Final Reflection

As per the syllabus, this final post will be an "assessment of this reflective experience" and answer the following two questions:

What was your most important earlier entry and why has it been important for your personal development?

I feel that week 10's reflection was my more important entry.  That week's topic was "Finding Content: Discovery Tools" and was when I finally understood how OpenURL and FindIt work.  These tools are very important in libraries today as more and more resources are available electronically.  This understanding was even useful at work several times this semester.  I work at the reference/information desk at MERIT and was able to answer questions regarding why links sometimes go to the publisher's main page and sometimes to the individual article.  Furthermore, I realize now that FindIt isn't perfect and an article could be available electronically even if FindIt does not, well, find it.

How has your thinking about ERM changed over the semester?

I've realized how complicated it is to manage electronic resources such that entire software systems are created to aid in this task.  Prior to this semester, I had not thought much about electronic resource management and did not know that positions devoted entirely to this task existed.  When I used electronic resources as an undergraduate, I mostly took them for granted and did not think about the many difficulties involved in providing electronic resources for patrons. These include the fact that licenses must be negotiated including planning for perpetual access, resources must be linked so that patrons can easily find content with tools such as FindIt, and copyright related policies must be written to help prevent situations such as the Georgia case.  I am not sure if I am ready (or interested) in taking an electronic resource management position as my first professional position, but I feel prepared after taking this class to possibly work in this field in the future.

Week 13 - Perpetual Access

Notes again this week in preparation for the quiz:

"Portico: An Electronic Archiving Service" presentation by Eileen Fenton

• Provides an archive for electronic academic journals
• Started by JSTOR in 2005
• Separate from JSTOR so that it can preserve both JSTOR journals and others
• Not-for-profit
• Works to save "intellectual content" not "look and feel" on publisher's website
• Normalizes source file to an archival format
• One article may have 100 files of images in various qualities, text, etc.
• Access provided campus wide and remotely for libraries giving financial support
• Cost is based on total money spent on collection per year by a particular library
• Discounts used as incentive to provide support early (2006 and 2007)
• Publishers also pay for right to supply content
• Libraries get access to entire archive regardless of their individual journal subscriptions
• Journal issues only available on Portico when not available from publisher or other sources
• Portico can also provide perpetual access for an institution when it cancels a subscription
• Shared archive saves money vs. each library keeping own collection

"A Social Model for Archiving Digital Serials: LOCKSS" by Michael Seadle

• Open source software model instead of one not-for-profit institution
• Members contribute financially to support core programmers
• Issues in digital preservation
• Must be able to trust technology
• Need to preserve integrity and context of object
• Authenticity decided by comparing copies of "same" item and determining which copy is the most common
• Developed at Stanford
• 100 servers operating (2006)
• LOCKSS Technology
• Archive exact copy rather than normalized format
• Bitstream archiving seems to allow for migration to new file formats
• Each version of a journal kept as a separate object
• Need 6 or more copies to guarantee integrity
• Working towards metadata plugin with JHOVE, OAI, etc.
• Need to get permission from publishers before archiving contents
• Especially important to archive small publishers whose work is more likely to be lost

 "Preservation Concerns in the E-Resource Environment" by Jennifer Watson

• Accreditation for some programs now requires "access to information" not a physical library
• Why libraries compromise desire for perpetual access
• Patron pressure - More important to serve patrons than refuse licenses based on perpetual access
• Most content available in print (for now)
• Financial pressure
• Can't afford both digital and print copies
• Can't afford to hire staff to negotiate perpetual access
• Some publishers charge an access fee for perpetual access
• Difficult to store digital material because of large file sizes and obsolescence/migration
• Difficult to store online material
• Constantly changing
• Large volume of content
• Important to store online reference materials for historical research
• Initiatives in e-resource preservation- 3rd Parties
• JSTOR - Journal Storage
• subscription service that provides access to back issues after an embargo period
• LOCKSS - not normalizing data may lead to data becoming obsolete
• serve data during any outage of publisher's website
• Portico - assumes libraries do not want to manage long-term storage (ie LOCKSS)
• Does not accept post-publication changes
• Google Book Search
• PubMed Central - provides online life sciences journal content for free and makes backup copy in case of failure at publisher's website
• Initiatives in e-resource preservation - Libraries
• Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC) member libraries purchase a single print copy of journal titles to preserve in CIC facilities
• Institutional repositories - version discrepancies for articles and lack of interest from authors
• National Library of the Netherlands takes responsibility for the country's digital preservation
• Also provides access to any licensee in the event the publisher cannot (calamities, bankruptcy)
• Initiatives in e-resource preservation - Publishers
• Many sign up with LOCKSS, Portico, JSTOR, and other initiatives mentioned above
• Publisher preservation initiatives are unreliable since publishers are bought, go out of business, and are profit motivated
• Initiatives in e-resource preservation - Governments
• Some require copy of all publications to be submitted to a legal repository
• Extend this legislation to e-resources
• Initiatives in e-resource preservation - Foundations
• Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Hewlett Foundation, Wellcome Trust provide funding

"From Dark Archive to Open Access: CLOCKSS Trigger Event Lessons" by Victoria Reich

• Controlled LOCKSS
• Similar trigger events as Portico
• Unlike Portico, triggered content is Open Access - provided to everyone for free
• Uses Creative Commons license
• Three volumes of Graft and Auto/Biography have been triggered
• 75% of use not identifiably academic
• Overall low use
• CrossRef is making CrossRef Multiple Resolution for triggered content
• Shows all archives where content is present

"Perpetual Access to Electronic Journals: A Survey of One Academic Research Library's Licenses" by J. Stemper and S. Barribeau

• Print retention projects - ensure that someone somewhere still has a complete run of a journal's print copy
• ex: CIC above
• Significant monetary investment, document delivery copyright issues, publishers may abandon print altogether
• Previous study in 2001 found that 22 out of 44 licenses granted perpetual access and 9 charged for this
• Previous ARL survey found that 44% were going e-only in 2003 but 85.4% did not see lack of perpetual access as a deal breaker
• Previous study by the authors found that 76% ask journal publishers for perpetual access but 76% still sign a license without assurance of such access
• Libraries seem not to take publishers up on their offer of LOCKSS access
• Libraries could use local data loading (ie CDs or LOCKSS) for perpetual access but format may become obsolete and this requires infrastructure and staffing costs
• Study of University of Minnesota licenses regarding perpetual access
• 64% grant perpetual access
• 72% of commercial and 56% of society publishers
• Print is an add-on to electronic now instead of the reverse
• Some licenses outright state no perpetual access or even require all downloaded copies to be deleted at the end of the subscription
• Some have a specific expiration parameter (5 years, 10 years, etc.)
• Aggregators rarely provide for continued access since their title lists and coverage frequently changes
• Of those granting perpetual access, 43.8% charge for this
• Roughly equal percentage of commercial and society publishers
• Typically paid to publisher but sometimes third party
• Fee is generally vague but occasionally specific (ie 10% of subscription cost)
• JSTOR does not grant perpetual access
• Continued access through publisher's own server and local data loading offered in equal numbers of licenses
• Many society publishers (71.4%) allow local data loading vs. 38.9% of commercial publishers
• Some specify that a third party will provide access
• 32% of studied publishers are partners with LOCKSS
• 6% of studied publishers are partners with Portico
• Only 1 publisher is a partner of both
• Some allow library to choose who will provide access
• Some licenses are intentionally vague regarding perpetual access
• Society publishers are not more likely to provide perpetual access than commercial publishers
• Cannot assume that library can safely cancel print version of journal included in a full-text aggregator database and retain access
• Libraries should consider making lack of perpetual access a deal breaker
• University of Maryland and University of California-Berkeley set precedent for this
• Consortia have enough economic leverage to possibly achieve this
• Libraries should budget for perpetual access
• JSTOR, Portico, publisher's back files, etc.
• Libraries should ask legal counsel whether perpetual access clause can stand up in court
• Need to include wording about publisher mergers

Week 12 - Reflections on the Worklife of an ER Librarian

Since I obviously have no experience as an ER librarian, I will be taking notes on the readings this week rather than reflecting.  Following are the parts I found particularly important or interesting:

"How to survive as a new serialist" by Griffin

•  Training and Continuing Education
• Can apply for stipends from ALA, ALCTS, LITA, NASIG, etc.
• Many ILS vendors provide training such as conferences or webinars
• Associations and Organizations
• Possibly join and:
• Attend conferences, meetings, and workshops
• Use webinars and online training
• Participate in an online discussion group
• Must weigh benefit vs. cost in time and money
• Most of those listed I've heard of except for NASIG - North American Serials Interest Group and SCCTP - Serials Cataloging Cooperative Training Program
• Books
• Mostly on cataloging and organization of information
• Slyly, Griffin includes the book in which this chapter is contained
• Print and Electronic Journals
•   Many of these I'm already aware of because we've read sections of them for this class - Against the Grain, Library Resources and Technical Services, Serials Review, etc.
• Online Sources
• Especially useful for learning about standards - MARC, Dublin Core, Dewey Decimal, etc.
• Identify New Needs
• Serialist is a rapidly changing profession
• Must keep up with revisions to standards and new standards
• Publish
• American Reference Books Annual, NASIGuides, and NASIG, Resource for Authors can help
• Terms
• CONSER- Cooperative ONline SERials
• integrating resource - resource that is added to or changed by continuous updates (ie website)

Ok, actually I'm going to reflect here just for a second.  Reading this chapter really made me realize how much I've learned this semester in all my classes and library school in general.  I've gone from knowing almost nothing last August about the LIS field to having heard of almost all the organizations, terms, journals, and so on mentioned in this chapter.

"Marian Through the Looking Glass: The Unique Evolution of the Electronic Resources (ER) Librarian Position" by Albitz and Shelburne

• Very little literature on ER staffing
• Authors decided to conduct survey and compare results of three other articles
• Administration structure
• 52% technical services in this survey
• Most are in public services in three other articles
• Responsibilities
• Most frequent response:
• Fisher: Reference
• Followed by instruction, "computer applications," and collection development
• Albitz: ER Coordination
• Followed by reference, instruction, and web apps
• Survey: ER Coordination
• Followed by purchase management, license negotiations, and IT 
• Reference and instruction have low response rates probably because patrons do not need as much help with resources in 2005 vs. 2001 and earlier
• Responsibilities become more focused on ER and technology (link-resolvers and federated searching) because this is more complicated than in earlier years
• ER librarians have diverse backgrounds but none held a previous ER librarian position
• Training varies widely - licensing workshops, organization (ie ALA) provided training, or self-taught

"Process Mapping for Electronic Resources: A Lesson From Business Models" by Afifi

• Process Mapping
• Create flexible organizations by continually re-evaluating business processes
• Similar to a flowchart
• Start with inputs and outputs then fill in steps in the middle
• "Swim lanes" across the page indicate who is involved in each task
• Use
• Construct "as is" and "should be" maps
• Select, Acquire, and Deliver ER as an example
• Case Study
• Some departments depicted processes idealistically but recipients challenged this
• ER team created to map complex ER related processes
• Created three processes
• Select electronic resources
• Acquire/deliver electronic resources
• Manage electronic resources

p.s.  While taking a break between the readings, I decided to change my Firefox Persona (http://www.getpersonas.com).  I noticed something interesting - all of the Personas have Creative Commons licenses.  How cool is that?

Week 11 - E-Books: Audio and Text

After three weeks of topics with which I have no person experience, now we're onto something I use almost everyday - digital audiobooks (DABs).  I listen to audiobooks before bed, when I go running, and when I walk around campus.  As a side note - audiobooks are an excellent cure for inability to sleep because they completely take your mind off whatever is stressing you. I discovered that OverDrive lets you download audiobooks to your ipod even if you're not in the actual area the library serves (ie there's no IP restriction) so I happily download from the Ohio E-book Project's large collection, http://ohdbks.lib.overdrive.com, with my hometown library card even though I'm in Wisconsin.

Since I use OverDrive audiobooks so often, I noticed some areas that have changed since the "Comparison Points and Decision Points" article by Thomas Peters in this week's reading was written.  These include:

• Collection size: According to http://www.overdrive.com, OverDrive now has 300,000 digital titles.  Granted this includes other formats such as e-books in text format, movies, and music but, nevertheless, this indicates that OverDrive has dramatically increased its collection from the 7,617 titles stated in Peters' article.
• Publishing partners and other content suppliers: The article states that OverDrive has fifty suppliers.  This has also dramatically increased since the time of this article's publication because the news for OverDrive at http://www.overdrive.com reveals that many new publishers have been added.  For example, Simon and Schuster, TantorMedia, and Penguin Group were all added in 2008.
• Single copies, owned versus leased with multiple concurrent users:  Peters states that OverDrive uses the single copies, owned model.  However, in my personal experience, I have found OverDrive to use the opposite model, leased with multiple concurrent users.  For example, the Ohio E-book Project currently has twenty copies of Twilight.  When the book was more popular, they had approximately thirty.  Consequently, it appears that OverDrive is leasing the collection to the library consortium and giving them the option to change the number of copies they lease rather than the library permanently owning copies.
• Playback options:  In my experience, very few DABs on OverDrive allow transfer to CDs.  However, in the "Comparison Points and Decision Points" article, Peters states that "OverDrive has agreements with its content suppliers that allow users of most of its audiobooks to burn the content to CDs."  He later claims that publishers are moving away from allowing CD transfer.  This prediction seems to be correct given that almost none of the audiobooks I've listen to from OverDrive allow this.

I also noticed two aspects of OverDrive that have changed since the article by Peters, Bell, and Sussman titled "An Overview of Digital Audio Books for Libraries."  These aspects are:

•  The "ipod impasse": I always listen to the audiobooks I checkout on my ipod and have not broken DRM or done anything else illegal so clearly this is an option now.  According to http://www.overdrive.com, a relatively recent agreement was reached between OverDrive and Apple in May 2009 allowing OverDrive media to be transferred to ipods.  One thing I've noticed, though, is that when DABs expire, they are not removed from my ipod.  In fact, it is somewhat difficult to remove them and requires connecting my ipod to itunes via my pc and manually deleting them.  Perhaps this is why it took so long for OverDrive and Apple to reach an agreement and also explains why a fair number of DABs do not allow transfer to ipods.
• Playback resume: The article states that "play begins back at the beginning of the book" when returning to an OverDrive audiobook after listening to other music on your MP3 player.  This is no longer the case because when I switch back to an audiobook on my ipod, I am presented with a "resume" option  that returns to the exact point where I stopped listening.

I enjoyed "Digital Accessibility for Blind and Physically Handicapped Individuals: A Panel Discussion" once I finally got it to play after 45 minutes of fighting with RealPlayer.  I thought it was interesting that the National Library Service has a copyright exception for narrating books although they need to somehow prevent the narration from being distributed to people other than the patrons they serve.  This makes a lot of sense because otherwise it might be prohibitively expensive to obtain recorded materials for distribution to the blind and physically handicapped.  Also, this occurred to me as an example of the numerous small exceptions in copyright law that Litman strongly dislikes.

Lastly, I thought an interesting point was raised in the "Think Tank on the Future of E-Books" panel discussion.  Specifically, several of the librarians were wondering how interlibrary loans would work with e-books.  Perhaps licensers will allow e-books to be printed and distributed similar to the ILL clause in many licenses for journal article databases.  However, this would be extremely inefficient and waste a lot of paper so I hope that licensers can devise a way for e-books (and journal articles for that matter) to be sent electronically that also satisfies their concern regarding the potential unauthorized distribution of the material.

Week 10 - Finding Content: Discovery Tools

To begin this week, I read through the Against the Grain special report on pay-per-view.  The articles reminded me of a particular event I witnessed while an undergraduate.  My school had a large number of journal subscriptions and once someone I knew (let's call her Wanda) downloaded and emailed some articles to her friend (let's call him Joe) who did not attend our school.  Joe needed these articles because he was attending a community college that did not provide access to the articles he needed to write his research paper.  Rather than obtaining the articles legally through an interlibrary loan or other means, he asked Wanda to violate the terms of use for her university's subscription since this would allow him to obtain the articles more quickly.  The Against the Grain articles reminded me of this because pay-per-view could be a viable option for the community college.  According to "Pay-Per-Use Article Delivery at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point" by King and Nichols, articles obtained through this method are delivered within 24 hours.  Furthermore, 63.4% of survey respondents rated the speed of document delivery as "very fast."  Length of time until access seemed to be the determining factor for Joe so even if the community college could not afford a particular journal's subscription price, they could still satisfy users like him by offering a pay-per-use program.

 Additionally, I found a section in one of the Against the Grain articles that relates to this week's readings.  Specifically, in the article "Pay-Per-View at the American Institute of Physics: One Scholarly Publisher's Experience with 'The Article Economy'" by Douglas LaFrenier, the need for discoverability is discussed.  He states that when publishers were first selling articles online, around 1998, the AIP was more focused on availability than discoverability.  They were unsure of whether to even allow Google to index their website and thought that, instead, users should "come directly to us for our content."  Now, of course, this sounds completely ridiculous.  Publishers can only hurt their sales by preventing search engines from including their website's contents.  In fact, the first recommendation of the "New Resource Discovery Mechanisms" article from this week's reading is that libraries should "ensure that library resources are well integrated into Google and, indeed, other search engines."  This article was written in 2006 so it is clear how important search engines have become in just eight years.

I thought CrossRef was the most interesting subject from the readings this week.  I had learned about DOIs in LIS 644 but I understand their purpose a lot better now that I've learned about a specific use for them.  With so many different systems needing to reference one piece of material, it makes a lot of sense to have a single identifier for this material which is then connected with a URL in a database.  This allows the URL to be updated in a single location rather than numerous times in each of the systems.  Additionally, I found CrossRef encouraging socially because publishers, who are normally competitors, were able to join together to create and fund CrossRef.  Although CrossRef was discussed in all five readings, I particularly appreciated the diagrams in Brand's "CrossRef" article.  While the other articles outlined in text how CrossRef works, the "Workflow for Reference Linking" and "DOI Resolution" diagrams showed the steps involved much more clearly.

The LibX Firefox extension developed by Virginia Tech intrigued me.  This was mentioned in the "Beyond Open URL: Technologies for Linking Library Resources" article.  The article also included a link to a website showing example toolbars used at various libraries.  Despite the separate listing for each library, the sampling of toolbars I examined seem to all have the same features.  These include a text box to search your library's OPAC directly from the toolbar, a special "cue" on a webpage if the item displayed (ie while browsing Amazon) is available at your library, and the ability to select text on a webpage and search for it as a title, author, or subject in your library's OPAC.  The toolbar has also been extended since the time when "Beyond Open URL: Technologies for Linking Library Resources" was written because, despite the article's claim that LibX is only available for Firefox, the website includes a version for Internet Explorer.  Overall this Firefox add-on looks extremely useful for research and, even though I try to avoid toolbars as a general rule, I'm strongly considering downloading the UW version.

P.S.  Metadata database is my new favorite tongue twister

Week 9 - Data Standards and Silos

First of all, "Library Standards and E-Resource Management: A Survey of Current Initiatives and Standards Efforts" and "Standards for the Management of Electronic Resources" relate directly to my post last week.  Both of these articles include great information on the acronyms and phrases I learned then while also focusing on data standards. For example, the first article includes a short definition I particularly like of COUNTER: "a collaboration between libraries, publishers, and content aggregators focused on creating guidelines that will lead to consistent, comparable, and credible usage statistics."  After my exercise in definitions last week and reading these articles this week, I feel confident in my understanding of ERM terms.

I found some of the statistics in Carpenter's "Improving Information Distribution Through Standards" presentation especially interesting.  First, he states that the average academic research library has approximately 40,000 serials.  I knew that electronic resource management systems were important but this particular statistic makes it extremely clear why libraries need good ways to manage the license terms, publisher, cost and other metrics regarding their serials.  When subscribing to such a large number of serials, keeping track of all of this information could easily get overwhelming.  Second, I learned that only 25% of librarians' data analysis time is actually spent analyzing.  The rest is spent primarily in obtaining and organizing the data for analysis.  This statistic emphasizes the importance of SUSHI.  Specifically, SUSHI will help librarians spend less time performing these menial tasks and more time doing actual analysis.

Speaking of analysis, I am curious about several aspects of the usage bibliometrics purposed in "Counter: Current Developments and Future Plans."  Specifically, I am wondering about the impact of calculating usage statistics for individual articles.  Might this have an effect on the author?  Would universities evaluate their faculty partially based on the usage statistics of their articles rather than relying only on metrics such as the number of times an article is cited?  Also, regarding the journal usage factor, I wonder how an article that has only an abstract in a database could be included in this calculation.  Is there any way of knowing if the researcher actually obtained the print version of the article?  Perhaps if the researcher clicked the button to search his or her local library's catalog that could be counted as a use.

Week 8 - Electronic Resource Management Systems: Vendors and Functionalities

In this week's readings, I noticed that ERMS and those who study them seem to use quite a few unique vocabulary words.  For my own clarification, the following are the most important acronyms or phrases I wasn't familiar with and their definitions:

• ONIX - ONline Information eXchange
• According to Wikipedia's citation from www.editeur.org, this is basically an XML schema for book product information 
• PAMS -  Public Access Management Services
• From reading "ERM Systems: Background, Selection and Implementation" it seems that these are essentially ERM systems offered by third party for-profit organizations
• MARC 856 field
• The guide for this field written by the Network Development and MARC Standards Office at the Library of Congress (http://www.loc.gov/marc/856guide.html) states that this field is used for "electronic location and access information to an electronic resource," ie: a URL, DOI, or handle
• The "Panorama of Electronic Resource Management Systems" chapter as well as quite a few webpages (for example: http://bibwild.wordpress.com/2009/06/18/marc-856-i-dont-like-you/) seem to indicate that this field is not an effective way to maintain location and access information
• COUNTER - Counting Online Usage of NeTworked Electronic Resources
• An "international set of standards and protocols governing the recording and exchange of online usage data" according to COUNTER's official website (http://www.projectcounter.org/)
• From the website, it seems that COUNTER is aimed at aiding libraries and licensees by creating standards for usage reports and listing which vendors are compliant with them
•  SUSHI - Standardized Usage Statistics Harvest Initiative
• According to "Project COUNTER and SUSHI: An Overview," a report on www.niso.org, SUSHI improves COUNTER by automating the process of gathering and managing usage data from a large number of providers
  

One thing I would like to see after finishing this week's readings is a survey of libraries' ERMS purchases.  The articles were excellent in explaining the different types of ERMS available as well as their advantages and disadvantages.  However, I would like to know what percentage of libraries are using each type of company (ILS, PAMS, Subscription Agent, etc.), what percentage make their own ERMS, and what percentage use the same company for their ERMS and ILS.  I haven't been able to find an article on this in LISTA, Library Lit, LISA or a simple Google search so perhaps no one has done a survey like this.

On a somewhat unrelated note, at MERIT yesterday a patron asked about emailing a particular article to their colleague in the Department of Education.  The article happened to be from a journal published by SAGE so I was able to tell him that yes, a copy can be distributed to a single colleague who is also an authorized user.

Week 7: Technological Protection Measures

Overall I thought the "Technologies Employed to Control Access to or Use of Digital Cultural Collections: Controlled Online Collections" article revealed some notable survey results.  For instance, the fact that only 44% of libraries use Network ID based Authentication seems to indicate that they are purposely lenient regarding who uses their "digital cultural materials."  81.7% of the libraries were academic libraries and, in my experience, it seems that all universities and colleges have some method of Network ID based Authentication in place to prevent unauthorized users from accessing library databases, course reserves, and other systems.  As a result, it seems that academic libraries are purposely not using this system for their "digital cultural materials" probably because they want the public to have access.

However, the survey reported in "Technologies Employed to Control Access to or Use of Digital Cultural Collections: Controlled Online Collections" has a couple of weaknesses revealed by the statements "The lower response rate for the technology questions may stem from respondents' lack of technical knowledge to easily answer these question sets. Or, it may be that respondents are not using the systems and tools listed in the survey." This quote refers to the fact that some respondents answered questions such as those regarding motivations for controlling access but did not answer one or both of the questions about systems use and tools use.  I feel that options for "Not Sure" and "None" should have added to the systems and tools use questions.  This would remove some of the ambiguity resulting from the lower response rate for these questions and, additionally, allow for comparison between libraries, museums, and archives of the percentage of institutions not using systems or tools for controlling access.

I've actually seen one-time passwords in use as described in "Authentication and Authorization."  My boyfriend worked for Livermore National Labs last summer and continues to do some work for them long distance this year.  Livermore is extremely careful about security because they do nuclear research.  They use a variant of one-time passwords in which a string of characters that changes every 9 seconds is appended to the user's password.  Although the article says the "small device" that calculates and displays the current string of characters is "the size of a credit card," his is actually smaller and more like the size of a flash drive.  I think this method of authentication strikes a good balance between convenience and security since carrying something the size of a flash drive is not difficult yet it prevents passwords from being easily guessed and prevents users from sharing passwords.

After reading "Every Library's Nightmare? Digital Rights Management and Licensed Scholarly Digital Resources" I decided to look at an article published within a SAGE Journal to compare its restrictions with those in the Terms of Use I reviewed last week.  The first SAGE journal I found that UW-Madison licenses full text online for is American Journal of Alzheimer's Disease and other Dementias.  Looking through the articles in this journal, I noticed that SAGE actually uses very few soft or hard restrictions.  Each article opens in a standard pdf window with options to save and print.  Furthermore, a tool bar along the right side of the screen lists "Services" including "Email this Article to a colleague."  A quick test of this tool reveals that the email may be sent to anyone and is not restricted to authorized users.  This is especially interesting since the Terms of Use restrict distribution to "other Authorized Users within the institution for their personal use."  Another of the "Services" of note is one that allows a user to "Request Permissions."  This sends the user to a form for obtaining a "quick price estimate" for making photocopies, reuse in a coursepack/library reserve, and other reuses or republications.  Filling out the form for a subscriber requesting reuse in a coursepack/library reserve shows a complete agreement with the Terms of Use because an announcement is displayed that use in a coursepack or electronic reserve is included in the Institutional subscription.

Week 6: Distance Education and TEACH Act

The "ARL Issue Brief: Streaming of Films for Educational Purposes" caused some confusion for me regarding fair use.  The authors refer to "recent judicial decision" that ruled in favor of fair use regarding digital technologies.  At the end of the discussion of these court cases, they state "The courts nonetheless found these uses fair because the defendants repurposed and recontextualized the works."  This left me confused because as far as I knew, fair use only involved four factors - purpose of the use, nature of the work, amount used, and effect on the market. 

After a little searching, I found an article by Troy Hicks for the Conference on College Composition and Communication on "Transforming Our Understanding of Copyright and Fair Use."  The most relevant section clarifies "If a copyrighted work is simply retransmitted, then it is a violation of copyright law. But, if the user 'transforms' the material in some way, repurposing it in a new media composition, for instance, then fair use likely applies."  This makes sense because a "transformed" work is less likely to have an effect on the market for the original work.  Furthermore, Russell in chapter two of Complete Copyright lists "transformative or productive use" as a factor under Purpose that favors fair use.  So repurposing or recontextualizing a work does fall under the four factors after all.

The first thing I noticed in Lipinski's article is that he was a visiting professor at the University of Pretoria, South Africa.  If it is at all relevant to our discussion on distance education, it would be neat to hear about his experiences there in class this Friday.

Since his article focuses on distance classes and I've only ever taken face-to-face classes, I have not experienced the effects of the TEACH Act personally.  However, I was surprised to discover that performances or displays for "recreation or entertainment" are not allowed in face-to-face as well as distance classes.  My teachers K-12 showed movies solely for that purpose routinely at the end of each semester.  At first it seems strange that they all disregarded this rule but, on the other hand, who would have any motive for enforcing it? 

For example, in middle school we watched How the Grinch Stole Christmas more times than I can remember each December (probably because of its convenient length and G rating).  We never once discussed, wrote papers, or otherwise integrated it into the curriculum so the viewing was solely for entertainment.  The copyright holder wants to sell as many copies as possible so he/she has no interest in telling a school they can't purchase a non-educational movie.  The teachers and students both enjoy the lack of effort involved in spending a class period watching a movie so they have no motivation to complain.  The only potential enforcers could be school administrators or parents looking to improve the students' education but, in my experience, neither seem to raise the issue.  Since this law is routinely broken and no one seems to have an interest in enforcing it, I wonder why it exists at all.

Week 5 - Pricing Models and Consortial Arrangements

After reading "UC Libraries, Nature Publishing Group in Heated Dispute Over Pricing; Boycott Possible" as well as "The Librarians Dilemma: Contemplating the costs of the 'Big Deal,'" it seems clear to me that the current commercial publisher model needs to be changed.  It seems ridiculous that research professors are essentially required to submit their articles for free to commercial publishers and then professors from the same university have to pay to access these articles.  University of California estimates that their faculty generates $19 million in revenue for Nature Publication Group and yet, at present, they will have to pay $17,479 for subscriptions to these journals in 2011. 

Furthermore, somehow commercial publishers have convinced researchers to donate their time in the form of peer reviewing articles at no cost.  I have never really understood this except that it must operate in a similar way to Frazier's description of cooperation in game theory.  Humans or animals who have to interact in the same way repeatedly realize that cooperation is more beneficial to all involved.  Similarly, a researcher is more likely to peer review someone else's article if he or she wants to publish a peer reviewed article in the future. 

I was intrigued by Frazier's mention of the Public Library of Science which, as an example of the open access model, hopes to be an "online public library that would provide the full contents of the public record of research and scholarly discourse in medicine and the life sciences in a freely accessible, fully searchable, interlinked form."  I searched the internet a bit to determine how this project has progressed since Frazier's article in 2001.  According to a July 7th, 2010 article in the Los Angeles Times titled "UC takes scientific journals to task over fees" (originally I was looking at this article to see if UC and NPG had come to a resolution) by Michael Hiltzick, the Public Library of Science is still in existence and, in fact, doing quite well.  In their model, researchers are charged a fee up to $2,900 to publish in one of their journals.  However, the article is then available to anyone free of charge and the researcher keeps the copyright for his or her article.  Additionally, the National Institute of Health encourages researchers to use their grant funds to pay these publication fees so that "the work they [NIH] pay for be made available without unreasonable delay and without pay barriers."

Lastly, I have a question regarding the conclusions drawn by "8.6 Reasons Why Journal Subscription Prices Spiraled Upward" in Economics and Usage of Digital Libraries: Byting the Bullet.  The authors believe that journal prices significantly increased from 1975 to 1995 in part because most journals had smaller circulations in 1995 than in 1975.  In addition to the increase in overall number of journals, this is because "the average number of personal subscriptions per scientist dropped more than 50 percent over a twenty-year period."  What they don't consider, however, is that the human population increases each year.  I would like to know how this affects the size of circulation from year to year or if the change is small enough to be negligible compared to the other factors mentioned. 

Week 4 - E-Reserves

First of all, I think I've figured out what the strange definition of subscription period we ran into on Friday means.  In order to get the exact wording, I found the same definition in the example Blackwell license from last week.  The definition is as follows: "that period nominally covered by the volumes and issues of the Licensed Material, regardless of the actual date of publication."  I think this refers to the fact that, for example, the October issue of a journal is often published and distributed in the middle of September.  If a library's license ended on September 30th, it would not have access to the October issue, according to this definition, even though the issue was published during the time of its license.

Moving on to this week's reading, I noticed that Learn@UW does not comply with one of the CONFU Guidelines for E-Reserves.  Specifically, these guidelines recommend "on a preliminary or introductory screen, electronic reserve systems should display a notice, consistent with the notice described in Section 108(f)(1) of the Copyright Act."  That particular section states that a notice should be posted informing patrons that making a copy may be subject to copyright law.  After carefully looking through Learn@UW, I have not found this notice on any of the pages from login to actually viewing course reserves.  The fact that I can't find this notice is especially interesting because according to the expert report by Kenneth D. Crews, UW-Madison states in its E-Reserves policy that there will be a "copyright notice on screen" as well as on the material itself.  However, I did find something interesting in reading all the fine print on Learn@UW.  There is an interesting sentence in the privacy notice on the main page stating "federal law and UW-Madison policy require that you must not reveal any information about classmates, course work content, or its authors to anyone outside the course."  This passage intrigues me because I am curious about its purpose.  Perhaps it is meant to protect the privacy of students' comments in discussion, content a professor might post and may want to publish in a journal later, or even the fact that a particular student is taking the course.

Reading about policies on E-Reserves this week is especially timely because I have an entire one hundred page book to read for another class this week that is posted on E-Reserves.  Neyer recommends that if professors are handling their own E-Reserves, policies should be distributed to them stating restrictions such as "items that cannot be digitized and placed on electronic reserves would include an entire book."  Perhaps my professor avoided this restriction by obtaining permission from the author or publisher to distribute the entire work.  One aspect of this book that complicates its distribution is that it is by a local author and out of print.  A quick internet search reveals that it is not easily obtained from any online vendors besides Ebay.  Ebay clearly cannot be relied upon to provide approximately forty copies to the students in my class and I feel that lack of availability should be included as a factor to consider in an E-Reserves policy.

Something I found interesting in both Russell and Neyer is the fact that both include quotes encouraging fair use so that, in the future, standard practice doesn't limit fair use.  For example, if all libraries developed a policy of limiting photocopying to one page of a work, eventually most patrons and librarians would assume it was against the law to copy even two pages.  I especially like the quote in Russell from "a former U.S. Register of Copyrights" which states "'If you don't use fair use, you will lose it!"'  I found this advocacy for using fair use interesting because it appears that Georgia State University did just that and ended up in a lawsuit.  Granted, the lawsuit only started on April 15th, 2008 and the quotes in both Russell and Neyer are from years before the lawsuit occurred.  I wonder if those quoted would express the same sentiment now.

Week 3 - Contemporary Licensing Best Practices

One part of the UCITA article I found interesting was the amendment added for libraries.  This allows public libraries to accept donations of software even if the shrink-wrap contract indicates otherwise.  However, this applies only to "computer software that is transferred in a computer."  I found this interesting because the downtown branch of the Cleveland Public Library has a moderately sized collection of software that is definitely not within computers and can be borrowed from the library.  If Ohio were put UCITA into law, then this collection would need to be removed.  Additionally, without Ohio passing UCITA, the Cleveland Public Library could be affected by it if the licenses of any of the software within its collection specified that Virginia or Maryland law (the two states where UCITA has been passed) governed the software.  This is possibly because Ohio is not one of the states that has passed "bomb shelter" legislation.  When looking through the software collection, I noticed it was all quite old which I assumed was simply because it was donated.  However, after reading this article, I wonder if the software placed in the collection all has license agreements made before Maryland and Virginia passed UCITA.

Reading the patent law section of chapter seven in Russell reminded me of a couple things.  First, this section renders a particular point made by Litman invalid.  In chapter seven of last week's reading, she makes an argument about copyright by comparing fashion and recipes with the usual subjects of copyright such as movies, music, and books.  She starts by stating that if there were no intellectual protection for fashion designers and food creators, then mass-market clothing producers and downscale restaurants would copy the creations of their more expensive counterparts.  This would result in no incentive for new designs or recipes so no one would make them.  Litman then points out that stakeholders debating copyright typically make this incentive argument when lobbying for strong copyright protection.  She means to disprove this claim by stating "of course, we don't give copyright protection to fashions or food.  We never have."  Although accurate, this statement does not consider patent law.  According to Russell, processes such as the steps in a recipe and designs such as "novel and ornamental clothing" or "the exterior of a Samsonite roller luggage" are covered by patents.  As a result, fashion designers and food creators are given protection over their works so her argument that these industries run just fine without intellectual property protection is not accurate.

Second, the patent law section reminded me of the movie Flashes of Genius.  This movie details the legal battle between Robert Kearns and the Ford Motor Company over Ford stealing the intermittent windshield wiper design that was patented by Kearns.  I particularly remember a court scene in which Ford's lawyer was claiming that the patent should not have been granted because Kearns' design simply arranged standard parts.  After reading Russell, I realize he was making this claim because patents should only be granted to applications that are "novel, useful, and non-obvious."  To show the novel and non-obvious nature of Kearns' design, Kearns' lawyer brought out a copy of The Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens and argued that it too was made of arranging standard parts known as words.  No one could claim that The Tale of Two Cities is not a novel and non-obvious creation and Kearns eventually won the trial.

Week 2 - Copyright and Licensing History (part 2)

Reading the CONTU guidelines regarding photocopying for ILL purposes actually gave me some new ideas for my group's scenario from class on Friday.  I am in the group debating whether it is allowed under copyright for a library to stop subscribing to a journal and rely on obtaining its content from Interlibrary Loans.  According to the guidelines, the library should buy the journal if it requests "within any calendar year for a total of six or more copies of an article or articles published in such periodical within five years prior to the date of the request."  Our scenario only stated that the amount of use was "moderate" and did not state whether the articles used were over five years old or not.  Considering these guidelines, I now feel that the library should keep detailed track of how often the journal is used and what articles are referenced before deciding whether to stop their subscription.

Since Professor Anuj Desai will be coming to class on Friday, I have spent some time thinking of questions regarding the ProCD vs. Zeidenberg court case.  First I would like to know a very obvious question - how was the case actually ruled?  Does Professor Desai feel that this was a fair ruling or perhaps influenced by the fact that ProCD was most likely much larger than Zeidenberg's company, Silken Mountain Web Services, and, consequently, was able to contribute more monetarily to the trial?  Second, is the real problem here the commercial use of a consumer version of ProCD's product?  Would ProCD be happy with a ruling that required Zeidenberg to buy the commercial version and allowed his company to continue to resell the information in ProCD's database?

Moving on to Harris' text, before even getting to chapter one, I noticed something interesting.  The copyright page does not state the usual warning: "All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form without the prior permission of the publisher."  According to Russell, this statement is false because reproduction and fair use exemptions still apply.  Instead, Harris' book states a much more accurate description of its copyright: "All rights reserved except those which may be granted by Sections 107 and 108 of the Copyright Revision Act of 1976."

Reading the actual assigned chapters, one aspect of license agreements that I had not considered is that libraries can be content owners and may need to use license agreements to let others use their content rather than only using the agreements to obtain content.  This makes a lot of sense because some libraries function as the archives for their town.  For example, in This Book is Overdue! How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All by Marilyn Johnson, the public library of Deadwood, South Dakota holds the archive of rare books and genealogical records for Deadwood dating back to the 1800s.

Lastly, I am in strong support of Litman's proposal for copyright revision after finishing Digital Copyright.  Her basic idea is to recast "copyright as an exclusive right of commercial exploitation" rather than basing copyright on control over copies of a work.  The definition of a copy of a work is increasingly difficult to determine with today's technology.  This new principle would simplify copyright by removing the confusing mix of rights and exceptions so that the public can understand and follow it.  For example, at my undergraduate school, our Film Society was paid to report on campus groups breaking copyright law by advertising a particular movie or TV show they were showing at an event.  According to a strange exception in copyright law, a group would be allowed to advertise the viewing of "a popular British romantic comedy" but not state Love Actually on their fliers.  Basing copyright law on commercial rights would remove illogical exceptions such as this one and, instead, perhaps require the group to pay a small fee for publicly showing the movie or require no fee at all since attendees would be more likely to buy the movie after viewing and enjoying it once anyway.

Week 1 - Copyright Basics and History

This week, I read Russell first even though it was listed second on the syllabus because I wanted to get an overview of copyright from a relatively neutral source before reading Litman's arguments.  Overall, I really enjoyed Russell's text because she incorporates interesting case studies and works hard to break up the unavoidably dense and sometimes confusing parts of copyright law with question/answer and tip sections.  Plus, I haven't had a textbook that included pictures just for fun since about 5th grade.

Anyway, one of the things I learned from Complete Copyright is that a particular urban legend I've heard is completely false.  As an undergraduate, I would sometimes hear from members of fraternities and sororities a story something like this: "All Greek organizations' rituals are in the Library of Congress but ours is not because [such and such president/supreme court justice/famous political member of speaker's organization] took ours out."  Having a written copy of their ritual in the Library of Congress is somewhat upsetting to members of Greek organizations because ritual is supposed to secret.  However, from chapter one, I now know that the only reason a document would end up in the Library of Congress is because someone wanted to register it for copyright.  The only reason to do this is to file a copyright infringement suit or allow someone to contact the author for permission to use the work.  Since rituals are supposed to be secret, neither of these actions are desirable and there is no reason to register for copyright.

Moving on to Litman, I quickly realized that she has some strong opinions about copyright, specifically the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  In evaluating her arguments, I wondered some very basic questions - who is Jessica Litman?  Is she an expert in the field and, therefore, qualified to make these arguments?  Finding no answers to these questions at the front or back of the book, I discovered her biography on the University of Michigan Law School website (http://web.law.umich.edu/_FacultyBioPage/facultybiopagenew.asp?ID=346).  In part this states:

Before rejoining the Michigan faculty in 2006, Professor Litman was professor of law at Wayne State University in Detroit, a visiting professor at NYU Law School and at American University Washington College of Law, as well as a professor at the University of Michigan Law School from 1984-90. In addition, she has taught copyright law at the University of Tokyo as part of the Law Faculty Exchange Program. Professor Litman is a past trustee of the Copyright Society of the USA and a past chair of the American Association of Law Schools Section on Intellectual Property. In addition to serving on the advisory board for the Public Knowledge organization, she is a member of the Intellectual Property and Internet Committee of the ACLU, the Advisory Council of the Future of Music Coalition, the advisory board of Cyberspace Law Abstracts, and the American Law Institute.

Clearly, from all these experiences, she is an expert on copyright and well qualified to form opinions. With a new respect for the author, I returned to the text.  One of the main themes I noticed is that Litman is very critical of copyright lawyers who make their income from clients (as opposed to her position as a professor).  She makes this obvious at the beginning of chapter two by stating "copyright lawyers are a peculiarly myopic breed of human being."  Furthermore, she argues that copyright laws are purposely written to be confusing so that clients will have to pay lawyers to translate them.  The alternative is to disregard the laws and end up in court at which point a copyright lawyer will still need to be hired.  For example, proprietors of small businesses unaware of the fact that they need to buy a license to play music in their business "went to court to protect their supposed right to play music - every year - at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars."  This is quite ridiculous and, so far, I agree with Litman in that copyright laws need to be completely rewritten to be more readable although my opinion may change with reading the second half of Digital Copyright next week.