School is out and the summer heat has started, but there is no signs yet that the threads of technology change are slowing down. This week’s threads include a healthy review of the Google Book Search lawsuit settlement, the downside of recommendation engines, and how academics are contributing to Wikipedia.

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New Video: What Next for Google Books?

I’ve just posted a new video on behalf of the Public Index, What Next for Google Books?. It’s an 80-minute discussion between myself and noted digital copyright experts and longtime settlement followers Jonathan Band and Kenneth Crews. We discuss Google’s scanning project, the lawsuit against it by copyright owners, the proposed settlement and the controversy around it, Judge Chin’s opinion rejecting the settlement, possible next steps for the parties, and some of the larger issues raised by the case. It’s a self-contained overview of how the settlement got to where it is now and what might happen next, designed to be informative no matter how little or how much you already know about the case.

- New Video: What Next for Google Books?, James Grimmelmann’s The Laboratorium

James Grimmelmann continues to be a prime go-to person for clear analysis of the Google Book Search lawsuit. If for some reason you haven’t been keeping track of what has happened with the lawsuit from the very beginning, then this is a great overview to get you up to speed. Even if you have been following a lot of the commentary, this video is a good way to quickly refresh your memory of the key points that started the lawsuit and how those initial key points have woven themselves throughout the story. Or, as Ed Summers tweeted, “lost 1h20min of my afternoon to ‘What Next for Google Books?’ … was worth it though”

All the News That’s Fit for You

Delivering personalized news poses much harder problems than
delivering personalized recommendations of books and movies as Amazon and Netflix do. Yet, despite the difficulties, personalized news seems all the rage these days. In February alone, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Yahoo! all announced some form of automatic personalization, and Google is quietly running its own experiments in personalized news delivery. …

But despite the promise of algorithmic personalization, the idea is far simpler in theory than in practice, and newspapers have struggled to figure out how to do it without giving up their traditional role as arbiters of news.

“Computer scientists may think it’s nirvana to get what you want to get,” says Penelope Abernathy, professor of digital media economics at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “But a newsperson will say, ‘My role is to bring you the world, and it may be news you didn’t know you needed to know.’ “

- All the News That’s Fit for You [subscription required], by Marina Krakovsky, Communications of the ACM

Pair this up with Eli Pariser’s Eli Pariser: Beware online “filter bubbles” 20-minute TED Talk from early last month and you might start to wonder if recommendation engines based purely on user behavior are the right way for us to go. Is it a role for librarians to help patrons break out of an echo chamber of their own making when the highest relevant hits are based on what they have already searched and read? I wonder if there has been a study of clusters of users that naturally form from recommendation engines because there is a high correlation between what the cluster has already selected. Or are human interests varied enough to prevent these self-selected, tight-knit clusters from happening.

Academics editing Wikipedia

The call to action was all over the Association for Psychological Science’s annual meeting here this past weekend. “Attention APS Members. Take Charge of Your Science,” fliers shouted. Promotional ads in the conference programs urged the society’s 25,000 members to join the APS Wikipedia Initiative and “make sure Wikipedia—the world’s No. 1 online encyclopedia—represents psychology fully and accurately.” And the Wikimedia Foundation, which backs the encyclopedia, was holding editing demonstrations in the middle of the conference exhibit hall.

- Academics, in New Move, Begin to Work With Wikipedia, by Josh Fischman, The Chronicle of Higher Education Wired Campus blog

This school year, dozens of professors from across the country gave students an unexpected assignment: Write Wikipedia entries about public policy issues.

The Wikimedia Foundation, which supports the Web site, organized the project in an effort to bulk up the decade-old online encyclopedia’s coverage of topics ranging from the Toxic Substances Control Act of 1976 to Sudanese refugees in Egypt. Such issues have been treated on the site in much less depth than TV shows, celebrity biographies and other elements of pop culture.

- Wikipedia goes to class, by Jenna Johnson, The Washington Post

Could the title of this section be “Librarians editing Wikipedia”? It could have been. This pair of stories show how faculty and students are channeling their efforts to improving the open access encyclopedia. Librarians are doing their part, too — notably OCLC Research is looking for ways to add authority data to Wikipedia entries.

We can’t leave the hot topic of ebooks behind in this edition of DLTJ Thursday Threads, but at least it is only the lead thread and not the entire focus of this post. HarperCollins made news when one of its executives appeared at a symposium in Connecticut and said that the new digital circulation policy was a “work in progress”. Leaving that aside, Wikimedia is seeking responses to a survey to find out what barriers exist to expert contributions. Lastly is a call to keep Microsoft Research’s Academic Search on your radar screen; some interesting updates are coming out that rival Google Scholar and perhaps even some subscription services.

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.

HarperCollins Executive Calls Circulation Cap a “Work in Progress”

HarperCollins knew that its decision to cap ebook circulations at 26 would generate some heat, but the intensity, nonetheless, surprised the company.

“We certainly expected a variety of responses, and we knew that there would be a lot of people that had issues,” Josh Marwell, president of sales, told LJ after speaking to some 150 librarians gathered Tuesday at the Darien Library, CT, as part of “eBooks: Collections at the Crossroads,” a symposium organized by the Connecticut Library Consortium (#clctrendspotting, #clcebooks). “I think what was surprising was the intensity and how widespread it was. There were a lot of people who are not carrying ebooks now who entered into the fray,” he said.

- HarperCollins Executive Calls Circulation Cap a “Work in Progress”, Michael Kelley, Library Journal

In the first public statement from HarperCollins since their open letter to librarians was published over a month ago, president of sales Josh Marwell went on to say, “Is 26 set in stone? No. It’s our number for now, but we want to hear back. Immediately. Honestly, it doesn’t make sense that one size fits all. We consider it a work in progress. But this is the number that we have now.” Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be a recording of Mr. Marwell’s remarks or the resulting discussion. It would appear from the little bits in the Library Journal article and what can be found on Twitter is that HarperCollins is not considering a fundamental change to the new policy of limited numbers of uses (otherwise known as digital “checkouts”); what can be considered is the actual number. That seems like a non-starter to me as a negotiating point. If HarperCollins really wants a dialog on the matter, we need to step back and look at the whole model. Or several models — one for front-list blockbusters, one for long-tail titles, distinctions between public and academic users, etc.

On a related note — related only in that HarperCollins and OverDrive are forever bound together in the “hcod” hashtag abbreviation (and to give equal time to both parties in this thread) — Joe Atzberger does a pretty good job dissecting the OverDrive End User License Agreement (EULA). (An executive summary is available.) He says, “The OMC [OverDrive Media Console] EULA is the product of obvious cut-and-paste composition and questionable original language. It repeats and contradicts itself and contains nonsensical references. More seriously, it disqualifies OMC from all pertinent uses, levies prohibitions against libraries specifically, attempts to obligate the user to illegal or impractical conditions, and indicates an unlicensed open-source dependency.”

Wikipedia Surveys Subject Experts to Find Barriers to Contributions

Wikipedia is now widely regarded as a mature project and is consulted by a large fraction of internet users, including academics and other experts. However, many of them are still reluctant to contribute to it. The aim of this survey is to understand why scientists, academics and other experts do (or do not) contribute to an open collaborative project such as Wikipedia, and whether individual motivation aligns with shared perceptions of Wikipedia within expert communities. We hope this may help us identify ways around barriers to expert participation.

The survey is anonymous and should take about 10 min to complete. It consists of a short introduction, followed by two main sections in which we contrast shared perceptions and personal motivation, and a final section where you can tell us more about yourself. At the end of the survey, you will find a link to follow the results and the ensuing conversation.

- Expert barriers to Wikipedia

This survey from the Wikimedia Research Committee is asking subject experts why they don’t contribute to Wikipedia. I think librarians of all types (public, academic, special, etc.) certainly count among the target audience, so I think it is appropriate for this survey to get some traction in our community. Questions include a section about how participating in Wikipedia editing is perceived by colleagues and another about motivations to contribute. It did take about 10 minutes to complete. [Survey found via George Siemens on Twitter]

On the other hand is an article from Inside Higher Ed summarizing a session at ACRL where librarians at the University of Houston are actively contributing image content to Wikimedia Commons, Wikipedia’s media library (handout, presentation slides). The comments to the article are almost more instructive than the summary of the presentation, with a lot of back-and-forth about the ethics of promoting library materials in Wikipedia in this manner.

Microsoft Academic Search (Beta) Appears Ready to Expand Database Coverage

Look out Google Scholar. Get ready for the academic/scholarly search war to begin very very soon. We think many info industry database providers will also have an interest in a new service from Microsoft.

Here’s why.

Since October 2009 we’ve been covering, speaking about and paying very close attention to Microsoft Academic Search. The product is being developed by Microsoft Research primarily by their team in Asia. It’s important to note that MS Academic is nothing like the mediocre (and that’s being kind) MS Live Academic Search available a few years ago.

In our view, Microsoft Academic Search turns the open web academic/scholarly material search game up to 11.

- Microsoft Academic Search (Beta) Appears Ready to Expand Database Coverage, Gary Price, INFOdocket

This is a resource to watch — it does appear that Microsoft Academic Search, a project of Microsoft Research, is gearing up. With more features than Google Scholar and an underlying database that appears to be catching up in size and scope, it will be interesting to see if a feature and content war break out between Microsoft and Google.

Published in The New Yorker July 5, 1993.
Image from The Cartoon Bank

As the saying, now a part of Internet lore, goes: “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” That may be true, but now we must add: “But we do know if you are from a major news organization or corporation.”

Wired magazine reports on the efforts of Virgil Griffith to expose the source of anonymous edits to Wikipedia. In Virgil’s words, “I came up with the idea when I heard about Congressmen getting caught for white-washing their wikipedia pages.” So he created a searchable database of anonymous edits to Wikipedia pages indexed by the IP address of the computer that made the edit. By cross-referencing those edits with the database of IP addresses assigned to organizations, one can speculate with some certainty about who made the edit — or at least the organization responsible for the IP address of the person who made the edit. There is a list of interesting examples of wikiscanner results along the right side of the wikiscanner homepage, and Wired Magazine is inviting users to submit interesting examples as well.

This is an interesting project, but it is not without faults. First, non-anonymous edits — that is, when a user signs into Wikipedia — are not tracked. Since account registrations are free and not tied to a particular IP address, edits by an organization can be “masked” behind a slew of pseudo-anonymous accounts. (For instance, the list of edits for the range of IP addresses assigned to the OhioLINK central offices does not include edits made when I was logged into to my Wikipedia account.) Second, Virgil is presumably using a recent snapshot of the IP assignments database. Since IP address assignments can change over time, a current assignee could be implicated by the changes of the previous owner. Third, the whole system can be thwarted by systems and services that mask the IP address of the machine being used. So the credibility of the anonymous edits database is about the same as that of Wikipedia itself — good enough for most uses, but not extremely high.

The text was modified to remove a link to http://wikiscanner.virgil.gr/f.php?ip1=192.153.30.0-255&ip2=&ip3=&ip4= on January 19th, 2011.