The internet has survived the great SOPA blackout, and we’re still talking about the fallout. Apple made a major announcement of plans to support textbooks on iPads, but there are concerns about the implementation. But the first story this week is about a free service geared towards teaching people how to program with weekly lessons throughout 2012.

Feel free to send this to others you think might be interested in the topics. If you find these threads interesting and useful, you might want to add the Thursday Threads RSS Feed to your feed reader or subscribe to e-mail delivery using the form to the right. New this year is that Pinboard has replaced FriendFeed as my primary aggregation service. If you would like a more raw and immediate version of these types of stories, watch my Pinboard bookmarks (or subscribe to its feed in your feed reader). Items posted to are also sent out as tweets; you can follow me on Twitter. Comments and tips, as always, are welcome.

Code Year: Learn to Code in 2012

Sign up for Code Year to start receiving a new interactive programming lesson every Monday. You’ll be building apps and websites before you know it!

- Code Year

Code Year is a project of internet startup Codecademy, a service that teaches people how to code (JavaScript only, at the moment). There have been three classes posted already, and the website says they are still accepting registrations at the homepage. Code Year is free, and it sends an e-mail at the beginning of each week with a link to that week’s course. More questions? See the frequently asked questions.

What I think is really cool about this is that a group of librarians has self-organized themselves to support each other through the year. There is a community area on ALA Connect and a list of resources on the catcode wiki that includes examples tailored to cataloging challenges. (“catcode” is a unique story onto itself. It is a wiki created to “help support dialogue between catalogers and coders.”)

Apple Introduces iBooks Author

Educators so far seem excited about the potential promise of a learning “revolution” enabled by Apple’s new iBooks Author app. However, not everyone is feeling that same level of enthusiasm: e-book publishing experts have concerns about the formatting that iBooks Author can output, which isn’t fully ePub 2 or ePub 3 compliant. Furthermore, Apple has added a clause to iBooks Author’s end user license agreement that prohibits selling e-books created with iBooks Author anywhere but the iBookstore.

- Enthusiasm for iBooks Author marred by licensing, format issues, by Chris Foresman, Ars Technica

Last week saw the big introduction of iBooks Textbooks for iPad and iBooks Author ebook creation utility. The combination were billed as a promising new way to have students interact with course materials and to have teachers build their own content. There were some not-so-nice surprises in the implementation, though. First, the ebook format is close to that of ePub standard from the International Digital Publishing Forum, but strays in enough important ways that the iBooks Textbooks themselves won’t be usable on non-Apple devices. Second, included the End-User License Agreement for the iBooks Author software are terms that says content created with iBooks Author can be given away freely but can only be sold through Apple’s iBookstore. Apple also reserves the right to determine if your work is sold at iBookstore with no recourse for rejected works. The article above has more details, and the press coverage of iBooks Textbooks and iBooks Author has been generally negative so far.

Update on 6-Feb-2012: Apple released iBooks Author version 1.0.1 with the only change being clarifications to the End-User License Agreement: “If you want to charge a fee for a work that includes files in the .ibooks format generated using iBooks Author, you may only sell or distribute such work through Apple, and such distribution will be subject to a separate agreement with Apple… This restriction does not apply to the content of such works when distributed in a form that does not include files in the .ibooks format.”

SOPA and Protect-IP Are Dead

Graphic from Talking Points Memo

Leaders in Congress on Friday effectively killed two pieces of anti-online piracy legislation following the increasingly vocal protests of tens of thousands of websites and millions of Internet users.

That’s right, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) in the Senate are, for all practical purposes, dead in the water.

Sure, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) and Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX) used the word “postponed” in their announcements, saying that Congress would only take a breather, but would certainly not give up for good on its goal of passing some sort of legislation designed to combat overseas “rogue” websites hosting pirated American content.

But whenever Congress decides to re-engage the online piracy fight — and it could be a while, given just how acrimonious the debate over the bills became in the last week — it’s almost certain that SOPA and PIPA won’t be revived in any recognizable form.

- How The Web Killed SOPA and PIPA, by Carl Franzen, Talking Points Memo Idea Lab

Who would have thought — grass roots organizations convince major internet presences to “black out” or otherwise inform users of ill-considered provisions (at best) in legislation, and in turn those users bury both houses of Congress with so much anti-SOPA and -PIPA feedback that they effectively kill the bills. Is this the closest we’ve come to direct democracy since ancient Athens? Perhaps! The article quoted above goes into great detail about the formational elements of SOPA and PIPA and the forces that gathered to stop them.

The response to Wikipedia being blacked out in particular was interesting. The Washington Post, The Guardian and National Public Radio announced that they would answer questions posted to Twitter with the hashtag #altwiki. Closer to the library community Credo Reference announced that free access for a day.

One could say it is an all intellectual property edition of DLTJ Thursday Threads. How could one miss the outpouring of opposition to SOPA/PROTECT-IP? If that was an overwhelming story you might have missed the introduction of the Research Works Act that could end the open access mandates now at the National Institutes of Health and coming elsewhere. And because we need some good news, Internet2 announced a new electronic textbook pilot that could be really interesting.

Feel free to send this to others you think might be interested in the topics. If you find these threads interesting and useful, you might want to add the Thursday Threads RSS Feed to your feed reader or subscribe to e-mail delivery using the form to the right. New this year is that Pinboard has replaced FriendFeed as my primary aggregation service. If you would like a more raw and immediate version of these types of stories, watch my Pinboard bookmarks (or subscribe to its feed in your feed reader). Items posted to are also sent out as tweets; you can follow me on Twitter. Comments and tips, as always, are welcome.

Support for Web Bill Wanes as Protests Spread

When the powerful world of old media mobilized to win passage of an online antipiracy bill, it marshaled the reliable giants of K Street — the United States Chamber of Commerce, the Recording Industry Association of America and, of course, the motion picture lobby, with its new chairman, former Senator Christopher J. Dodd, the Connecticut Democrat and an insider’s insider.

Yet on Wednesday this formidable old guard was forced to make way for the new as Web powerhouses backed by Internet activists rallied opposition to the legislation through Internet blackouts and cascading criticism, sending an unmistakable message to lawmakers grappling with new media issues: Don’t mess with the Internet.

- Support for Web Bill Wanes as Protests Spread, By Jonathan Weisman, New York Times

The population of the internet became very familiar with the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT-IP Act (a.k.a. PIPA) today with major internet services like Wikipedia blocking access to its articles and Google placing a black rectangle over its logo. Advocacy sites like americancensorship.org and blacklist.eff.org and www.google.com/landing/takeaction sprang up to prompt U.S. citizens to call their Senators and non-U.S. citizens to petition the U.S. State Department to set in motion opposition to bills that once seemed inevitable. And all sorts of people took to Twitter to protest the fact that they couldn’t use Wikipedia to answer their homework.

It wasn’t all a one-way street, though. Former Senator Chris Dodd (and now MPAA chairperson) denounced the protests as “an irresponsible response and a disservice to people who rely on [the sites] for information and [who] use their services.” House Judiciary Committee Chairperson Lamar Smith announced that his committee will resume consideration of SOPA in February. And PROTECT-IP Act sponsor Senator Leahy released a point-by-point rebuttal to some of the claims made by opponents.

At the end of the day, the protest clearly had an effect on the legislation as co-sponsors dropped their support of PROTECT-IP and others made statements opposing the bill. As this is being written on the evening of the 18th, the ProPublica lists 41 Senators supporting and 19 Senators opposing or “leaning no” (OpenCongress’ whip count lists it as 34 to 35 versus last night’s OpenCongress count of 39 to 16), so it is unclear whether there the 60 votes required to end debate and move for passage of PROTECT-IP in the Senate as promised by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

I’ve stated my objections to SOPA and my objections to PROTECT-IP, and reiterated them today by putting up an anti-SOPA/PROTECT-IP splash page on DLTJ. I also still think there is more to learn a few levels deeper than the anti-SOPA/PROTECT-IP advocacy. ProPublica has a project called Who in Congress Supports SOPA and PIPA/PROTECT-IP? that offers a variety of ways to categorize supporters and opponents of the legislation including an accounting of campaign donations by industry. On my own Stop-SOPA/PROTECT-IP page, I ask readers to look into Laurence Lessig’s #Rootstrikers movement. A big part of the disconnect and dysfunctional nature of public office holders is the role that campaign contributions play — or, at best, have the appearance of influence — in the public policy decision making. So while SOPA/PROTECT-IP opponents may have won the battle, there is much to do to win the war of undue influence that created SOPA and PIPA in the first place.

More Legislative Shenanigans: Research Works Act

In case SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act, hasn’t given you enough heartburn, here’s another development on the legislative horizon to be concerned about–H.R. 3699, the Research Works Act. The Association of American Publishers has provided a summary of what they hope the bill will accomplish, which is a frightening read for those of us committed to the principles of Open Access. It appears that H.R. 3699 would seriously threaten public access to federally funded research and deal a critical blow to the Open Access movement, which has been buoyed by exactly the kind of activity H.R. 3699 seeks to curtail in the AAP’s view, namely public access mandates and the development of repositories for publicly funded research.

- More Legislative Shenanigans: Research Works Act (H.R. 3699), by Meredith Kahn, University of Michigan’s MPublishing blog

Yes, that’s right — more intellectual property legislation in front of the U.S. Congress. This time it is a bill that would protect the business interests of academic publishers by preventing the U.S. government from mandating open access to federally funded research. An article in The Guardian (U.K.) paper says academic publishers have become the enemies of science. The twist here is that one of the sponsors of the Research Works Act is none other that Representative Darrell Issa, one of the leading opponents to SOPA in the House Judiciary Committee. As you might guess, campaign donations are involved and so there is a call from #Rootstrikers to help fight “SOPA v2″.

Internet2, McGraw-Hill, Courseload, and Five Universities Implement eText Pilot in Spring 2012

Participating universities in the pilot get McGraw-Hill eTexts, the Courseload reader and annotation platform integrated with their Learning Management System, and can be part of a joint research study of eText use and perceptions. Through the Courseload software, students can print, use social annotation with classmates and instructors, and access their eTexts on any HTML5-capable tablet, smartphone, or computer. Students will receive their eTexts at no cost as the institutions are subsidizing the study, and students who prefer a full hardcopy book may optionally order a print-on-demand version of the eText for a $28 fee. Faculty interest at the pilot institutions has been very strong.

- Internet2, McGraw-Hill, Courseload, and Five Universities Implement eText Pilot in Spring 2012, Internet2 Press Release

This is good news for students and etextbooks. It sounds like a good experiment and I’m eager to see the outcomes of the pilot. And something that might make next week’s DLTJ Thursday Threads? The rumor that Apple is expected to delve into textbooks in an announcement today.

As the last DLTJ Thursday Threads of the year, the stories in this post look back to what we saw in 2011 and look forward to what we may see in 2012. Looking backwards is a list of five things we learned about publishing from O’Reilly Media and Google’s 3-minute Zeitgeist video. Looking forward are a list of predictions from Fast Company and from the National Endowment for Science Technology and the Arts in the UK. At this high point when 2011 is slowing and we start down the hill of 2012, I wish you a happy and prosperous new year.

Feel free to send this to others you think might be interested in the topics. If you find these threads interesting and useful, you might want to add the Thursday Threads RSS Feed to your feed reader or subscribe to e-mail delivery using the form to the right. If you would like a more raw and immediate version of these types of stories, watch my FriendFeed stream (or subscribe to its feed in your feed reader). Comments and tips, as always, are welcome.

Five things we learned about publishing in 2011

1. Amazon is, indeed, a disruptive publishing competitor
2. Publishers aren’t necessary to publishing
3. Readers sure do like ebooks
4. HTML5 is an important publishing technology
5. DRM is full of unintended consequences

- Five things we learned about publishing in 2011, by Jenn Webb, O’Reilly Radar

I think we can add a sixth thing: The relationship between libraries and publishers is no longer a passive one. Although libraries and publishers were always intertwined, this year we saw more stories where they came head-to-head (HarperCollins/OverDrive and Authors Guild versus HathiTrust) and side-by-side (Douglas County’s Ebook Lending). I expect we will see this trend continue in 2012.

Google’s Year in Review

Within the frame of Google’s newly launched Google+ project, this three minute video provides a perspective on the top news stories of the year.

10 Bold Tech Predictions For 2012

1. Social business will take off in 2012, but companies will struggle to adopt.
2. A significant failure in a popular cloud service will set the cloud movement back.
3. Mobile IT will grow slowly in the enterprise.
4. Organizations will increase IT infrastructure investments.
5. An iPad tablet alternative will emerge out of the fragmented Android market.
6. Android vs. iOS 2012.
7. eBooks will dominate.
8. Information overload will get much worse.
9. Consolidation in the social business/enterprise collaboration market.
10. A significant new player will emerge in the social networking space.

- 10 Bold Tech Predictions For 2012, by David Lavenda, Fast Company

A couple things for libraries to watch in this list. I don’t know if eBooks will dominate, but they will certainly become more prevalent. The first quarter 2012 sales for ebooks will be interesting because many people are expecting a bump in sales that corresponds with e-reader gifts. (Helped, no doubt, by the introduction of the new Kindle models late in the year.) Look for libraries to publish statistics of lending as well, although one wonders how much “head room” is left in the lendable collections after the last surge of e-reader sales. Given that budgets in libraries — and the cities/states/universities over them — tend to lag the business world, I’m not sure that IT spending in libraries will increase although there is some infrastructure that really needs to be updated. And personally I think libraries should punt on the whole Android versus iOS debate and design for a mobile, HTML5-based world.

12 predictions for 2012

1. Innovation for frugality: This year innovators will become thriftier
2. Raspberry Pi and the rise of the cheap computer: We’ll see a return to home programming
3. Massively connected: The Internet of Things will come of age
4. Healthy appetite for tech: Our approach to health will become more like a running club
5. The rise of the new reporter: Data journalism will defy the decline of the printed press
6. Your mobile wallet: Technology enabling our phones to act as mobile wallets will finally break through
7. Seeing the impact in impact investing: The impact investment industry will step up a gear
8. The death and life of great public servants: A growing movement of leaders will challenge the separation of public and private sectors
9. 3D printing: The next Industrial Revolution will continue to pick up steam
10. Educated gamers: Next Christmas the games will be much more serious
11. The year of the crowdfunder: 2012 will prove an important year for the evolution of business funding
12. Outside the Box: Next year we’ll see a seismic shift in how we understand, view and make television

- 12 predictions for 2012, National Endowment for Science Technology and the Arts (UK)

This list comes from the National Endowment for Science Technology and the Arts in the U.K., so I think some of the predictions are specific to that country (the mobile wallet prediction, in particular), but I believe most of these are pretty general for the U.S. as well.

Two serious threads this week and one fun one. The first serious story is a look at the attitudes of e-book consumers from the Book Industry Study Group, including a finding that almost half of all e-book consumers would wait for an electronic edition up to three months after the print edition has been released. The second serious story is about a university press starting to sell excerpts from backlist titles as a way to capitalize on existing content. And finally, the fun story is a 12 minute TED talk from the founder of the Improv Everywhere project.

Feel free to send this to others you think might be interested in the topics. If you find these threads interesting and useful, you might want to add the Thursday Threads RSS Feed to your feed reader or subscribe to e-mail delivery using the form to the right. If you would like a more raw and immediate version of these types of stories, watch my FriendFeed stream (or subscribe to its feed in your feed reader). Comments and tips, as always, are welcome.

Ongoing BISG Study Reveals E-Book Buyers Deepening Commitment to Digital Formats

E-book sales can be expected to continue growing as readers show increased loyalty to and satisfaction with the digital format, according to Book Industry Study Group’s (BISG) closely watched Consumer Attitudes Toward E-Book Reading survey. Results of the final installment in Volume Two of the survey show that nearly 50% of print book consumer who have also acquired an e-book in the past 18 months would wait up to three months for the e-version of a book from a favorite author, rather than immediately read it in print. A year ago, only 38% said they would wait this long.

- More Than a Passing Fancy: Ongoing BISG Study Reveals E-Book Buyers Deepening Commitment to Digital Formats, BISG Press Release, 8-Nov-2011

Mark Nelson over at The CITE (a blog on Course materials, Innovation, and Technology in Education) points to this press release from the Book Industry Study Group about an ongoing survey on e-book adoption attitudes. The results of the survey are available for purchase, with the press release and Mark’s post providing tantalizing on what it contains. The announcements of the sharp uptake in interest of ebooks in libraries echoes this data. As you might recall, this interest jumped after the holiday season last year with analysts speculating it was because of the number of e-reader devices given as gifts. Amazon’s recent announcements of new devices is likely to spur the same thing to happen again this holiday season. Our are libraries and service providers ready for another jump in ebook interest in January?

Princeton University Press Enters Digital Market with Princeton Shorts

The Chronicle reports that Princeton University Press will test the digital market with its Princeton Shorts.  Using its back list it will take excerpts and package them as e-books.  Running from 20 to 100 pages in length it will have a price range between 99 cents to $4.99 and unlike Kindle Singles, Princeton Shorts will not introduce new content instead it will take selections and place new titles on them, according to the story. Douglas Armato, director of the University of Minnesota Press, called it “good, savvy publishing on Princeton’s part.” In an e-mail, he said he was “interested to hear what happens—particularly if the market for the ‘shorts’ turns out to be more classroom than general trade.”

- Princeton University Press Enters Digital Market with Princeton Shorts, The CITE

Another post from Mark Nelson in The CITE points to an article behind the Chronicle of Higher Education paywall about the new Princeton Shorts effort from the Princeton University Press. There are a few more details in the blog post from the Press and in a Los Angeles Times article. For libraries, I think the interesting question comes whether these “Shorts” attempt to enter into library purchase plans as new items. Libraries should really not be paying for the same content twice, and if the Shorts are truly unedited excerpts from existing books then hopefully they won’t count as “new” items.

Charlie Todd: The shared experience of absurdity

Charlie Todd causes bizarre, hilarious, and unexpected public scenes: Seventy synchronized dancers in storefront windows, “ghostbusters” running through the New York Public Library, and the annual no-pants subway ride. At TEDxBloomington he shows how his group, Improv Everywhere, uses these scenes to bring people together.

- Charlie Todd: The shared experience of absurdity, Video on TED.com from TEDxBloomington

This one is just for fun. Charlie is the founder of Improv Everywhere. With the tagline “We Cause Scenes”, Improv Everywhere describes itself as “a New York City-based prank collective that causes scenes of chaos and joy in public places. Created in August of 2001 by Charlie Todd, Improv Everywhere has executed over 100 missions involving tens of thousands of undercover agents.” It first came to my attention with the Who You Gonna Call? prank in the New York Public Library reminiscent of the opening scenes of the first Ghostbusters movie. The other videos of Improv Everywhere are just as funny.

In this weeks thread of topics: the final report of library linked data, an interview with one of the executives of Wiley Publishing, important questions to ask when considering major system migrations, and the announcement of work to begin on a new comment and evaluation overlay layer for the web.

Feel free to send this to others you think might be interested in the topics. If you find these threads interesting and useful, you might want to add the Thursday Threads RSS Feed to your feed reader or subscribe to e-mail delivery using the form to the right. If you would like a more raw and immediate version of these types of stories, watch my FriendFeed stream (or subscribe to its feed in your feed reader). Comments and tips, as always, are welcome.

Library Linked Data Incubator Group Final Report

Key recommendations of the report are:

• That library leaders identify sets of data as possible candidates for early exposure as Linked Data and foster a discussion about Open Data and rights;
• That library standards bodies increase library participation in Semantic Web standardization, develop library data standards that are compatible with Linked Data, and disseminate best-practice design patterns tailored to library Linked Data;
• That data and systems designers design enhanced user services based on Linked Data capabilities, create URIs for the items in library datasets, develop policies for managing RDF vocabularies and their URIs, and express library data by re-using or mapping to existing Linked Data vocabularies;
• That librarians and archivists preserve Linked Data element sets and value vocabularies and apply library experience in curation and long-term preservation to Linked Data datasets.

- Library Linked Data Incubator Group Final Report, World Wide Web Consortium Incubator Group

This week the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) announced the publication of the final report of the Library Linked Data Incubator Group. I’m happy to have been a part of the creation of this report. I think it is an important stake in the ground that documents where we are now and where we could be going with connecting library data to a wider world. We wrote it with several audiences in mind — each of the groups highlighted in the block quote above — so I think you’ll get something out of it no matter what your career path in the library profession. (If parts seem a little technical, skip them until you hit the next section.)

Failure is a digital prerequisite

In the following podcast, Jesse Wiley (@jcwiley), who works on digital and new business initiatives at John Wiley & Sons, Inc., and is a seventh-generation Wiley family member, talks about the challenges the 200-year-old company faces in the digital age. Wiley says that success and innovation depend on learning how to fail — and expecting to fail.

- Failure is a digital prerequisite, O’Reilly Radar blog

This 25 minute interview is part of the O’Reilly “Tools of Change” podcast series. Tools of Change is a conference and related media put together by O’Reilly Media that seeks to explore the boundaries of what is happening in the publishing field. This interview is a thoughtful exploration of what it takes for a company the size of Wiley to navigate the shift from all print to combined print/digital as it tries to figure out what parts of its business model belong in an all-digital world. It is useful for libraries to know what publishers are going through and considering as we navigate this shift ourselves.

Ten Questions to Ask About LMS Migrations

Admittedly, many of these questions seem – indeed are – obvious. Yet a steady stream of campus newspaper articles, editorials, and blogs periodically delivered to my computer via Google Alerts affirms the wise words a pragmatic professor offered in the opening moments of a graduate seminar on public policy many years ago: “implementation is the movement from cup to lip.” While many campuses to a great job of planning the transition to a new LMS, a good number do not. And the problem areas all seem to involve training and support for students and faculty.

As with so many IT issues, technology may be the easy part of a LMS transition. It’s the planning, policy, and people factors that pose the real (and continuing) challenges.

- Ten Questions to Ask About LMS Migrations, Kenneth C. Green, Inside Higher Ed

In this context, “LMS” is “learning management system” — the systems in higher education that professors use to bring a digital component to their classes with an online syllabus, discussion forums, document posting, etc. The ten questions are equally useful for considering transitions from integrated library systems. The headings of the questions are:

1. Why are we considering a LMS review and possible LMS migration?
2. What does our current LMS do well and what do we want (need!) it to do better?
3. What is the real annual cost of our current LMS?
4. Who will be involved in the review process?
5. What’s been the experience of institutions similar to ours that have undertaken a LMS review and a LMS migration?
6. How fast are we prepared to migrate to a new LMS, should we decide to do so?
7. What kind of training and support services will students and faculty need to expedite the transition to a new LMS?
8. What are the benefits – instructional, operational, and financial – of migrating to a new LMS?
9. How will we evaluate the LMS migration process?
10. How should we document the LMS migration experience?

The article has explanatory paragraphs for each of these questions.

Hypothes.is: The Internet, peer reviewed.

If wherever we encountered new information, sentence by sentence, frame by frame, we could easily know the best thinking on it.

If we had confidence that this represented the combined wisdom of the most informed people–not as anointed by editors, but as weighed over time by our peers, objectively, statistically and transparently.

If this created a powerful incentive for people to ensure that their works met a higher standard, and made it perceptibly harder to spread information that didn’t meet that standard.

These goals are possible with today’s technologies.

They are the objectives of Hypothes.is.

- Hypothes.is homepage

This is a pre-announcement for a new layer that will sit above the web as we know it now and allow for commenting, rating, and evaluation of content in a browser. It proposes to be an open source, distributed effort with the potential to be a neutral evaluation source. The five minute video introducing the project is full of hopeful expectation for what this layer of commentary and evaluation can do for human progress. As I listened, I wonder what the role of libraries would be as nodes for hosting the proposed open-source solutions for people to store their comments and evaluations.

The project has signed on a number of notable names of internet culture to advise the development team. It is in the process of gathering $100,000 of funding from volunteers via the Kickstart service with a deadline of November 14th. This is a project to watch.

This week’s list of threads starts with a pointer a statement by the International Coalition of Library Consortia on the growing pressure between publishers and libraries over the appropriate rights and permissions for scholarly material. In that same vein, Joe Lucia writes about his vision for libraries and the cultural commons to the Digital Public Library of America mailing list. On the more geeker side is a third link to an article with the experience of content producers creating HTML5-enabled web apps. And finally, on the far geeky side, is a view of what happens when a whole lot of new wireless devices — smartphones, tablets, and the like — show up on a wifi network.

Feel free to send this to others you think might be interested in the topics. If you find these threads interesting and useful, you might want to add the Thursday Threads RSS Feed to your feed reader or subscribe to e-mail delivery using the form to the right. If you would like a more raw and immediate version of these types of stories, watch my FriendFeed stream (or subscribe to its feed in your feed reader). Comments and tips, as always, are welcome.

ICOLC Response to the International Association of Scientific Technical and Medical (STM) Statement

A recent statement by the International Association of Scientific Technical and Medical Publishers (STM) advocates a set of new guidelines for document delivery (http://www.stm-assoc.org/industry-news/stm-statement-on-document-delivery/). While intellectual property laws vary from country to country, STM’s approach would radically alter well-established library practices that advance knowledge, support scholarship, and are compliant with current copyright laws. The STM recommendations are in conflict with widely held principles that provide a copyright exception for interlibrary loan (ILL) activities. The regime anticipated by the STM statement would place unfair restrictions on researchers’ access to information. In particular, ICOLC contends that:

1. interlibrary loan, under existing principles and laws, is consistent with the three-step test of Berne;
2. cross-border deliveries are adequately and appropriately governed by current copyright law;
3. digital document delivery directly to an end-user is best coordinated through the end-user’s library or community of learners;
4. libraries are able to deliver on-site articles to library walk-up patrons in any format, including both digital and print;
5. current copyright law appropriately places the burden on the library user to affirm that the documents they receive are for private, non-commercial use.

The ICOLC strongly supports IFLA’s Draft Library Treaty, Article 7, which states “It shall be permissible for a library or archive to supply a copy of any work. . . lawfully acquired or accessed by the library or archive, to another library or archive for subsequent supply to any of its users, by any means . . . provided that such use is compatible with fair practice as determined in national law” (http://www.ifla.org/files/clm/publications/tlib.pdf). See also ARL’s statement clarifying legal protections afforded to libraries for national and international ILL use (http://publications.arl.org/rli275/18), and related documents (http://publications.arl.org/rli275/4 and http://publications.arl.org/rli275).

- ICOLC Response to the International Association of Scientific Technical and Medical (STM) Statement, International Coalition of Library Consortia, issued June 22, 2011

On the heels of last week’s frightening copyright scenario comes this statement from the International Coalition of Library Consortia. It was short, so the main content of the statement is posted above. Follow the link in the citation to find contact information for the ICOLC statement. Library Journal also has an article on the statement with quotes from Tracy Thompson-Przylucki and Ann Okerson.

Libraries & the Cultural Commons

Reduced to its medium-independent core, the mission of libraries is to subsidize and sustain barrier-free access to intellectual and cultural resources for our constituents and communities. In that sense, libraries establish a bridge between the proprietary realm of commercially supplied intellectual property and the gift economies of intellectual and cultural expression. From my perspective, everything we do flows from that core function. The DPLA will be, in effect, a new global networked digital face of the library as cultural and intellectual commons.

- Libraries & the Cultural Commons, by Joe Lucia, DPLA mailing list, 22-Jun-2011

Joe Lucia, University Librarian at Villanova University, posted this broad and, frankly, energizing view of the role for libraries to the Digital Public Library of America mailing list. If you want a concise view of how libraries are about content and services and not the historical carrier and delivery mechanisms, then take a look at this message.

The FT and NPR: HTML5 as part of a multi-platform strategy

I had heard that the FT and Apple were struggling to come to an agreement on digital subscriptions, so it came as no surprise to me that the FT has launched an HTML5 web app. Some folks have added sneer quotes around app, but I’m not going to. The HTML5 version of the FT’s app looks, behaves and has even more functionality than their native iPad app.

- The FT and NPR: HTML5 as part of a multi-platform strategy, Strange Attractor blog, 7-Jun-2011

I think there is a strong future in common agreement of web markup standards over proprietary app development. I’ve made that point serveral times on DLTJ, so I remain attuned to stories that point in that direction. This article points to how the U.K.’s Financial Times built an iPad app using the built-in Safari browser and the HTML5 tools like advanced cascading stylesheets and offline storage for reading when you are off the net (just like the old Financial Times native app). And, of course, the techniques work on other tablet platforms with minimal modification. NPR is experimenting with the same technique using Google’s Chrome web browser.

Wi-Fi client surge forcing fresh wireless LAN thinking

IDC reports that twice as many smartphones and tablets, nearly all with Wi-Fi, will ship compared to laptops this year. The number of Wi-Fi certified handsets in 2010 was almost 10 times the number certified in 2007, according to the Wi-Fi Alliance. Tablets, e-readers and portable audio devices are helping to drive this growth.

The result is a very different wireless environment in terms of radio behaviors, Wi-Fi implementations, applications, usage and traffic compared to just a year or two ago. This raises a different set of issues from simply managing these mobile devices with tools from vendors…

- Wi-Fi client surge forcing fresh wireless LAN thinking, by John Cox, Network World

Long ago I used to have to manage network infrastructure. That was back in the days when, for a small organization, one person could be the unix system administrator, the network administrator, and help with desktop support. With the complexity and pervasiveness of devices, though, I don’t think one person can do all of that any more. It is articles like this one that talk about the difficulties managing wireless networks that are bursting at the seams with new devices that make me realize how far networking has come in the past two decades.

I recently started reading content from a tablet device and in doing so re-encountered a list of web pages stashed in a Read It Later queue that are over a year old. Not only were these pages interesting enough to read a year ago, but in light of a year’s worth of “internet time” of innovations some of them are down right fascinating. So the DLTJ Thursday Threads this week are weaved from new reflections on old stories. First is a 13-month-old view of what publishers can do to reverse the perceived decline of their relevance in a digital publishing era. 15 months ago was an outline for a new role for publishers to engage authors and readers. And a little over a year ago came the first explorations of the “internet operating system”.

Feel free to send this to others you think might be interested in the topics. If you find these threads interesting and useful, you might want to add the Thursday Threads RSS Feed to your feed reader or subscribe to e-mail delivery using the form to the right. If you would like a more raw and immediate version of these types of stories, watch my FriendFeed stream (or subscribe to its feed in your feed reader). Comments and tips, as always, are welcome.

Book Publishers’ Regrets in 2025

In 2025, when book publishers look back to try to understand why their business became first disintermediated and then displaced, the prevailing sentiment will be one of regret. They will ask themselves: “How did we fail to learn from the example of the music industry and newspaper business? Why didn’t we take advantage of new technologies instead of fighting them? How did we manage to fail to create a new generation of book readers and book buyers?”

Book buyers are not born, they are created. Today’s college students will become tomorrow’s book buyers only if book publishers invest in nurturing their next customers. Book publishers are not doing this. At some point today’s book buying market will age out of the purchasing mode (fixed incomes, more time etc.), meaning that the future of the lending library is bright indeed.

What Should Book Publishers Do:

- Book Publishers’ Regrets in 2025, Joshua Kim, Inside Higher Ed’s Blog U.

From April 2010 comes Joshua’s recommendations for what publishers should do: Sell the Book, Not the Format; Integrate the Formats; Sell to the Tribe; Treat Book Readers as Marketers, Not Potential Customers; and Start with College Libraries. Each heading has a paragraph describing what it means. A year later, I don’t think any mainstream publishers have taken him up on his offer, and I don’t think we are better off.

How to create new reading experiences profitably

Making books into e-books is not the challenge facing publishers and authors today. In fact, thinking in terms of merely translating text to a different display interface completely misses the problem of creating a new reading experience. Books have served well as, and will continue to be, containers for moving textual and visual information between places and across generations. They work. They won’t stop working. But when moving to a digital environment, books need to be conceived with an eye firmly set on the interactions that the text/content will inspire. Those interactions happen between the author and work, the reader and the work, the author and reader, among readers and between the work and various services, none of which exist today in e-books, that connect works to one another and readers in the community of one book with those in other book-worlds.

- How to create new reading experiences profitably, Mitch Ratcliffe, booksahead.com

From January 2010, Mitch Ratcliffe talks about what it means to connect with readers in a digital format, and as he says it goes beyond “merely translating text into a different display interface.” His essay talks about how publishers become the “switchboard” that connect the ideas of authors with and among the readers of the text in ways that are only possible in the digital, network-enabled realm. We may be seeing the first stages of this with publishing platforms like Commentpress and Digress.it and Anthologize.

The State of the Internet Operating System

I’ve been talking for years about “the internet operating system“, but I realized I’ve never written an extended post to define what I think it is, where it is going, and the choices we face. This is that missing post. Here you will see the underlying beliefs about the future that are guiding my publishing program as well as the rationale behind conferences I organize like the Web 2.0 Summit and Web 2.0 Expo, the Where 2.0 Conference, and even the Gov 2.0 Summit and Gov 2.0 Expo.

- The State of the Internet Operating System, Tim O’Reilly

In this two part series from March 2010 and April 2010, publisher and visionary Tim O’Reilly defines the components of an “internet operating system” and looks at the companies that at the time were delivering some or all of the components. The second post is the real interesting one, but you can’t really read it without understanding what Tim means by the “internet operating system”: Search; Media Access; Communications; Identity and the Social Graph; Payment; Advertising; Location; Activity Streams; Time; Image and Speech Recognition; and
Government Data. It is an interesting vision, and even more interesting to see now 12 months later what companies have stepped up to fill niches in the vision. Out of all of the stories in this post, I think this is the most interesting to come back to in a year.

Hickory, with true-to-life parting attitude (left) and Mittens

Okay, cute cat pictures aside, this week’s DLTJ Thursday Threads has three stories. The first is a pointer a project that scans and releases out-of-copyright music scores; this is an interest project not only for questions of copyright and asserting public domain rights but also for what it says about the perception of libraries and librarians. The second story, suggesting that organizations should hire for attitude and train for skill, makes me wonder about how this principle could be applied to the library profession. And lastly, the U.S. federal government has issued a broadband availability map based on data collected from states.

Feel free to send this to others you think might be interested in the topics. If you find these threads interesting and useful, you might want to add the Thursday Threads RSS Feed to your feed reader or subscribe to e-mail delivery using the form to the right. If you would like a more raw and immediate version of these types of stories, watch my FriendFeed stream (or subscribe to its feed in your feed reader). Comments and tips, as always, are welcome.

Free Trove of Music Scores on Web Hits Sensitive Copyright Note

The site, the International Music Score Library Project, has trod in the footsteps of Google Books and Project Gutenberg and grown to be one of the largest sources of scores anywhere. It claims to have 85,000 scores, or parts for nearly 35,000 works, with several thousand being added every month. That is a worrisome pace for traditional music publishers, whose bread and butter comes from renting and selling scores in expensive editions backed by the latest scholarship. More than a business threat, the site has raised messy copyright issues and drawn the ire of established publishers.

The site (imslp.org) is an open-source repository that uses the Wikipedia template and philosophy, “a visual analogue of a normal library,” in the words of its founder, Edward W. Guo, the former conservatory student. Volunteers scan in scores or import them from other sources, like Beethoven House, the museum and research institute in Bonn, Germany. Other users oversee copyright issues and perform maintenance. Quality control — like catching missed pages — is also left to the public. “It’s completely crowd sourced,” Mr. Guo said.

This article from the New York Times about the International Music Score Library Project (IMSLP) struck several chords with me (please pardon the pun). First is that this is the sort of activity libraries should be deeply engaged in. In a world where the mass distribution of physical works is common and the aggregation of digital access to materials being bundled into comprehensive (sometimes consortial-based) licenses (or libraries be bypassed by commercial distribution chains altogether), libraries can distinguish themselves by supporting projects that curate the unique and the local. The project has the word “Library” in the title and they have a category of volunteers called “librarians” (one is a high school student) but I can’t find evidence of the traditional library profession in the creation or support of the operation. As a librarian-by-formal degree (Simmons College, 2003) I’m neither offended by this, nor concerned that the project doesn’t have the involvement of librarian-by-degree people. Rather, I see this as markers of what people expect a library to be and what a librarian should do. This is an example of something we should strive towards.

The second chord is the copyright issue. It seems that this is another publishing industry segment that is under assault by the easy and relatively inexpensive distribution of content over the internet. In this case, it is the scanned versions of public domain scores. (The IMSLP has a Copyright Made Easy page describing what can and cannot be released on the site.) On the other hand, publishers can earn money by making researching and publishing what-the-composer-intended changes (my paraphrase) to public domain scores, then copyrighting the resulting derivative work. For most, scanned versions of out-of-copyright works are probably good enough and there is a cadre of volunteers who find personal fulfilment in scanning, uploading, proofing, and categorizing these versions. In its history, IMSLP was challenged in court, taken down, then reformulated and brought back online again by the original creator with the added support of volunteers. The IMSLP recently celebrated its five-year anniversary and although it faces the threat of lawsuits again, it is still going strong (hundreds if not thousands of changes per day).

Hire for Attitude, Train for Skill

How does the practice’s leader, Dr. Rushika Fernandopulle, find the right people for these unusual (but critical) jobs? “We recruit for attitude and train for skill,” Dr. Fernandopulle told Dr. Gawande. “We don’t recruit from health care. This kind of care requires a very different mind-set from usual care. For example, what is the answer for a patient who walks up to the front desk with a question? The answer is ‘Yes.’ ‘Can I see a doctor?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Can I get help making my ultrasound appointment?’ ‘Yes.’ Health care trains people to say no to patients.”

Now that’s an effective prescription for innovation!

This article in Harvard Business Review uses an example of a “special care center” in a physician’s practice to demonstrate how attitude of workers is key in radically moving an organization forward. I’ll admit to a mental struggle of trying to integrate the lessons of this story with that of the International Music Score Library Project above. This may be the kind of hiring model we need for “re-imagining the future of libraries” (to take a riff off of the physician’s practice motto). But with seemingly so many service aspects that we can’t let go of, I’m finding it hard to imagine not hiring for skills. [Via OCLC Research's Above-the-Fold.]

National Broadband Map: How Connected is My Community?

The National Broadband Map is a tool to search, analyze and map broadband availability across the United States. Created and maintained by the NTIA, in collaboration with the FCC, and in partnership with 50 states, five territories and the District of Columbia.

On February 17th, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) launched the National Broadband Map — a collection and visualization of better-than-dialup internet service providers in the United States. It came about using funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. Grant funds were given to states to gather the information needed to create the map, and it is on a schedule to be updated every six months. Network World Magazine has 6 cool things learned from the National Broadband Map (One: There is a large gap between connection speeds for small businesses and for medium and large businesses; Two: A dearth of broadband providers in the Northeast; Three: DSL is still the most available wireline technology; Four: Wireless looks like the future for rural broadband; Five: New York is the king of the 100Mbps download; Six: Wyoming is not a good place for high-speed Internet).

It wasn’t too long ago that the music industry was in an uproar about stories of how easy it was to copy digital audio files and make digital copies with high fidelity. It was predicted that we would see the same thing in other media forms, and this week’s DLTJ Thursday Threads has two stories on the topic of book publishing. First is news of another inexpensive and simple (and now to be commercially produced) book digitizing system. Although the process of “ripping” a book from its physical medium might take longer than an audio track, these kind of devices are emerging that will make it simple to do. What happens with the digital copy after that? The second Thursday Threads pointer is to an interview with the founder of book publishing industry consultant about the state of book piracy, how it is measured, and why digital rights management software is a poor way to stop it. The last entry this week is a short excerpt of a brief summary of a study conducted by OCLC last year on the usage of MARC tags in cataloging records.

As a side note, apologies to DLTJ readers that had problems reading some of the content here over the past couple of weeks. A series of problems with my personal server — driven by the fact, I believe, that the server was first set up about 10 years ago and all the patches, tweaks, and updates over the decade have finally driven performance into the ground — prompted me to migrate this blog to Amazon’s Web Services cloud. It is now running on a micro Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2) virtual machine backed by Simple Storage Service (S3) and the CloudFront content distribution network. I’ve also been optimizing the snot out of configuration — employing all sorts of new tricks for reducing the time it takes to deliver pages to your browser. I have another blog post in draft with the details for when anyone (even me!) wants to replicate it. Given enough personal time, watch for that in the next week or so.

All of that said, if you are seeing things that don’t look or function right, please let me know.

Book Saver – A personal book digitization setup from ION

Picture and Demonstration Video of the Book Saver from ION

Book Saver has two cameras that take separate images in rapid succession of each page within an open book. Both cameras of Book Saver also have a flash for allowing the page to be fully illuminated during the scanning process. Book Saver’s cradle, where the book is placed during the scanning process, is also angled as to not require you to hold pages down to get a flat, even surface. While similar devices require up to seven seconds per one page, Book Saver takes only one second per two pages!

News of the new Book Saver product comes from Fiacre O’Duinn. It is a hand-held device for digitizing book materials. The promotional literature says it takes about 15 minutes to digitize a 200-page book. The product was announced in time for the Consumer Electronics Show earlier this month, but is not yet available. It is expected to ship this summer with a manufacturer’s suggested retail price of $189 (I’m already seeing price points of $149 mentioned).

One of the “Key Features” listed on the product page is that the device “eliminates the need to purchase electronic versions of reading material you already own.” As Fiacre points out in his post, this really brings down the cost (in equipment and in effort) of digitally reproducing books. Are we about to see a new wave of personal book sharing/piracy? And what will the impact on libraries be? In the higher education arena, it is already being mentioned as a way to digitize textbooks. It is conceivable that students would borrow textbooks from our libraries, digitize them in an afternoon, and return them — or maybe just digitize them in the library. Do we need to get ahead of devices like this with education and policy initiatives?

Book Piracy: Less DRM, More Data

As digital book publishing continues to expand at a rapid pace to meet reader demands, piracy rears its head at the forefront of many a discussion in publisher circles. Many publishers respond to the perceived threat with strict digital rights management (DRM) software. But is this the best solution? And does it even provide protection from piracy?

In the following interview, Magellan Media founder and TOC 2011 speaker Brian O’Leary (@brianoleary) discusses the current state of book piracy, how measurement data isn’t sufficient to determine its impact, and why DRM is a poor anti-piracy tool.

The same arguments in favor of digital rights management for the music sector are now being made in the book publishing sector. This interview comes from the perspective of why DRM is the wrong answer to the perceived problem of book piracy. The backdrop is O’Reilly Media’s Tools of Change for Publishing conference to be held next month in New York City.

Core Bibliographic Description

Those “outliers” can be categorized according to three general purposes:

• Provenance and Identity: identifiers (e.g. ISBN, OCLC, etc.) and cataloging source (040)
• Elements useful for discovery: title statement (245), personal names (100, 700) and subject (650)
• Elements useful for understanding and evaluation: publication statement (260), physical description (300), and notes (500)

That’s it. In a nutshell you have the very core of bibliographic description as defined by librarians over the last century or so.

This post by Roy Tenant briefly summarizes the work of OCLC Research staff member Karen Smith-Yoshimura. The research work was to gather evidence to inform changes in MARC metadata practices, and that project page includes a 72 page report [PDF] and an Excel spreadsheet of data tables along with audio and video of a one hour webinar on the report. In my FriendFeed posting of Roy’s article, Walt Crawford noted a similar finding in his 1986 Bibliographic displays in the online catalog. As Walt notes, “somehow it’s not surprising that it’s still true in 2010.”

With the close of the year approaching, this issue marks the 14th week of DLTJ Thursday Threads. This issue has a publisher’s view of Amazon’s strong-arm tactics in book pricing, research into the possibility that academic authors could game Google Scholar with spam, demonstrations of how Amazon’s Mechanical Turk drives down the cost of enlisting humans to overwhelm anti-spam systems, and a story of multispectral imaging adding information in the process of digital preservation.

As the new year approaches, I wish you the best professionally and personally.

Books After Amazon

What happens when an industry concerned with the production of culture is beholden to a company with the sole goal of underselling competitors? Amazon is indisputably the king of books, but the issue remains, as Charlie Winton, CEO of the independent publisher Counterpoint Press puts it, “what kind of king they’re going to be.” A vital publishing industry must be able take chances with new authors and with books that don’t have obvious mass-market appeal. When mega-retailers have all the power in the industry, consumers benefit from low prices, but the effect on the future of literature—on what books can be published successfully—is far more in doubt.

Onnesha Roychoudhuri publishes this view of Amazon’s marketing practices in the lastest issue of the Boston Review. From the publisher’s pespective, the strong-arm tactics described sound horrible. But the story also points to cracks appearing — at least for the bigger publishers. That may leave smaller, independent publishers in a big squeeze. [Via OCLC Research's Above-the-Fold]

Academic Search Engine Spam and Google Scholar’s Resilience Against it

Abstract: In a previous paper we provided guidelines for scholars on optimizing research articles for academic search engines such as Google Scholar. Feedback in the academic community to these guidelines was diverse. Some were concerned researchers could use our guidelines to manipulate rankings of scientific articles and promote what we call ‘academic search engine spam’. To find out whether these concerns are justified, we conducted several tests on Google Scholar. The results show that academic search engine spam is indeed—and with little effort—possible: We increased rankings of academic articles on Google Scholar by manipulating their citation counts; Google Scholar indexed invisible text we added to some articles, making papers appear for keyword searches the articles were not relevant for; Google Scholar indexed some nonsensical articles we randomly created with the paper generator SciGen; and Google Scholar linked to manipulated versions of research papers that contained a Viagra advertisement. At the end of this paper, we discuss whether academic search engine spam could become a serious threat to Web-based academic search engines.

Joeran Beel and Bela Gipp have this article in the most recent issue of Journal of Electronic Publishing. In addition to being able to game Google Scholar, the authors note that Microsoft Academic Search and CiteSeer (as well as their own academic search engine currently under development — SciPlore) have the same issues. Although it is possible, we don’t know if it is being done — or even if there would be an penalties in the academic community for doing so.

Mechanical Turk: Now with 40.92% spam

At this point, Amazon Mechanical Turk has reached the mainstream. Pretty much everyone knows about the concept. Post small tasks online, pay people cents, and get thousands of micro-tasks completed. Unfortunately, this resulted in some unfortunate trends. Anyone who frequents just a little bit the market will notice the tremendous number of spammy HITs. (HIT = a task posted for completion in the market; stands for Human Intelligence Task). “Test if the ads in my website work”. “Create a Twitter account and follow me”. “Like my YouTube video”. “Download this app”. “Write a positive review on Yelp”. A seemingly endless amount of spam HITs come to the market, mainly with the purpose of spamming “social media” metrics. So, with Dahn Tamir and Priya Kanth (MS student at NYU), we decided to examine how big is the problem. How many spammers join the market? How many spam HITs are there?

This post from Panos Ipeirotis, Associate Professor at the IOMS Department at Stern School of Business of New York University, describes a review of activities posted to Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service. Spam is everywhere, and it appears that the Mechanical Turk is reducing the friction between buyers and workers of spam activity. [Via Ron Murray]

Cutting-Edge Imaging Helps Scholar Reveal 8th-Century Manuscript

With a manuscript like the St. Chad Gospels, multispectral imaging—a series of scans, each based on a single part of the color spectrum—allows his team to create images that have the equivalent of three-dimensional detail, down to revealing the thickness of brush strokes on letters and illustrations. Cockled pages can be virtually flattened out so that all their details can be studied. Studied color band by color band, the chemical composition of ink can be determined.

This article by Jennifer Howard at the Chrnoicle of Higher Education reviews the story of how 8th-century documents in England were digitized by scholars at the University of Kentucky. It caught my eye because of the mention of multispectral imaging; this is something that the JPEG2000 file format can natively store. Digitization at this level doesn’t just provide alternative, online access to documents — it actually adds new information to the process of researching those documents. [Note: the link is behind a publisher paywall. If you would like to see it, send me an e-mail and I'll forward you a short-term link from the Chronicle's website.]