Earlier today, the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) Steering Committee put out a call for a “Beta Sprint” to bring to the surface “innovations that could play a part in the building of a digital public library.” From the announcement:

The Beta Sprint seeks, ideas, models, prototypes, technical tools, user interfaces, etc. – put forth as a written statement, a visual display, code, or a combination of forms – that demonstrate how the DPLA might index and provide access to a wide range of broadly distributed content. The Beta Sprint also encourages development of submissions that suggest alternative designs or that focus on particular parts of the system, rather than on the DPLA as a whole.

1. File a 400-word statement of interest with the DPLA by June 15th (which includes an acknowledgment of the intellectual property policy).
2. Make a final submission by September 1st.

Participants will be notified of the results of the review in late September or early October 2011 and will be invited to a DPLA meeting in October in Washington, DC.

In the video introducing the beta sprint, John Palfrey points to the March’s Concept Note and the description of research tracks on the DPLA wiki. Jennifer Howard on Wired Campus blog of The Chronicle of Higher Education has a blog post about the DPLA beta sprint with a few quotes from some of the principle people.

This is an interesting way to gather more input about what the DPLA will look like and interact with local libraries. It reminds me of a traditional “Request for Information” process but is much more wide open in its call for new concepts from anyone — not just established players. The breadth of possible submissions will make the task of selecting proposals to be presented to a wider audience a challenging process. Submissions can be anything from data models to wireframe user interface mockups to running code.

Anyone Interested in Working on Library-Friendly DRM?

At the 2010 Annual RLG Partnership Meeting, David Lewis (Dean of the IUPUI University Library) gave a talk entitled “Collections Futures”. I’ve followed David’s ideas since we crossed paths a few years ago; his ideas on applying Clayton Christensen’s disruptive innovation theories to libraries ring true to me. This presentation is in part an update on his earlier work on this theme and an expansion to include new ideas from Clay Shirky and John Seely Brown.

With David Lewis’ permission and in keeping with the Creative Commons license he used to publish the work, I have synchronized his slides and the audio recording using Slideshare.net. That effort is embedded below and is available on the Slideshare site.

A couple of notes on the conversion.

• Slides 17-24 are out-of-sync with the audio recording. The speaker flipped through the slides quickly and SlideShare.net enforces a minimum of 10 seconds per slide. The slides catch up to the audio at slide #25.
• SlideShare.net did not convert the graphs on slides 67, 68 and 69. Snapshots of those slides are included below:
  67. 
  68. 
  69. 

The sources listed on the second to last slide are:

Clayton M. Christensen, Jerome H. Grossman, and Jason Hwang, The Innovator’s Prescription: A Disruptive Solution for Health Care, New York: McGraw-Hill, 2009.

Clayton M. Christensen, Michael B. Horn, and Curtis W. Johnson, Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns, New York : McGraw-Hill, 2008.

Clayton M. Christensen, “The Innovator’s Prescription: A Disruptive Solution for Health Care” (video), May 13, 2008, MIT World, Available at: http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/594

John Hagel III, John Seely Brown, and Lang Davison, “Measuring the forces of long-term change: The 2009 Shift Index,” Deloitte Center for the Edge, 2009. Available at: http://www.johnhagel.com/shiftindex.pdf

John Hegal III, John Seely Brown, and Lang Davison, The Power of Pull: How Small Moves Smartly Made Can Set Big Things in Motion, New York: Basic Books, 2010.

Lewis, David W. “A Strategy for Academic Libraries in the First Quarter of the 21st Century.” College & Research Libraries 68(5):418-434 September 2007. Available at: http://www.acrl.org/ala/mgrps/divs/acrl/publications/crljournal/2007/sep/Lewis07.pdf and http://idea.iupui.edu/dspace/handle/1805/1592 [Note: Links changed to point to updated locations]

If you are interested in more sources about applying Clayton Christensen’s theories to higher education in general and libraries in particular, see the Christensen in Higher Education Zotero group library.

My gratitude to David Lewis for sharing his thoughts and for allowing me to make them more accessible.

North America is gaining its third¹ major bibliographic record utility server this month with the unveiling of SkyRiver.

SkyRiver Technology's Pre-launch Homepage

SkyRiver was founded by Jerry Kline, one of the principles behind Innovative Interfaces, Inc, and its president is Leslie Straus, former vice president for worldwide sales and marketing until 2006. The Library Journal article indicates that Kline is providing the financial backing of the effort, and that it shares office space and administrative support with Innovative Interfaces. No word yet about who the development partners are (although the article says that at least one is an ARL library) or what the subscription pricing will be. The SkyRiver website, though, does encourage people to come back to http://skyriver.com/ for the formal launch on Friday, October 9th.

For the record, the other major North American bibliographic utilities that I’m aware of are OCLC and LibLime’s ‡biblios.net, with the footnote talking about the possibility of the Open Library as a bibliographic utility. As with ‡biblios.net, I think it is useful to think about the introduction of SkyRiver to the bibliographic utility universe in the framework of Clayton Christensen’s theory of disruptive innovations. And in that framework, I’m not sure these efforts will work — while SkyRiver and ‡biblios.net are arguably quicker and more nimble than their OCLC counterpart — there isn’t much in the service offering that are not sustaining innovations in the field. Sure, the pricing model and the record re-use policies might be different, but the existence of SkyRiver and ‡biblios.net may just force OCLC to move in these directions as well. After that, there are no distinguishing factors. Clearly, this is going to need more thought…

The text was modified to update a link from https://biblios.net/ to http://biblios.net/ on February 11th, 2011.

Footnotes

1. or fourth? Does Open Library count as a bibliographic utility?

Late last month, the University of Pittsburgh Press and Library System announced a joint effort to revive 500 titles with online and print-on demand access. I originally found this via a post on the Course materials, Innovation, and Technology in Education (CITE) blog. Since we have been ramping up discussions here in Ohio about ways OhioLINK can be an aggregation point for efforts at the four university press services in Ohio, I was interested to read about this and learn more.

Conversation with Rush Miller

They had been closely studying the usage and sales data with the trial content and had found that online access didn’t necessarily cannibalize print sales. In fact, one title sold about 100 copies last year while having near zero sales the previous few years. (Adoption for a course is the suspected reason, and the item was probably found because the digital edition was online). Books that have been out of print for 20 years are now getting use as soon as the digital editions are available.

With the initial success, the libraries and press moved forward with digitizing and mounting the 500-title backfile represented by this announcement. This was a significant effort on the part of the press to clear the rights for all of these titles — about a year’s worth of work. The partners are already looking forward to another round of titles to be digitized and mounted online.

From a library director’s perspective, Rush appreciates the backing of the university press in the library’s digital initiatives. The support of the press gives more credibility to the digital initiatives and encourages faculty to participate. The joint effort also closely aligns with the campus’ desire to promote open access publishing. Their goal is to establish a practice where titles in the pipeline now are put up for open access online after a one or two year window in print.

The library is using the DLXS software from the University of Michigan. They are probably the largest user of the DLXS software, to include the University of Michigan. They are looking at migrating the content to Fedora repository in the next year or so. (They are also looking to migrate their EPrints-based ejournal service to Fedora as well.)

They are examining all options for scaling up print-on-demand. (They had previously used Brookhaven Press in Wisconsin for a print-on-demand project of history of Pittsburgh monographs, but found the $50/item price point too high.) They have not yet explored digital delivery to e-book readers (such as the Kindle or Sony Book Reader). The kinds of materials the press produces does not lend themselves to the kinds of digital supplements (such as data sets, image collections, etc).

This library/press collaboration was built over several years even before the digital editions effort. The press routinely donated complete runs of titles to the libraries to be used in exchange programs with foreign libraries to acquire new titles.

The move to digital editions with the press is part of a long-standing goal at the library to move to the digital version of content. In the past year, for instance, the University of Pittsburgh purchased access to over 300,000 electronic books, and this continues a progression of physical to digital formats over the past few years. In the case of the press’ digital editions, the content can be spidered and harvested by search engines. The descriptive metadata is also harvested and combined with the card catalog data and other content in the library’s AquaBrowser discovery layer.

The text was modified to remove a link to http://www.library.pitt.edu/uls/news/pittpress.html on January 28th, 2011.

Beyond the public pronouncements of the Google Books Settlement¹ are the documents that form the meat of the agreement. The full text of the proposed settlement agreement is 141 pages plus another 162 pages of appendices. The Proposed Notice of Class Action Settlement itself — a summary of the complete settlement — is 38 pages, and is what is reviewed in this post. (The proposed settlement agreement may be covered in a future post.) The Notice of Settlement is chock full of interesting nuggets and hints of even more interesting things in the complete summary agreement. Even the printed version of the summary posted here is about 10 pages long.

Two notes before we get started. First, for readers who don’t normally follow DLTJ, this exploration through the Notice of Settlement is taken from a decidedly library (and library technologist) point of view. There are lots of bits that will probably be of greater interest to authors and publishers (like formula for determining how much compensation is due, etc.) that are not covered here. Second, this is a review of the document as it was submitted to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York in the case of The Author’s Guild et al v. Google Inc.. The court needs to review and approve it, and details may change between now and then. There are lots of holes in the document — notably dates and URLs — that will need to filled in.

In the summary below, references to the Proposed Notice of Class Action Settlement take the form of the word “Notice” followed by the question number and possibly the paragraph number plus the page number. For instance: “(Notice: Q9(A), p. 11)”

Important Definitions

Classes.

Photographs, graphic designs, artworks, illustrations (other than illustrations in children’s Books) and other images and works of visual art that are included in Books are not considered Inserts and are not covered by the Settlement, UNLESS the U.S. copyright interest in those works is held by the Rightsholder of the Book. (Notice: Q5, p. 7)

So it would seem that if you are a photographer or illustrator, you’re not covered. I wonder what this means for those that design book jackets. First, are book jackets covered by this agreement? If so, it would seem that the rights of those who create them are not covered by the agreement.

Book.

For purposes of the Settlement, a “Book” is a written or printed work on sheets of
paper bound together in hard copy form that:

• Prior to January 5, 2009, was published or distributed to the public or made available for public access under the authorization of the work’s U.S. copyright owner(s); and
• Has been registered with the U.S. Copyright Office as of January 5, 2009, UNLESS the work was first published outside the United States, in which case such registration is not required; and
• As of January 5, 2009, is subject to a U.S. copyright interest (either through ownership, joint ownership, or an exclusive license) implicated by a use authorized by the Settlement. …

EXCLUDED from the definition of “Book” are the following:

• Periodicals (e.g., newspapers, magazines or journals). See Section 1.102
• of the Settlement Agreement for a full definition of “Periodicals.”
• Personal papers (e.g., unpublished diaries or bundles of notes or letters).
• Sheet music and other works that are used primarily for the playing of music. See Section 1.16 of the Settlement Agreement for a more detailed description of these works.
• Public domain works, meaning works that are in the public domain under U. S. copyright law.
• Government works, meaning written works that are not subject to copyright because they are authored by the U.S. government or that are subject to equivalent treatment under any state’s law, as defined in Section 1.64 of the Settlement Agreement.

A couple of interesting points here. First is the date of January 5th, 2009 itself. By saying that books must be “published or distributed” prior to that date, it would seem to automatically exclude everything forever published after that date. The implicit meaning here would seem to be that books published on January 5th, 2009 and after, the author/publisher would need to go through the Google Book Search Partner Program — e.g. the Publisher arm rather than the Library arm of Google Book Search. Note that I don’t find this explicitly in the agreement.

Second interesting note is that the work has to be registered with the U.S. Copyright Office as of that same date. Note that the answer to the FAQ of “When is my work protected?” says “your work is under copyright protection the moment it is created and fixed in a tangible form that it is perceptible either directly or with the aid of a machine or device.” The Settlement, however, requires registration — an act that itself carries a fee of $35 to $45.

Third, explicitly excluded from this agreement are “periodicals”. The full definition of “Periodicals” from section 1.102 of the agreement (which I might get to in a subsequent post), but it would seem to include things that are already digitized and available in Google Book Search. Should we expect a lawsuit to follow from journal publishers?

Insert.

For purposes of this Settlement, an “Insert” must:

• Consist either of (1) text, such as forewords, afterwords, prologues, epilogues, poems, quotations, letters, textual excerpts from other Books, periodicals or other works, or song lyrics; or (2) tables, charts, graphs, musical notation (i.e., notes on a staff or tablature), or children’s Book illustrations; and
• Be contained in a Book, government work or a book that is in the public domain; and
• Be protected by a U.S. copyright, where the U.S copyright interest in the Insert is owned or held by someone other than a Rightsholder of the Book’s “Principal Work.” “Principal Work” is further defined in Question 8(C) below. For example, if you own rights in a poem that is contained in a Book for which you also hold a U.S. copyright interest, then your poem, as it appears in your Book, is not an Insert; however, it would be an Insert if the poem is contained in a Book for which someone else holds the U.S. copyright interest; and
• Be registered, either alone or as part of another work, with the U.S. Copyright Office as of January 5, 2009, UNLESS the Insert or work was first published outside the United States, in which case such registration is not required.

EXCLUDED from the definition of “Insert” are

• Pictorial works, such as photographs, illustrations (other than children’s Book illustrations), maps and paintings.
• Works that are in the public domain.

For purposes of receiving payments for the use of Inserts, the Settlement
identifies two types of Inserts:

• “Entire Insert,” which is an Insert that is an entire work, e.g., forewords, afterwords, introductions, entire works included in anthologies, entire poems, entire short stories, the entire lyrics of a song, and entire essays.
• “Partial Insert,” which is any other type of Insert. Partial Inserts include excerpts from a work (e.g., excerpts from a Book or magazine article, quotations, stanzas from poems or portions of a song’s lyrics).

There is the same requirement for registration with the U.S. Copyright Office. The first question that leapt to my mind in reading the first bullet point of the definition was “what about books that have chapters written by separate authors?” but that seems to be covered under the definition of an “Entire Work” (“…entire works included in anthologies…”). It could be a matter of interpretation, though; it would be nice to see it more explicitly stated.

Commercially Available.

Participating Libraries.

How Google Can Use the Material

Display Uses.

Subject to Rightsholders’ exclusion and removal rights discussed above, the Settlement authorizes Google to make the following Display Uses of all out-of-print Books and, upon the express authorization of Rightsholders, in-print Books:

1. Access Uses: Access uses are viewing and annotating the entire Book, and printing and copying/pasting portions of the Book, subject to certain page number limitations. These are full text uses of Books that Google is or may be authorized to make:
   1. Institutional Subscriptions: Educational, government and corporate institutions will be able to purchase time-limited subscriptions (e.g., by semester or by year) for their students or employees to access the full contents of the institutional subscription database. Google may also offer subscriptions to discipline-based collections. The pricing of the institutional subscription may vary over time, including to reflect increases in the size of the institutional subscription database….
   2. Consumer Purchases: Individual users will be able to purchase the right to access Books online. Rightsholders will have two options for setting the sale price of their Books: they can set the price themselves or they can allow Google to set the price based on a multi-factor formula that is designed to maximize revenues for the sale of the Book (the “Settlement Controlled Price”)….
   3. Public Access at Libraries and Elsewhere: Google will provide, on request, “Public Access” licenses for free through a dedicated computer terminal at each public library building and through an agreed number of dedicated computer terminals at non-profit higher educational institutions located in the United States. The Public Access service will provide the same access to Books as Google offers in the institutional subscriptions, except that users will not be able to copy/paste or annotate any portions of a Book. At public libraries that are able to charge for printing, and at all libraries at higher educational institutions, users will be able to print from the Public Access terminals for a per-page fee. Upon Registry approval, Public Access terminals may be made available for a viewing and per-page printing fee at commercial businesses such as copy centers, which will share those fees with Google and the Rightsholders. Revenues from the Public Access service will be based on a per-page charge for printing, with Google collecting the revenues from libraries or copy centers and sending 63% of those revenues to the Registry. Google will provide data tracking the usage of the Public Access service to the Registry, the libraries and other places where the service is available.
   4. Other Potential Commercial Uses: In the future, Google and the Registry may agree to develop other Access Uses, including consumer subscriptions (similar in concept to the institutional subscriptions); print on demand Books; custom publishing (per-page pricing of content for course packets or other forms of custom publishing for the educational and professional markets); PDF downloads (consumers would be able to download a PDF version of a Book); and summaries, abstracts or compilations of Books. Rightsholders will be notified, either directly or through the Registry’s website, of all new commercial uses that Google is authorized to make, and will have an opportunity at any time to exclude their Books from any or all of these uses.
2. Preview Use: In response to a user’s search, Google may allow the user to view up to 20% of a Book (no more than five adjacent pages) before making a purchase decision, but not to copy/paste, annotate or print any pages from the Book (“Standard Preview”). For Books of fiction, Google will block the last 5% of the Book (or a minimum of the final fifteen pages of the Book). Also, for Books of fiction, Google may display up to 5% or fifteen pages (whichever is less) adjacent to where a user lands on a given page. Rightsholders may also select another preview option, in which the pages available for preview are fixed (up to 10% of the pages of the Book, as chosen by Google and, if a mechanism to do so is developed, chosen by the Rightsholder) (“Fixed Preview”). The pages presented to the user with Fixed Preview do not depend on the user’s search. Rightsholders will have the ability to change the type of Preview available for their Books at any time. Preview uses are designed to serve as a marketing tool to sell the Book for Consumer Purchase or otherwise. Rightsholders are also expected to receive advertising revenues from advertisements placed on Preview Use pages for a Book….
3. Snippet Displays: In response to a user’s search, Google may display about three or four lines of text from a Book (a “snippet”), with up to three snippets per user for that Book. Rightsholders are expected to receive advertising revenues from advertisements placed on web pages that display one or more snippets from, and are devoted to, a single Book.
4. Display of Bibliographic Pages: Google may display to users a Book’s title page, copyright page, table of contents, and index.

Non-Display Uses.

Advertising.

Uses by Fully Participating Libraries.

The Settlement permits Google to provide to each Fully Participating Library a digital copy of all the Books in that library’s collection (a “Library Digital Copy” or “LDC”), provided Google digitizes a certain amount of Books at that library. Fully Participating Libraries are authorized to use their LDC: (a) to make copies to preserve, maintain, manage and keep current that LDC; (b) to provide access to Books in the LDC to users who have disabilities that render them unable to use printed versions of Books; (c) to create a print replacement copy of a Book that is damaged, deteriorating, lost or stolen; (d) to use indexes and finding tools, and to display snippets in connection with finding tools (except if a Rightsholder directs the Fully Participating Libraries not to do so); (e) to permit faculty and staff to use up to five pages of a Book that is not Commercially Available for personal scholarly use and classroom use, if those Books are not in the Institutional Subscription; (f) for Non-Consumptive Research (subject to the limitations described in Question 9(J) below); (g) if the U.S. Copyright Act is amended to allow use of orphan works, to use Books from their LDC in accordance with the amended statute; and (h) for other lawful uses that a Rightsholder or the Registry approves (the Registry may only approve uses that do not impair any rights of the Rightsholders). The Settlement Agreement also prohibits Fully Participating Libraries from making certain uses of their LDC; however, fair uses of Books that are not Commercially Available are not prohibited if no Institutional Subscription is available.

Research Corpus.

In addition, digital copies of all Books digitized by Google at libraries will be combined into a “Research Corpus.” The Research Corpus may be hosted at up to two separate sites (“Host Sites”) at any given time. With the Registry’s approval, Google could become an additional Host Site (i.e., a third Host Site if two already exist). The Research Corpus will be made available to “qualified users” solely for engaging in specific types of research, including: (a) computational analysis of the digitized images to either improve the image or extracting textual or structural information from the image; (b) extracting information to understand or develop relationships among or within Books; (c) linguistic analysis, to better understand language, linguistic use, semantics and syntax as they evolve over time and across genres of Books; (d) automated translation (without actually producing translations of Books for display purposes); and (e) developing new indexing and search techniques.

For any Books that are Commercially Available as of January 5, 2009, or within two years thereafter, the Rightsholder has the right to withdraw the Books from the Research Corpus as long as they remain Commercially Available….

The Research Corpus and its use are subject to detailed requirements and limitations, all set forth in the Settlement Agreement….

Compensation

Plaintiffs view the Settlement as an excellent opportunity to breathe new commercial life into potentially tens of millions of out-of-print Books, and to provide an innovative marketing tool for authors and publishers of in-print Books.

Then comes the meat and potatoes:

Under the Settlement, Google is authorized to 1) sell to institutions subscriptions to an electronic Books database, 2) sell online access to individual Books, 3) sell advertising on pages from Books, and 4) make other uses, all as further described under “Access Uses” in Question 9(F)(1) below. Google will pay Rightsholders, through the Book Rights Registry (the “Registry”), 63% of all revenues received from these uses. The Registry will distribute those revenues to Rightsholders in accordance with the Plan of Allocation and the Author-Publisher Procedures….

Google agrees to pay these amounts (emphasis added):

• “To fund the establishment and initial operations of the [Book Rights] Registry, Google has agreed to pay US $34.5 million.” (Notice: Q8(B), p. 11)
• “Google has agreed to pay a minimum of US $45 million to make cash payments for all of the Books and Inserts that Google will have digitized as of May 5, 2009… without Rightsholder authorization (“Cash Payment”).” (Notice: Q9(C); p. 12)
• “Subject to Court approval, Google will pay [Author Sub-class] attorneys’ fees and expenses of US $30 million.” (Notice: Q19, p. 35)
• “Google has agreed to pay US $15.5 million in settlement of [the action brought by the Publisher Sub-class]” (Notice: Q19, p. 36)

The details about how much individual authors and publishers receive in compensation is left out of this summary. It is quite complicated and scattered all throughout the Notice, so you’ll need to go read it yourself.

The Book Rights Registry

The Settlement establishes a not-for-profit Book Rights Registry that will maintain a database of Rightsholders, collect their contact information and information regarding their requests with respect to uses of Books and Inserts, and identify, locate and coordinate payments to Rightsholders. The Registry will represent the interests of the Rightsholders, both in connection with the Settlement as well as in other commercial arrangements, including with companies other than Google (subject to the express approval of the Rightsholders of the Books involved in such other commercial arrangements).

The section goes on to say: “After the funding of its initial operations by Google’s payment, the Registry will be funded by taking an administrative fee as a percentage of revenues received from Google (estimated to be 10-20%). The Registry will be jointly managed by a Board comprising an equal number of representatives of the Author Sub-Class and Publisher Sub-Class – at least four author directors and at least four publisher directors.”

Permanent Removal

Rightsholders can exclude their Books from some or all of these uses…. Rightsholders can also remove their Books altogether from the Books database (if already digitized) or direct Google not to digitize their Books so long as the request is made by no later than April 5, 2011.

Why a “stick”? Because it appears to be a final deadline by which a rightsholder can once and for all have their material removed from Google Book Search. The section on Non-Display uses says that “Rightsholders may not exclude Books or Inserts from Non-Display Uses.” (Notice: Q9(G), p. 20) If a Rightsholder later wants to get the Book back into Google Book Search “it may be possible to contact Google subsequently to attempt to negotiate a separate deal for inclusion of the Book in the Partner Program.” (Notice: Q9(D), p. 16)

And, in what I see as a sane move, “a removal request will not require Google or a Fully Participating Library to destroy back-up tapes or other back-up storage media that may contain copies of otherwise removed Books.” (Notice: Q9(D), p. 16) Having to go through backup media to remove individual Books at a time would be a royal pain. I’d speculate that the plaintiffs thought it enough to have it removed from active service.

Interesting Dates

5-Jan-2009.

5-May-2009.

5-Apr-2011.

Other Interesting Tidbits

Perhaps under a heading of “did you know copyright law could be obscene?” there are these two sentences, with my emphasis added for effect: “You should assume that you own a U.S. copyright interest in your Book, unless you are certain that your Book was published in, and that you reside and are located in, one of the few countries that have not had or do not now have copyright relations with the United States…. If you own a copyright in a Book or Insert published in a country outside the United States, you are advised to seek advice from an attorney or a Reproduction Rights Organization to determine whether your interests would be better served by participating in this Settlement or opting out of the Settlement.” Copyright Relations? Reproductive Rights Organization? Those sound like euphemisms to me. Just remember, when you engage in copyright relations with a company, you engage in relations with every other country that country has had copyright relations with.

There is an odd provision in the heading of “What are Authors’ and Publishers’ rights under the Author-Publisher Procedures?”. For some reason “Educational Books” are handled differently. I’m not sure why (Notice: Q10(1), p. 27):

[The] arbitration right [by which authors can question the amount of payment for an in-print Book from a publisher] does not apply to authors and publishers of Educational Books (i.e., Books that, when published, were intended primarily for sale to educational markets (i.e., K-12, higher education, continuing education, vocational, professional, self-study, and similar educational markets) for use in educational programs); disputes between those parties must be resolved under the terms of the individual author-publisher contract for the Educational Book.

Like what you hear? The parties warn that it is going to take a while to make this happen. “It will take considerable time to implement the commercial uses authorized under the Settlement, implement the elections made by Rightsholders for their Books and Inserts, and make Cash Payments…. Please be patient, and visit the Settlement Website at www.googlebooksettlement.com regularly for updates.” (Notice: Q8(E), p. 13) We’ll have to wait and see…

The text was modified to update a link from http://www1.nysd.uscourts.gov/ to http://www.nysd.uscourts.gov/ on July 13th, 2011.

Footnotes

1. See the bottom of this earlier post on DLTJ for a complete list

Announced today was a settlement between Google and the plaintiffs — the Authors Guild, the Association of American Publishers and individual authors and publishers — in the class action lawsuit about materials scanned for the Google Book Search application through the Google Book Search Library Project. This posting on DLTJ includes a brief summary of the agreement and links to the primary source public announcements and documents. Subsequent postings to DLTJ will include analysis and commentary on the agreement.

Basic Terms of the Agreement

The “Memorandum of Law” filed in support of a motion by the plaintiffs in the case summarizes the complaint and settlement agreement this way:

This class action lawsuit arises out of the decision by Defendant Google, Inc. (“Google”) to create digital copies of millions of copyrighted books and other works and make those digital copies available on its website (the “Google Library Project” or “GLP”). As its principal defense against the copyright infringement claims that have been brought against it based on this copying, Google asserted a fair use defense under 17 U.S.C. § 107, largely because it originally planned to offer the public only “snippets” (several lines of text) of access to those books and other works.

The parties now have reached an agreement that avoids a trial and appeals over the infringement claims and defenses asserted. [footnote omitted] The Settlement, once approved, would provide, among other things, the following material benefits to the Settlement Class:

• At least $45 million to compensate Settlement Class members whose works have already been scanned without permission.
• Another $34.5 million to establish and maintain a Registry of rights to books (the “Book Rights Registry” or “Registry”), which will locate Settlement Class members, maintain a database of their contact information, collect and pay revenues on behalf of the Settlement Class for the use of copyrighted works through this Settlement, and otherwise protect and represent the interests of the Settlement Class.
• Prospectively, 63% of the revenues earned from Google’s future commercial uses of the Settlement Class members’ works.
• In addition to these and other significant benefits, the proposed Settlement creates a rights clearance mechanism that lets members of the Settlement Class, at all times, retain control over their copyrighted works by giving them the ability to determine the extent to which those works are included or excluded from the Google Library Project.

As a result, the Settlement:

• Creates an innovative marketing program for authors and publishers of in-print books that catapults the publishing industry into the digital age, a result that greatly benefits individual authors and publishing houses, which simply could not launch such a program on their own;
• Addresses what has been a persistent problem, particularly for individual authors – how to breathe new life into older, out-of-print books that are generally inaccessible to the public and have stopped generating revenue;
• Is designed to maximize Settlement Class member rights by allowing any of them, at any time, to commercially exploit their works in other ways outside of the Google Library Project; and
• Benefits the Settlement Class, as well as the general public, through the ability to access books on Google’s website and, as a result of provisions addressing the extent to which libraries may also use digitized copies of these works, enjoy a new and unprecedented ability to use books and conduct research.

These benefits were reached only after two years of vigorous, hard fought, multi-party negotiations by experienced counsel on all sides. Each of the parties zealously protected their interests, including those of the authors and publishers as aligned against Google, those of the authors and publishers as they competed on some issues, and those of the libraries that, for the most part, are the source of the works Google is digitally copying and, as a result, also wanted their constituencies to benefit through the access for archival, research and other purposes specified in the Settlement Agreement.

As explained in more detail below [in the Memorandum of Law], the result is a settlement that, although complex in its structure, is elegantly simple in its result. It provides extraordinary and previously unattainable benefits to the authors, the book industry, and even the public. As a result, it falls well within the range of reasonableness necessary for the Court to grant preliminary approval.

There is much more to the agreement than this short description covers. The proposed Notice of Class Action Settlement is 39 pages and the full proposed Settlement Agreement is 141 pages plus another 162 pages of appendices. Future postings on the Disruptive Library Technology Jester blog will go into more detail and analysis.

Links to Primary Source Documents

• Google

  • Google Press Release
  • Post from Official Google Blog (statement by David Drummond, Google’s Senior Vice President, Corporate Development, and Chief Legal Officer)
  • Settlement Description (including how Book Search will change)
  • Thoughts and Opinions from the principles involved

• Settlement Administrator

  • Settlement Homepage
  • Proposed Notice of Class Action Settlement (summary of the proposed settlement)
  • Proposed Settlement Agreement
  • Joint Public FAQ (from the Association of American Publishers)

• Authors Guild

  • Settlement Announcement
  • Settlement Resources Page
  • Final University Joint Press Release with University of Michigan, University of California and Stanford

• Association of American Publishers

  • Settlement Announcement
  • Statement from AAP Chairman Richard Sarnoff

There is a message floating around the net with a link to a survey about “a completely new online resource discovery service.” There is no identifying information information on the survey; obviously the entity that commissioned it wants to remain private. I, however, want to know who this organization is. (I have some questions to ask.) Think of it as a game — a treasure hunt of sorts. Speculations welcome, either publicly in the comments or privately.

The message going around says:

Subject: REMINDER: Take a library survey – you may earn a $100 Amazon voucher

If you haven’t already done so, please participate in our 15-minute web survey and be entered to win one of five $100 Amazon gift certificates.

    www.amrsurvey.com/7410

We’d like your feedback on the potential value of a completely new online resource discovery service for libraries. All you need to do is click on the link and answer our brief survey.

Winners will receive their $100 Amazon gift certificate via email by midnight September 30th 2008.

Thanks for participating!

On-Line Communications
401 S Dewey, Suite 500
Bartlesville, OK 74003

The survey itself contains a description of the entity conducting the survey and a sample screenshot of the new discovery layer being tested:

Screenshot from the Survey's Prototype Discovery Tool

ABOUT THE VENDOR

This new discovery service is offered by a major vendor that has been exclusively serving libraries for a matter of decades. This vendor has:

• Extensive expertise in large-scale hosted search
• Experience in the quality treatment of scholarly content and its metadata
• Market recognition for consistently designing interfaces with users in mind
• Excellent, long-term relationships with thousands of publishers
• Deep knowledge of library e-resources
• Trusted, longstanding reputation for superior customer service

PRICING

The exact annual subscription rate for this discovery service would depend primarily on your enrollment/FTE.

These costs are still being developed, but an initial estimate for institutions like yours is $xxx per year, plus a one-time installation fee of $xxx.

The vendor believes that the subscription cost would be offset by savings from no longer needing to have a federated search product nor any hardware or maintenance associated with it.

The e-mail was sent out through what looks like a standard commercial bulk emailer (like the kind that send out corporate newsletters and advertisements). The amrsurvey.com domain is registered to an entity called Action Market Research, so that isn’t much help. Thoughts about who is sponsoring this survey?

The text was modified to remove a link to http://www.amrsurvey.com/7410 on January 28th, 2011.

The Espresso Book Machine (EBM) might also of interest here in Ohio. OhioLINK is building a repository of recent current-year books that we license from publishers. One wonders, with the addition of an add-on license fee to the copyright owners, whether we could use such a machine to print on-demand books from current titles. On Demand Books is obviously thinking along the same lines; in April they entered into a partnership with Lightning Source Industries, which enables the EBM to print from Lightning Source’s catalogue of over 500,000 in-copyright books. The EBM can also access nearly 400,000 public domain books through their relationship with the Open Content Alliance.

So, with that in mind, let’s take a look at the technical specifications of the EBM.

About the Espresso Book Machine

The EBM will print bind and trim a 300 page book in about 7 minutes with a one printer model and in about 3 minutes with a two printer model. Production cost is a penny a page. Consumables used by the EBM are paper, cover stock and toner suitable for laser printers, glue and charcoal filters. The first three are commonly available consumables. The glue for binding will cost less than $100 and can be used for roughly 10,000 books. The charcoal filter is replaced about once a month and costs about $1.

The trim size of a book is infinitely variable between 8.5” by 11” and 4.5” x 4.5” and the EBM version 1.5 can bind up to 550 pages. The shearing blade has to be sharpened about every 5,000 – 10,000 books; sharpening by manufacturer is recommended.

The file formats accepted are the exact same files as one would use in traditional book printing: a PDF for the book block and (ideally) a PDF for the cover. The machine will print (and then bind and trim) anything a laser printer can print. The software on the machine itself does not combine individual files into a single book; it must be “pre-made” before being delivered to the Espresso machine.

How the machine actually behaves is a bit unclear to me. The publicity says that all interaction with the machine is performed via a standard browser. The decision of how broadly to expose that interface (local network only, campus-wide, internet-wide, etc.) is reportedly up to the owner of the EBM. It is also unclear as to how the content repository works. The promotional materials speak of a world-wide content repository for Espresso machines and that content can be restricted to a particular location, but then it also goes on to say that a site can manage its own content repository or that the manufacturer of the machine can do that function for an added fee. If I learn more, I’ll update this post. If anyone knows anything about how the content repository works, please comment or get in touch with me privately.

Are we building the “next generation” catalog for us (librarians) or our users? As a read a report from the Next Generation Summit Search Interface Working Group of the Orbis/Cascade Alliance, I have to wonder. Portions of this report are dated¹ other portions are timeless. In particular, this section from page 2 (emphasis added):

How do we define “next generation”?

The working group has considered what it means to create a “next generation catalog” within the context of the current Summit interface and the current definition of “next generation” as understood within the library community. However, maybe this isn’t the right question. In part, library systems have failed to even keep up with our current generation of users, with neither the library community or vendor community really understanding how a current generation catalog might function. We have ideas from looking at vendor sites and social software tools that provide tagging, faceted browsing, and user reviews, but are these really “next generation”? No, they represent current generation functionality that library systems simply have yet to assimilate into their current service offerings. It’s a dangerous confusion of vocabulary. While these services represent “next generation” services for the library community, they don’t for our users. If a simple makeover of the ILS is to be our aim, then we will continue to fail to provide services for our current generation of users. Our current library information systems are failing our users and inhibiting our users’ attempts to build communities around our services and systems.

Libraries should rectify this problem by seeking to build systems that meet the needs of this current generation, while allowing the library community to plan for and implement functionality that will be necessary within the “next generation”. In part, this is what some libraries are doing — some examples are discussed in this report. North Carolina State University’s utilization of Endeca has been lauded far and wide, but in essence, they’ve simply started to catch up with today’s current generation of users. Yet in just catching up to the current generation, they have distinguished themselves from the rest of the library community. They have placed themselves in a position to look beyond the needs of the current generation of users and focus on the services and needs of the next. At this point, few organizations, including the Alliance, can make such a claim. That, in part, is the challenge facing the Alliance and this working group as it made its assessments.

It would seem helpful to shift terminology, because in doing so we can focus more readily on the needs of our users. They aren’t looking for a “Next Generation” interface. “Next Generation” to us means “Current Generation” to our users. “Next Generation” for our users is “what have you done for me lately?” In order to meet that need, we need a platform that is “developer-friendly.” Again, from the report:

a platform that supports and encourages interaction with the system. This can take many shapes, including OAI harvesting, SRU, OpenSearch or a simple web-services-based API to allow the Alliance to take a more proactive role in developing services.

And, finally, in the report’s recommendations:

Additionally, in researching current and in-development solutions, it became clear that if the Alliance is to continue to meet the needs of its users, it will have to demand greater access to the metadata (holdings, items, bibliographic) found within the catalog. Regardless of who provides the Alliance’s next generation OPAC product, one of the deliverables that must be available as part of any solution is API or web services access to the catalog. Access at this level is important for two reasons:

1. It allows libraries to integrate and share development resources:
   The Alliance members are currently hamstrung by the closed nature of the Summit catalog. The Summit INN- Reach catalog currently only provides two methods of interaction – Z39.50 and HTML access. For developers looking to build services around the Summit catalog, the Z39.50 protocol, as implemented, is currently too limiting and expensive for production development services. All major ILS vendors but III provide their customers a web services or HTTP REST API access to their systems, allowing for continued development around the catalog. Lacking such access, the Summit catalog will continue to be marginalized within the consortium’s academic campuses as tools and services are developed that take advantage of web service friendly applications.
2. Allows for the development of library-created or user-created mashups:
   The Alliance should strive to create a resource that encourages users, libraries, and campuses to develop services around the Summit catalog. The library community has recognized that our patrons want social tools, which we tend to identify as tagging, commenting, etc. However, Web 2.0 applications like Flickr are popular because of the API access that they provide to their users as well. This access has enabled other web services, individuals, and organizations to develop different methods for exporting and utilizing the images placed within the Flickr photo archive. The Alliance should strive to make the Summit catalog open in this way, so that users and members alike are free to enhance Summit to meet individual, campus, or consortial needs.

If it is possible to sum up what we need in “next generation” systems, I haven’t seen more succinctly put than this report.

Footnotes

1. Although the report itself does not contain a date, mention of the report appears in the agenda of a March 2007 meeting of the consortium’s Summit Catalog Committee.

Waves of change are crashing on the shores of the library profession. New media, new tools, new techniques, and new expectations collide to cause excitement, anxiety, confusion, and concern. It may be difficult to determine where we are and where we are going. At our present crossroads, it is useful to view the pressures and effects of change on our services as a matrix of commercial versus local on one axis and physical versus digital on the other. Interesting observations about the nature of content and our reaction to it can be made at the intersections of commercial and local with physical and digital. This essay uses these intersections to examine the waves of content coming to the library and our ways of managing it.

The first wave

Also part of this first wave is the management of local, physical material. This is usually in the form of special archive materials – content produced by the institution and/or curated one-of-a-kind items such as author manuscripts, correspondence, and other ephemera. An entire profession – that of an archivist – is devoted to this kind of material.

The second wave

The third wave

Does the library have a role in managing local, digital material? Should the library have a role? The JISC/SCONUL Library Management Systems Study suggests it should. It described the impact of this new wave as “applying library expertise to new views of corporate intellectual assets, such as the long term management and ‘exposure’ of both research and undergraduate outputs, in a multimedia and collaborative world.”¹ David Lewis, Dean of the University Library at Indiana University – Purdue University Indianapolis, says the transition from purchased to open access content “will do more to reshape what libraries will be and do in the future… but this has not yet been carefully considered or broadly discussed.”²

In some sense, the break between the second and third waves is the difference between the management of content that is “done”, versus the management of content as it is being created. In the first two waves, the library profession focused on the curation of knowledge published in a fixed form, usually by commercial publishers, in a reactionary manner towards the end of the content creation cycle. A focus on curating local, digital content, however, means that libraries can more directly insert their services at the point where content is being created.

One of the criticisms by authors of institutional repositories is the extra steps required to deposit their content into the library’s repository, after going through the effort of submitting it to a publisher.³ From their perspective, they are asking, “Why do I have to do this extra work for my published (‘done’) article?” What if, instead, the author stored their work-in-progress in a library service from the beginning? We could offer the promise of robust backups and versioning, collaborative writing tools, and access from anywhere. With the working draft on our servers, we could mine the text to suggest content from our curated stores, and even suggest potential collaborators based on similarities of works. And with the completed draft on our servers, “publishing” it in the institutional repository becomes a simple checkbox – “yes, make this public” – as we have already collected all of the necessary metadata that would go into the archive package in the repository.

Waves are crashing on the shores of our libraries. Waves of content that represent a fundamental shift from the physical to the digital, and the commercial to the local. Waves of change that form opportunities to evolve our services for library users by offering effective tools for the management of content, as it is created. Are you ready to ride the waves?

The text was modified to update a link from https://idea.iupui.edu/dspace/handle/1805/953 to https://scholarworks.iupui.edu/handle/1805/953 on January 28th, 2011.

Footnotes

1. Adamson, V., Bacsich, P., Chad, K., Kay, D., & Plenderleith, J. (2008). JISC & SCONUL Library Management Systems Study. p. 35. Retrieved April 17, 2008, from http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/programmes/resourcediscovery/lmsstudy.pdf
2. Lewis, D. W. (2007). A Strategy for Academic Libraries in the First Quarter of the 21st Century. College & Research Libraries, 68(5), p. 425. Also available from the IUPUI Digital Archive.
3. For more on the difficulties research faculty see with institutional repositories, see Foster, N. F., & Gibbons, S. (2005). Understanding Faculty to Improve Content Recruitment for Institutional Repositories. D-Lib Magazine, 11(1). doi: 10.1045/january2005-foster.