http://www.info-commons.org/blog/archives/000439.html

Librarians Looking for Help on Copyright Suit
Eli Edwards and Mary Minow are collaborating on a research project in support of the team working on the Kahle v. Ashcroft copyright lawsuit (maybe that makes them part of the team?), and they are asking librarians and archivists for their help.

Larry Lessig and the Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society filed Kahle v. Ashcroft on behalf of Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle and Richard Prelinger of Prelinger Archives. The suit challenges the constitutionality of changes in copyright law that have resulted in an overabundance of "orphaned works" -- information that, though subject to copyright, has little commercial value and is not made available for publication by the rights holder, and therefore is largely inaccessible. Specifically, the suit seeks to overturn the move from a system that required authors to register their works for copyright protection, to the current system in which copyright is automatic and no registration is required.

If successful, the suit could make it much easier for libraries, archives and other organizations to digitize orphaned works published between 1964 and 1977 (the year the no registration required system came into effect). As part of the effort, Eli and Mary are asking librarians:

1) To identify collections of orphaned material they hold that was published between 1964 and 1977, and that they will not consider digitizing or posting online because of copyright restrictions, and

2) Whether someone can come up with a manageable method for determining how many works were published between 1920 and 1950 (when no registration was required)?

See the details here, and email Eli Edwards if you have ideas or suggestions.

And while I am at it, congratulations to Eli on the publication of her article, "Ephemeral to Enduring: The Internet Archive and Its Role in Preserving Digital Media," in the March issue of Information Technology and Libraries. She does an excellent job of describing the Internet Archive as an organization that, though not a library, has strong affinities with and important lessons for librarians. As she writes:

"In order to extend the life of information on the internet, libraries, archivists, and computer scientists will need to examine IA and its successes and failures and draw lessons from what has been done by IA and other projects, as well as what still needs to be done, to preserve our growing yet precarious digital heritage."

As Eli suggests, the Internet Archive is helping to build the digital information commons. Librarians have a responsibility both to learn from what the organization is doing and to bring their knowledge to bear on the problem of how best to nourish and preserve that commons.

A National Archive of Datasets
Jeffrey Darlington describes how structured datasets produced by UK Government departments and agencies are being archived and made available to users. He explains the preservation policy and recounts some preservation challenges faced and solved to date.

http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue39/ndad/

Keeping the World Safe from Naked-Chicks-in-Art Refrigerator Magnets: The Plot to Control Art Images in the Public Domain through Copyrights in Photographic and Digital Reproductions
by Kathleen Connolly Butler
Comm/Ent: Hastings Communications and Entertainment Law Journal 21 (Fall 1998)

Summary

http://www.uchastings.edu/comment/PUB-ADMIN/Archives/volumes/volume21.htm

This article addresses an emerging and significant problem in the realm of copyright and art law: the control of public domain art images through the copyright of photographic and digital reproductions. This problem occurs since galleries or collections have control over the duplication of fine art images by the public and have used this control to generate exclusive reproductions of the art, which, under present law, are copyrightable themselves, precluding public use of these images of concededly public domain art. Professor Butler argues that this de facto control over art which is rightfully in the public domain both gives economic advantage to parties which down own rights in the art and deprives the public at large from using and enjoying these public treasures. This problem is somewhat unique to art objects since, unlike other forms of expression such as music or literature, anyone seeking to duplicate the art must have access to the original itself, making the power of the art owners great indeed.

In exploring a remedy to this problem, Professor Butler examines the history and development of the definition of "originality" in copyright law. Specifically, she argues that photographic and digital reproductions or fine art, as are used in these situations, do not meet the constitutional minimum of originality, meaning that they should not be afforded protection. For this reason, Professor Butler concludes that the "alternate test" fashioned by courts should be abandoned as a measure of originality in art reproductions. This test does not reflect the true purposes of copyright protection in this context and in fact frustrates the free dissemination of public domain art--a goal which lies at the heart of copyright law.

Butler's article is cited by Hirtle 2003
http://www.archivists.org/governance/presidential/hirtle.asp

See also the discussion on the 1999 Bridgeman vs. Corel decision
http://www.casebook.org/forum/messages/4922/9505.html

http://www.movinghere.org.uk/

Moving Here is the biggest database of digitised photographs, maps, objects, documents and audio items from 30 local and national archives, museums and libraries which record migration experiences of the last 200 years.

The National Archives has a reference collection of 55,000 books, periodicals and directories on aspects of history (including local, family and military history), law, biography, genealogy and a wide range of reference material. Many publications relate to the documents held within the national archive itself. A growing number of electronic reference sources are also available.

The bulk of the collection of published works is housed in the Resource Centre & Library. A project to recatalogue these works from paper catalogues to an online computer catalogue has been continuing for several years. The Library is pleased to announce that this project was completed at the end of March and for the first time all Library holdings can be found in a single, online catalogue. The catalogue can be found at http://www.library.pro.gov.uk

NB: A lot of articles is cataloged as "pamphlets".

The Library of Congress:
http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/catalog.html

http://www.lisnews.com/article.pl?sid=04/04/26/142203

An Anonymous sends us more news on the nominee for National Archivist. Nine professional organizations (not named in this article, but discussed in an earlier LISNews story or two) have expressed concerns about Allen Weinstein's qualifications and experience, especially his penchant for secrecy.

The entry is referring to:

A Controversial Choice for the Position of Archivist of the United States: Part of the Bush Administration's Secrecy Strategy?
by John W. Dean
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0423-03.htm

Tim Brody's Institutional Archives Registry now organizes OAI-compliant archives by country, type (e.g. institutional, disciplinary, e-theses), and the software on which they are built. This is a very helpful innovation. Of course the registry continues to provide a graphic for each archive showing its growth over time. To mark the new plateau in functionality, Stevan Harnad has sent a message to several discussion lists calling on unregistered archives to register themselves.

(PS: Because no directory of OAI-compliant archives is as comprehensive or up-to-date as the DOAJ is for journals, I maintain a list of the better lists in order to help users find them all. Brody's registry, for example, offers better services, but fewer archives, than the other large lists. The largest at the moment seem to be the OAIster and UIUC lists. I support Harnad's call for registration, not to pick a favorite in the mix of lists but in order to get the benefit of Brody's useful tools for more and more of the existing archives. Why do we need a good list of all the OAI-compliant archives? Three reasons: (1) so that archives can register in one place and be assured that they will be noticed and harvested, (2) so that OAI service providers can learn which archives are eligible for harvesting, and (3) so that authors can learn where they may deposit their work.)

http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2004_04_18_fosblogarchive.html#a108266930390692979

A few comments:

(i) http://www.doaj.org/

I do not think that this project is so extremely helpful as the OA community thinks. It would be a great source of information when the announced article search is working. According to
http://www.doaj.org/articles/about#criteria
DOAJ is listing journals if they are research journals with quality control available without fees. Permission barriers are NOT removed in most DOAJ journals, and many DOAJ journals make extensive copyright reservations. Thus I would call this OA "OA light" ...

I cannot see the essential difference to the most comprehensive list of E-journals, the German EZB
http://rzblx1.uni-regensburg.de/ezeit/

There is much more FREE stuff than in the DOAJ (beside the historic and popular journals excluded by the DOAJ). So what?

(ii) Harnad's message is confusing OA archives and OAI-compliant archives. It makes sense that all free available document servers should be OAI-compliant, and the OAIster
http://oaister.umdl.umich.edu
is one of the greatest search engines I know.

But one should not forget that only a little part of the free document servers ("OA light servers" like the Lund "OA light journals") are OAI-compliant.

(iii) We need much better list of both types!

Brody lists in Germany 5 servers, OAIster 13 servers.

HU University offers an OAI-meta-search for German (and other) servers
http://edoc.hu-berlin.de/e_suche/oai.php

But TheO searchs 46 dissertation servers in Germany
http://www.iwi-iuk.org/dienste/TheO/

Most of them are not OAI-compliant but free available document servers = OA servers. (Fortunately a lot of e-dissertations in Germany can be found in OAIster via the BSZ-data! See also
http://arc.cs.odu.edu:8080/dp9/identify.jsp?id=bsz-bw.de )

Another meta-search for 22 German document servers (and meta-search-engines like DNB-Theses and GBV) is OASE, a KVK-cat:
http://www.ubka.uni-karlsruhe.de/kvk/kvvk/kvvk_en.html

OASE is an acronym for Open Access for Scientific Literature!

OPUS searchs 42 servers:
http://elib.uni-stuttgart.de/opus/gemeinsame_suche.php

According to
http://www.dissonline.de/texte_html/quellen.html
there are 70+ academic library servers in Germany but there is NO meta-search for them all!

See also:
http://www.uni-duesseldorf.de/ulb/univhs_hochschulschriftenserver.html

In short: There is a lot of free available scholarly online-stuff in Germany but no one can find all these pearls!

Why do we need OASE AND OPUS AND TheO if they are indexing only a part of all German eprints?

A little test:
landschaftsmalerei
One dissertation at Berlin Arts U
OAIster 1 match at Heidelberg via BSZ
TheO 0 (??? - Heidelberg is included)
OPUS: 3 matches (without Berlin!)
OASE: 5 matches with Berlin because DNB-Theses are included.

DNB-Theses (in German: Die Deutsche Bibliothek) is a collection only dissertations and "Habilitationsschriften" available online (not preprints etc.)
http://dbf-opac.ddb.de/
landschaftsmalerei: 2 matches (Berlin and another dissertation at Braunschweig)

DNB-Theses is part of http://www.renardus.org but nothing is found there with the search "landschaftsmalerei"!

Another tests could demonstrate that there are German scholarly preprints in servers not harvested by OASE/OPUS (or OAIster). See the German wiki-page
http://wiki.netbib.de/coma/EprintArchive

(iv) May I note that there are large lists in Turkey no one knows?

http://www.google.de/search?hl=de&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=uppsala+nottingham+site%3Atr+2004&btnG=Suche

(v) Yes, authors should know in which OA archives they can publish. But the existing lists are insufficient: Given a research topic each scholar who has not the possibilty to use the repository of the own institution (if affiliated!) should know: where are repositories for my research area and in which languages I can give my paper. If scholars had to translate their papers that would be not an incentive.

(BTW: I do not know a repository for archival science! Only papers on digital preservation are accepted by the ERPANET server.)

(vi) OAIster contains some projects digitizing rare books and another heritage collections (and, unfortunately, some projects containing only finding aids). I do NOT appreciate the decision of the Münster server MIAMI not to make the 400+ rare books (from a noble Westphalian library, each book fully digitized) available via OAIster. We need a registry for historic stuff in "OA light" archives like incunabula or manuscript or rare book collections!

Read my talk (in German) on this topic at:
http://digbig.com/3tyb

See also my lists (partly in English) of free historic stuff:
http://wiki.netbib.de/coma/KategorieTexte

Only my two cents ...

100+ library weblogs listet at:
http://www.blogwithoutalibrary.net/index.shtml?links.html

I do not know a single archive with a weblog :-(