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.
No comments:
Post a Comment