Ain't No Such Thing as a Free Lunch!

I've just read a synopsis of Google's settlement with the book publishers and the librarians concerning Google Books (http://books.google.com). See below.

For the past few years I've been showing relevant upper-division classes the value of Google Book Search. Google has been digitizing the books from a couple of dozen of big libraries for several years now. Till now (and I really don't know the date when this will change) anyone anywhere could search this website and pull up records of the books already digitized in three different possible formats: full view for out-of-copyright items (generally 1925 and earlier), limited preview (several pages) for copyrighted with no active publisher-prohibition, and snippet for publisher-restricted viewing.

Publishers didn't like the fact they they had to ask Google to restrict their books to limited preview,and they claimed copyright violation, and sued (of course). Below is the gist of the settlement. What it seems to say is that no longer will out-of-copyright books be available full-text from any computer anytime as it is now. Only authorized computers in libraries will have this ability. [I'm sure the librarians fought hard to get this one so full-view access of copyright-free books remains available, but also so libraries don't become completely irrelevant as providers of classic and historical sources of information.]

Google and the publishers will also LET YOU personally and We, libraries, BUY access to copyrighted books. You could buy individual titles. Libraries would buy subscriptions (To Collections? How much? Will libraries will be able to afford the price publishers deem reasonable. Will access be restricted to the University community or can anyone come in and use it? Will libraries ever need to buy another print monograph? Is licensing the same as owning? Will we be able to interlibrary loan electronic items?)

The two research center idea is interesting, but I'm not really sure of any broadly useful value, other than archival. Where will they be? Will access be free at these sites?

There are so many more questions about the ramifications of this settlement that we don't even know how to pose them yet, much less what the answers will be. ANSTAAFL. I guess we always knew that Google wasn't doing all this scanning because of their generosity and their love of knowledge. Sometime the stockholders would seek a profit. We also know that publishers are not easily adjusting to this electronic world. This is another attempt at control. Will it work? How will it affect libraries?

Here's an excerpt of what Google just sent out:[ Note the enthusiastically positive spin.]

Increasing access to books: the Google Book Search settlement agreement

by Daniel Clancy, Engineering Director for Google Book Search

. . .  The <http://www.google.com/googlebooks/agreement/>agreement, which settles two lawsuits brought against the <http://www.google.com/googlebooks/library.html>Google Books Library Project, proposes to dramatically increase access to millions of books in the U.S., while at the same time expanding the opportunities for authors and publishers to earn money from their works.  The agreement also provides a wealth of new opportunities for libraries, academics, and researchers, a few of which we'd like to share with you:


Expanded access to millions of in-copyright books: Librarians have been providing access to books for thousands of years, and over time they have increased the size of their collections and broadened their reach into the community. The agreement dramatically expands the reach of <http://books.google.com/googlebooks/partners.html>Book Search Library Partners by enabling readers across the U.S. to <http://books.google.com/googlebooks/agreement/#2>preview millions of in-copyright out-of-print books preserved in their collections. Readers will be able to search these books through Google Book Search and where previously they have only been able to view bibliographic information and a few snippets of text from the book, they will be able to view a limited preview (up to 20%) of the book to find out if it suits their needs.  From there, they can click through to a list of libraries which hold that book, to online bookstores (which carry used books) or to purchase instant online access to the rest of the book so that they may read the book in its entirety. 

Free online viewing of books at U.S. public and university libraries: In most communities, your local library is one of your primary access points to information. Through this agreement, public libraries, community colleges, and universities across the U.S. will be able to provide free full-text reading to books housed in great libraries of the world like Stanford, California, Wisconsin-Madison and Michigan. A newly-created Public Access Service license will allow full-text viewing of millions of out-of-print books to readers who visit library facilities. Public libraries will be eligible to receive one free Public Access Service license for a computer located on-site at each of their library buildings in the United States. Non-profit, higher education institutions will be eligible to receive free Public Access Service licenses for on-site computers, the exact number of which will depend on the number of students enrolled. 

Institutional subscriptions to millions of additional books: Imagine never having to ask a patron to wait until a book is returned or arrives through interlibrary loan. Beyond the free license described above, libraries will also be able to purchase an institutional subscription to millions of books covered by the settlement agreement.  Once purchased, this subscription will allow a library to offer patrons access to the incredible collections of Google's library partner when they are in the library itself as well as when they access it remotely.

Services for People with Print Disabilities: One of the advantages digitization presents is the opportunity to enable greater accessibility to books.  Through the agreement, the visually impaired and print disability community will be able to access millions of in-copyright books through screen enlargement, reader, and Braille display technologies.

New Research Opportunities with the Creation a Research Corpus: The vast database of books that Google is digitizing is not just a resource for readers, but also a one-of-a-kind research tool. The agreement allows for the creation of two research centers that will include a copy of almost all of the books digitized by Google. These research centers will enable people to conduct research that utilizes computers to process or analyze the text of the books. Examples of the types of research they will facilitate include automatic translation, analysis of how language has evolved over time, next generation search technology, image processing research and others.

This agreement would not have been possible without the work of librarians who have preserved and maintained books for years, and <http://www.google.com/googlebooks/partners.html>Google Book Search's library partners, who worked with Google to make so many of them discoverable online.  To learn more about what they have to say about the agreement, check out our <http://books.google.com/googlebooks/agreement/thoughts.html>thoughts and opinions page.
___________

Staff Appreciation Awards Go To . . .

Brenda Hunter and Nancy Trant received this year's National Library Week "Staff Appreciation Awards" in the University Library during a luncheon on Wednesday.

This Year's Excellence in Librarianship Award goes to . . .

Deborah Lynn Harrington, the Mitchell College of Business Librarian. Congratulations Deborah for doing excellent work in setting up and running the "Business" Library.

Celebrate National Library Week--April 12-18

World Connect @ USA Libraries

Monday Thru Thursday--Roving Reference, Student Center Breezeway, 11:30-1:00. Need help with your assignments? Face-to-face with a reference librarian--what could be better!

Thursday-- 7 P.M., Library Auditorium, "Ruben's Mobile." Dr. Sue Brannan Walker and Ms Kathryn Seawell.

Kids & Teens Book Drive for USA Chidren's and Women's Hospital--Drop any new or gently-used children's or young adult books at one of our libraries.

Twitter a Book Review--share your bookish experiences @usabaldwin.

Rare Books at the USA Archives on Springhill Ave.

Prize Drawing--draw a quote at any of our Circulation Desks for a chance to win a prize.

Twenty-First Century Literacy Skills

by Henry Jenkins, Director of Media Studies, MIT, excerpted:

"We have also identified a set of core social skills and cultural competencies that young people should acquire if they are to be full, active, creative, and ethical participants in this emerging participatory culture:

Play — the capacity to experiment with your surroundings as a form of problem-solving

Performance — the ability to adopt alternative identities for the purpose of improvisation and discovery

Simulation — the ability to interpret and construct dynamic models of real world processes

Appropriation — the ability to meaningfully sample and remix media content

Multitasking — the ability to scan one’s environment and shift focus as needed to salient details.

Distributed Cognition — the ability to interact meaningfully with tools that expand mental capacities

Collective Intelligence — the ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with others toward a common goal

Judgment — the ability to evaluate the reliability and credibility of different information sources

Transmedia Navigation — the ability to follow the flow of stories and information across multiple modalities

Networking — the ability to search for, synthesize, and disseminate information

Negotiation — the ability to travel across diverse communities, discerning and respecting multiple perspectives, and grasping and following alternative norms."

Bodleian 19th Century Collection Online

Just got this from Google Book Search Blog:
http://booksearch.blogspot.com/2009/03/bodleians-treasures-available-to-all.html


"In 2004, Google began a partnership with Oxford University Library to scan mostly 19th century public domain books from its Bodleian library. Five years on, we're delighted to announce the end of this phase of our scanning with Oxford, our first European partner. Together, we have digitized and made available on Google Book Search many hundreds of thousands of public domain books from the Bodleian and other Oxford libraries, representing the bulk of their available public domain content.

From English to German, to Spanish and French, most of the digitized works date from the 19th century and range from classic literature to more scientific volumes in fields including Geography, Philosophy or Anthropology. Among some of the works now available through Book Search, you can find the first English translation of Newton's Mathematical principles of natural philosophy from 1729, the first edition of Jane Austen's Emma, and John Cassell's Illustrated History of England. You can search and read the full text of these works on Google Book Search, and download and print a pdf if you wish to.

TODAY: Writing Outreach--Finding Scholarly Articles

Today in the University Library Auditorium I will be doing an instruction session on how to find the best scholarly articles for your research papers. Bring your topic and we can explore where to go and how to "talk to" the general and specific databases that will yield articles to help inform your papers.
3:30 Thursday
March 26th
Univ. Lib. Auditorium
about 45 minutes in length
http://www.usouthal.edu/univlib/sauer/outreacharticles.html

Web 2.0 PETAL Brownbag

Faculty and Staff,
Ellen Wilson and I will be talking about some Internet applications that may enhance your teaching and make your life more efficient at the PETAL BrownBag Tuesday. 12:15 in Room 312 on the Southside of the University Library.

The Commons

"The Commons: Your opportunity to contribute to describing the world's public photo collections."
http://www.flickr.com/commons/
These collections from institutions and corporations are all published under usage guidelines called "no known copyright restrictions" meaning that they have been unable to locate the copyright owner. These photos are probably public domain. They can certainly be used under fair use guidelines for academic purposes.

The cool thing about this collection of collections is that "the public" are asked to tag the photos to make them more accessible to others.

FYI: At the bottom of the sign in page is this warning:
*Any Flickr member is able to add tags or comment on these collections. If you're a dork about it, shame on you. This is for the good of humanity, dude!!

Momentous Day 200 Years Ago Today

Arguably, the two men who most influenced our lives and our thinking were born on the exact same day, 200 years ago. One is obvious. Who is the other?

Writing Outreach--Googling for Information

What do we even mean when we say we Googled it? Plain old Google, Google Books, Google Scholar, iGoogle, Google Docs, Google Calendar, Google Finance, Google Maps, Google Images, Google Reader?

Is searching Google academically anathema? Why, when, where and how students and faculty can use Google as one of the research tools in the scholarly scavenger hunt to find the best information available. And when is it best not to use it!

See you (anyone):
Tomorrow--Thursday, Feb 12th
3:30-4:30
Library Auditorium

The Best of the Best

I am constantly squirreling away websites that I plan to get back to when I retire--email, delicious, favorites, bookmarks--any way I can, so I have them at my fingertips sometime in the near future. Two came across my email in past two days and are perfect for my dilettantish [better:interdisciplinary] mind. The second one I am already addicted to, because it is the perfect iPhone app--short, often graphically interesting, and highly entertaining (remember this is for a librarian's mind.)

Academic Earth--"Thousands of video lectures from the world's top scholars." Choose them by subject, by instructor, thematically, or the Editor's choice. Most of them seem to be about an hour long. http://www.academicearth.org/

TED "Ideas worth spreading" An annual conference that invites the best and brightest to spend 18 minutes each talking about their ideas in fields that include science, business, the arts and the global issues. Watch them on your computer and now on your iPhone. Perfect length. Fascinating people and ideas. http://www.ted.com/

Find Out About Study Abroad? British Tea Today

London, Mexico, Spain, Germany, Ghana--Programs offered by USA for studying abroad. Come have some biscuits and find out about them.

British Tea
5:30-7:00 Today
Alumni House

.edu and spammers

I've gotten a couple of these emails this week purporting to be from university webmasters. They come from gawab.com which seems, according to a few webforums, to be home of lots of spammers. Universities use the .edu domain, not the .com domain and have no reason to change domains.

Dear Webmaster of http://www.southalabama.edu ,
I´m the webmaster of indiana.edu and and I want to inform you about the changing of our domain name.
Old name: http://www.indiana.edu
New name: http://indiana-edu.com

Whitehouse.gov

Here's the ABC website with a transcript of the inaugural address and a video of the address.

As of 12:01, today, January 20th, the White House has a new webpage. The first blog post on it promises transparency of government to the point that it says this: "One significant addition to WhiteHouse.gov reflects a campaign promise from the President: we will publish all non-emergency legislation to the website for five days, and allow the public to review and comment before the President signs it." Wow. I wonder who is going to read all of the posts, many of which, given the tenor of comments I see on other blogs, will be venomous. Let's hope for a new era of civility on the web, as well as the transparency promised by our new President and the new Administration. Perhaps information will again flow freely from our government to the people.

MLK Quote

Power without love is reckless and abusive. Love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice. Justice at its best corrects everything that stands against love.

PMLA Alternative Source Citations

Being a reference librarian in an academic institution means being bombarded by questions about the rules for citing information using the most common stylesheets, particularly the MLA. This alternative source, the PostModern Language Association, offers guidelines for citing the cutting edge sources of information now so common in research papers.
http://www.pmla.org/altsource.html
Thanks to Ellen Wilson for this site.

SilverPlatter to OVID

Just got this from Amy Prendergast, our sci/tech librarian:

All our SilverPlatter databases have now been moved to the Ovid platform. I have changed the links on the database pages - please let me know if you find any I have missed. The databases concerned are:

Biological Abstracts
GeoRef
Mental Measurements Yearbook
Social Work Abstracts
NASW Clinical Register

Unfortunately we don't seem to be connecting correctly with Social Work Abstracts and NASW Clinical Register but the others should all be working. I have sent a message about the problem to Ovid and hopefully we can get it resolved soon.

When you click on one of the database links, it will take you to a search page. At the top of the page is a box for Search History - you can close this by clicking on "(Click to close)". This makes more room at the top of the screen and enables you to see all the available limits for the database.

A Junkbin of Catalogs

Is there anyone who hasn't resolved to be more organized; to be more environmentally aware; to work smarter this year? Here's a website to help: Catalog Choice You do have to register and supply a snail mail address to which the catalogs you receive are posted. Find the ones you really don't want and this org will make contact with the business and request that they desist. Go through all those Christmas catalogs and thin the selection. Save space, save trees, save work AND eliminate temptation.

https://www.catalogchoice.org/

Lists 2008--Best of . . .

Here's an aggregate list of many of the end-of-the-year best of/ worst of lists. What's this fascination with lists? Maybe because they are so neat and tidy. Maybe they simplify our world into nice linear value-laden predigested cultural schedules. I dunno. All I know is that I'm off for the weekend.
http://www.fimoculous.com/year-review-2008.cfm