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ShelfLife, No. 112 (June 26 2003)
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Peter Suber
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Jun 27, 2003 05:08 PDT
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ShelfLife, No. 112 (June 26 2003) ISSN 1538-4284
http://www.rlg.org
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ShelfLife, a weekly executive news summary for information professionals,
is a free service of RLG, the not-for-profit membership corporation of more
than 160 universities, national libraries, archives, museums -- and other
institutions with remarkable collections for research and learning. RLG was
created in 1974 as the Research Libraries Group. ShelfLife provides context
for RLG's major initiatives, which celebrate the power of knowledge to
grow, to live, and to last.
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CONTENTS
'Just Saying No' to Public Domain Limits
Looking for Information? Ask Yourself 'Who Cares?'
Getty Wants to Know Where You're Coming From
'Portlet' Project to Be Turned Over to RDN Hubs in August
Gates Foundation Funds Library Outreach
Historic Cities Website Invites Visitors and Contributors
Thinking Outside-the-Domain
The Pitfalls of Trusting Google's Hit Numbers
'JUST SAYING NO' TO PUBLIC DOMAIN LIMITS
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 isn't the only big threat to
the digital public domain. The Uniform Computer Information Transactions
Act and the Collections of Information Anti-Piracy Act also affect a broad
swath of the digital public domain and contiguous territories, such as the
realm of fair use. There are several ways to avert these threats, writes
Pamela Samuelson in a Duke University Law School publication. First,
Congress -- or in the case of UCITA, state legislatures -- can be
sensitized to expressions of concern about the repercussions these laws
would have. Legislators could dismiss or amend them to alleviate the
threats they pose. Second, courts can construe these laws more narrowly
than they were initially drawn, strike them down as unconstitutional, or
interpret them as unconstitutional unless limited by public domain and fair
use principles. A key obstacle to reliance on the Constitution is that
courts too often behave as though there is an intellectual property
exception to the First Amendment. They have been quite deferential to
legislative judgments, using rational basis analysis rather than
intermediate scrutiny. Judges sometimes act as though the limits, both
express and applied, lack meaningful substance. The progress of science and
the useful arts depends on information being in the public domain and
available for reuse, as much as on the grant of intellectual property
rights. Third, the public can refuse to accept laws that impede socially
desirable uses. If people "just say no" to licensing and to technically
protected content, the content industry, the courts, and the legislature
will have to adjust. (Law and Contemporary Problems Winter/Spring 2003)
http://www.law.duke.edu/shell/cite.pl?66+Law+&+Contemp.+Probs.+147+(WinterSpring+2003)
LOOKING FOR INFORMATION? ASK YOURSELF 'WHO CARES?'
Next time you're searching for information on a particular topic, it might
be a good idea to ask yourself, "Who cares?" Not to be flippant, but
because it's one of the best ways to find validated, reliable up-to-date
information. If you can figure out who cares passionately about whatever
topic you're researching, you've identified a resource that most likely
will turn out to be both helpful and reliable. Mary Ellen Bates, principal
of Bates Information Services, writes that in addition to identifying who
cares, it's also helpful to remember that the fastest way from question to
answer is often not a search engine but an information tool -- a
broad-based directory such as Open Directory Project or Librarians' Index
to the Internet. Once you've located one or two good Web resources, you can
always expand your search by looking for sites that link to those sites --
a much more efficient way to go than praying for an on-target hit in
Google. (SearchEngineWatch.com 17 Jun 2003)
http://www.searchenginewatch.com/searchday/article.php/2214431
GETTY WANTS TO KNOW WHERE YOU'RE COMING FROM
Among the presentations at this year's Cultural Content Forum after the EVA
Florence conference was a talk by RLG president Jim Michalko reviewing the
ever-expanding needs and expectations of scholars using the World Wide Web,
who increasingly expect to find everything they want online and in a format
and language of their choosing. In addition, Tim Hart of the Getty Center
described the Getty's efforts to redesign its Web site to meet different
needs of different types of visitors: the "casual" Internet surfer, the
more well-defined Getty Center Visitor, and the Researcher. Getty has come
to realize that each of these different types of user interacts with the
site in quite different ways, so rather than force all visitors to enter at
a single homepage, the site welcomes each type of visitor at a different
place and in a different way. (D-Lib Magazine Jun 2003)
http://www.dlib.org/dlib/june03/miller/06miller.html
'PORTLET' PROJECT TO BE TURNED OVER TO RDN HUBS IN AUGUST
The Research Discovery Network (RDN) -- a collaboration of 70-plus
educational and research organizations in the United Kingdom -- differs
from ordinary search engines in that it gathers resources that are
carefully selected, indexed and described by specialists in partner
institutions, including such notables as the Natural History Museum and the
British Library. For several years, an RDN team has been working to refine
those services even further, to turn them into subject portals that deliver
information to users within a single environment that the users can, to
some degree, personalize and control. Ultimately, the Subject Portals
Project (SPP) team decided to develop modular plug-in "portlet" functions
that existing RDN subject hubs -- such as Biome (biomedical), Humbul
(humanities) and Sosig (social sciences) -- could select and integrate into
their own services. These functions include: a cross-search of information
resources from multiple publishers; an alerting service; an aggregated
newsfeed; and various additional services, such as an e-journal search
engine and jobs listings. The SPP concludes as a project in August, when
the RDN hubs will take over the responsibility for the portal functions,
working to integrate them with their existing services. (Library Update Jun
2003)
http://www.cilip.org.uk/update/issues/jun03/article3june.html
GATES FOUNDATION FUNDS LIBRARY OUTREACH
Libraries for the Future has been awarded a three-year, $1-million grant by
the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to establish a network of EqualAccess
Libraries -- dedicated to transforming libraries into education and
information centers -- over the next year and a half. EqualAccess Libraries
will embody the concept of Access Skills, a curriculum developed by
Libraries for the Future aimed at boosting librarians' abilities to serve
their communities and attract new users through a variety of outreach
activities, including afterschool technology programs for teenagers and
sessions on health-related issues for at-risk populations. Integral to the
EqualAccess Libraries concept is its emphasis on building community
partnerships and connections between libraries and local organizations and
schools. "Local libraries are vital community centers that link individuals
with the latest information through books and the Internet," says Richard
Akeroyd, director of the Foundation's Library Initiatives. "We must ensure
that library staff members receive ongoing training and support so they can
help their patrons benefit from the latest information technology." The
grant covers expansion of the EqualAccess Libraries program throughout 10
states, the first of which is Pennsylvania, where 61 libraries will
participate. (Libraries for the Future press release 18 Jun 2003)
http://www.lff.org/news/gatesnational.html
HISTORIC CITIES WEBSITE INVITES VISITORS AND CONTRIBUTORS
Anyone with an interest in the world's historic cities will appreciate the
information-rich Web site being funded by the Council for Higher Education
in Israel as a joint project of the Historic Cities Center of the
Department of Geography, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Jewish
National and University Library. The site contains maps, literature,
documents, books and other relevant material concerning the past, present
and future of historic cities. It also provides links to other sites on the
Web with similar content. The site is already loaded with several hundreds
of high quality city maps and brief documented histories of some of the
most important cities. Additional material will be added gradually with the
expectation that the site will grow as a virtual archive of high quality
materials. As part of that archival growth, the project staff invites the
collaboration of scholars and amateur and local historians to share
knowledge and recommend links to their own or other sites. Access to site
material is free, but users are expected to accredit the site and not to
print or sell any material without approval.
(Historic Cities Project Jun 2003) http://historic-cities.huji.ac.il/
THINKING OUTSIDE-THE-DOMAIN
In the next-generation Semantic Web, there will need to be ways of mapping
ontologies together. (An ontology can be thought of as a glossary or set of
fully linked descriptions of the information found in a particular subject
area; all ontologies will be coded in the Resource Description Framework
language (RDF) -- which builds upon and extends XML the way XML built upon
and extended the HTML page-encoding language.) So how will two different
specialized ontologies be bound together in one more generalized set of
relationships? The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative, which is addressing
that problem in a concerted way, hopes to create a huge fabric of concepts
that can be referenced no matter what specific area of knowledge a
researcher begins to search. Eric Miller of the World Wide Web Consortium
says, "There's a blur between what is domain-specific and what is
cross-domain information. People are beginning to realize that the
information you think is domain-specific can be useful outside the domain."
(The Independent 18 Jun 2003)
http://news.independent.co.uk/digital/features/story.jsp?story=416581
THE PITFALLS OF TRUSTING GOOGLE'S HIT NUMBERS
Pundits are now routinely using top-rated search engine Google as the
benchmark for judging the popularity of a celebrity or idea, based on how
many "hits" are listed in the search results. However, these numbers are
often way off, because the typical user fails to put the search terms in
quotes. For instance, when the Raleigh News & Observer says that a search
on Iraq war returns 3.2 million hits, that number actually reflects the
number of articles with "Iraq" and "war" in them, in any order. A search on
the exact phrase "Iraq war" returns only about 635,000 items. Pulitzer
Prize-winning author Bill Dedman points out another problem inherent in the
way Google searches are conducted: Google drops many of the common words in
most searches, such as "the," "and," etc. "Try it with 'to be or not to
be,'" says Dedman. "Just typing in the words, Google counts 451,000,000 --
but warns you that it ignored the following common words: 'to' and 'be.'
And it ignores 'or' unless you capitalize it. In other words, you just
searched for 'not.' But put the same search in quotes and you get 108,000
-- a better count." (Poynteronline 2 May 2003)
http://www.poynter.org/templates/column_a/default.asp?id=32&aid=32072
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