course, “Web 2.0″ is a hodge-podge of intersecting technologies, ideas, practices and marketing pitches. It has gotten a lot of attention over the past year in the tech press and geek blogosphere but you know it has hit maintstream when the term starts showing up in airline in-flight magazines (see AirCanada’s EnRoute (May 2006)).

Although the “Web 2.0″ term probably has a limited shelf life, I expect it will at least get people’s attention as they scan a conference program. It provides a relatively wide and hype-charged entry-point for a discussion on some of the more interesting of the new web technologies and practices.

For the purpose of my presentation, I have focussed on three core Web 2.0 themes:

1. usability
2. openness
3. community

Usability

As part of the usability theme I intend to discuss AJAX features such as auto-complete, drag-n-drop, and dynamic update of page components without reload as well as other Web 2.0-like usability improvements such as permalinks, feed aggregators, personalization, and the use of simple, functional design (with generous application of whitespace and what appears to be a preference for neon-green logos). All of these elements can be incorporated into existing and new archives access systems to improve their usability.
Openness

When I say “openness” I am actually trying to refer to four key charateristics of the Web 2.0 trend:

1. open architectures
2. open standards
3. open content
4. open source

Open architectures refers to the ‘web as platform’ concept that encourages the use of loosely-coupled components, web services and APIs to piece together application functionality or content ‘mash-ups’. Open architectures are enabled by the use of open standards such as (URI, HTTP, XML, XHTML, CSS, Atom, etc.)

Open architectures and standards have lots of implications for the archives community as common services (e.g. archival description, subject classification, search, reference and research) might be shared between institutions at both the technical and program/service delivery levels. Likewise, loosely-coupled components can be used to improve the ongoing management of enterprise information systems, freeing the institution from being dependent on one behemoth, technology stack.

Up until now, we’ve only seen limited use of open architecture and technical standard concepts in archives management systems, namely as EAD finding aids and OAI-PMH harvesting.

However, there are plenty of Web2.0 type technologies and standards that can enhance archives system architectures. For example, the use of simple syndication feeds and pings, particularly through the IETF’s newly approved Atom 1.0 standard, can greatly improve upon the ‘harvesting’ concept, including the potential to distribute not just metadata but also digital objects as Atom 1.0 supports base64-encoded binary content.

Also, geo-coding archival materials with latitude and longtitude information (related to the place of creation, use, custody, or the location of related materials) allows for integration with map-based browsing and access tools or as input to the growing variety of wifi location-based services such as walking-tours and GPS treasure hunts.

Open content and open access refer to the elminination of restrictions on the re-use of digital information through more flexible licensing practices such as those provided through Creative Commons licenses as well as the increased sharing of content on sites such as Flickr.com and OurMedia.org.

Although there are still many tough legal, business, and professional obstacles to clear, the increased adoptation of open content licensing can help archival institutions to enrich the content and contextual information of their own collections while ‘letting a million flowers bloom’ and enriching the ‘long tail’ of the Web with open access to the wealth of information and cultural treasures that are preserved in archival collections.

Lastly, as institutions with limited funding that are managing public information as part of the public trust, archives can only benefit from using and supporting open source software to manage their functions, programs and websites. Fortunately, the leading Model-View-Controller (MVC) frameworks that are being used to build most of the new Web 2.0 applications are all open-source products (e.g. RubyOnRails, Django, TurboGears, Symfony) and they all run on open-source server architectures (e.g. Linux, Apache, MySQL).
Community

Aside from the technological innovations of Web 2.0, the most distinguishing characteristic of this trend has to be importance of nurturing a community around a given online service, technology or content repository. That is to say, a community in the sense of people connecting to other people but also a community that takes responsibility and ownership of the services, technology and content. Some poster children of this trend include Wikipedia, LinkedIn, and MySpace. Some buzzwords associated with this trend include social software, radical trust, decentralization, and disintermediation.

‘Disintermediation’ is a mouthful of a buzzword that was actually introduced in the last wave of web hype (i.e. the dot-Com boom). It refers to the concept of cutting out the middleman and, although ordering your next pet online never really took off, disintermediation does refer to a trend that is continuing today. The most recent example that has been getting a lot of attention is grassroots journalism wherein everyday people are posting their own reports, analysis, pictures and videos of events to their own blogs or community-operated news portals (e.g. NowPublic.com). These grassroots journalists are giving new insight, context and emperical information that corrects, verifies or enhances the reports provided by the traditional news outlets or, in many cases, providing coverage of events that the traditional media has ignored.

Similarly, archival institutions are going to have to accept the rise of grassroots archivists. Not as barbarians at the city gates but as value-adding partners that share the goal of preserving historical memories and experiences. In his excellent webcast presentation, Are the Archives Doomed?, Rick Prelinger discusses the emergence of what he calls ‘archives groupies’ and the wonderful, often unexpected results that occur when users are invited to participate in the organization and use of archival collections.

Some interesting early examples of how these Web 2.0 concepts could be applied to archival collections include:

* The Exhibit Commons: encouraging the collaborative creation and alteration of museum exhibit content.
* STEVE: The Art Museum Social Tagging project: exploring the potential of folksonomy, social tagging practices (like those used on Flickr and Del.icio.us) to improve access to museum collections and to encourage user engagement with cultural content.
* Zoekplaatjes.nl: The City of Archives of The Hague hosts a forum where users are asked to help identify the location and subject of previously unidentified photographs in the archives’ collection.
* WW2 People’s War: A collection of World War II memories written by the public and gathered by the BBC
* Vrroom: The National Archives of Australia’s virtual research room for teachers and students

Archival Institutions and Web 2.0

I assume, of course, that professional archivists will have issues with blurring the lines between institutionally managed archival materials and descriptions and those contributed, enhanced or re-used by patrons. Copyright and restrictive access conditions placed on material by donors are a concern. Another legitimate concern would be to protect the authenticity of archival materials and the context of their original creation and use.

I therefore see the introduction of community-managed collections, descriptions, exhibits and discussions as something that happens in parallel to the authoritative archives access systems that are managed by archival institutions and their professional staff. I see these parallel systems as taking the form of virtual collections or virtual research rooms that are loosely-coupled to the institutional systems using open architectures and standards.

These could exist completely seperate from the institution, on another organization’s technology platform, but I also think that archival institutions stand to benefit from taking a leadership role in encouraging new and innovative use of their collections and being the benefactor and host of new, online communities. Web 2.0 is full of interesting stories and lessons of how that might be accomplished.

(My emphasis)

http://www.library.nd.edu/medieval_library/seals/index.shtml

A virtual exhibition with good images.

http://www.rogergaskell.com/essays.htm
http://cdn.elsevier.com/promis_misc/Endopinion.pdf

Selling the Family Silver – sale of the Macclesfield Library

Patrica Fara and Roger Gaskell, 'Selling the Family Silver: country house libraries and the history of science' Endeavour, 29 ( 2005), pp. 14–19.

This article, written with Patricia Fara, fellow of Clare College, Cambridge and author of Newton, the Making of Genius (Macmillan, 2002), discusses the dispersal of the Macclesfield Library removed from Shirburn Castle. The scientific books mostly come from the library of William Jones (1675–1749), who in his turn had acquired the library and papers of John Collins (1625–1683). At the time of his death, Jones' library was regarded as the finest scientific library in England. Over 3000 early scientific books are being sold by Sothebys' in London in one of the most, if not the most significant dispersal of a private scientific library in Britain in the last 50 years. Yet despite the public outcry over the wretched Keele affair, this massive blow to the history of science in Britain is passing almost un-noticed by the history of science community and the public.

We have shown how important this library is as an archive of unique documents – books with specific bibliographical features, provenances and notes as well as whole manuscript treatises – and argue that it should have been kept together. The total sales price will not be so very great compared with other things with less historical context or dubious national importance for which public (that is lottery) money has been found. We ask why there has been no public debate about the loss of this extraordinary library.

The full article can be viewed as PDF

Article "The Digital Black Hole" by Jonas Palm, National Archives of Sweden, now online

The article presents an analysis of costs for digitizing and long-term storage at the Riksarkivet (National Archives, RA) in Stockholm, Sweden. This example includes forecasts of cost development for the next few years which may help other institutions in analysing their own costs and budgeting for long-term storage.

To download the article go to:
http://www.tape-online.net/docs/Palm_Black_Hole.pdf
(445 KB).

The author:
Jonas Palm is Director, Head of the Preservation Department, National Archives of Sweden, Stockholm
jonas.palm@riksarkivet.ra.se

The article is published in the framework of the TAPE project: Training for Audiovisual Preservation in Europe,
http://www.tape-online.net/


European Commission on Preservation and Access (ECPA)
P.O. Box 19121, NL-1000 GC Amsterdam,
visiting address: c/o KNAW, Trippenhuis, Kloveniersburgwal 29,
NL-1011 JV Amsterdam, The Netherlands
tel. ++31 - 20 - 551 08 39 fax ++31 - 20 - 620 49 41
URL: http://www.knaw.nl/ecpa/

Ex: Archivliste