One thing that would dramatically clarify the controlled digital lending concept in general and the Hachette v. Internet Archive lawsuit in particular is having distinct terms for types of ebooks. I propose that we refer to them as digital and digitized. A digital book is one that is born digital …
On March 16, 2023, I gave a presentation with this title to the code4lib conference in Princeton, New Jersey.
The suggested links from the end of the presentation are listed below followed by a rough transcript of the talk.
As I noted in the talk, the judge in the Hachette …
Cecil Mae Feather, 1929–2023
This issue is offered in honor of Cecil Mae Thornburg Feather, my mother-in-law.
Cecil Mae was a wonderful person.
I only knew her a short time as I married into the Feather family, and that time was filled with love and joy.
She enjoyed playing …
We are one week into Russia's war against Ukraine.
From here in America, it is hard to understand the reality of a country whose citizens seemed to be going about normal lives just a short time ago.
I find it also hard to know what to say to people whose …
Just a brief pair of threads this week. First is a look at what is happening with mobile device encryption as consumer electronics companies deal with data privacy in the post-Snowden era. There is also the predictable backlash from law enforcement organizations, and perhaps I just telegraphed how I feel …
Last month's HathiTrust newsletter had an interesting technical tidbit at the top about access to out-of-print and brittle or missing items:
One of the lawful uses of in-copyright works HathiTrust has been pursuing is to provide access on an institutional basis to works that fall under United States Copyright Law …
Thursday Threads has been a back-burner activity for quite a while now. Blame it on too many interesting things happening at home and at work (to say nothing of the early arrival of spring weather). This week will be …
The title of this post was updated (replacing "Display" with "Performance") a day after it was originally published. See the update at the bottom of the post for more details.
Last week a federal district court in California decided in favor of the University of California defendants in a lawsuit …
Legal action against the digitization and limited distribution of orphan works unexpectedly hit the news again this week. This week's DLTJ Thursday Threads starts with an overview of the lawsuit filed by authors organizations and authors against Hathi Trust over plans to make digital versions of orphan works available to …
It might have been the week of the annual American Library Association meeting with all the news and announcements and programming that came from it -- as well as getting into the dog days of summer -- but interesting news at the intersection of technology and libraries did not take a pause …
This week we got the long-awaited report from the group testing RDA to see if its use would be approved for the major U.S. national libraries. And the answer? An unsatisfying, if predictable, maybe-but-not-yet. This week also brought new examples of the tensions between authors and publishers and libraries …
Wordle of the Opinion Rejecting the Google Book Search Settlement AgreementThis afternoon, Judge Denny Chin released the opinion of the court rejecting the proposed settlement agreement between authors/publishers and Google in the Google Book Search settlement. ARL's Public Policy Twitter account seems to have been the first to …
Hickory, with true-to-life parting attitude (left) and Mittens This week's Thursday Threads is delayed, but for good reason. If you will indulge me with a personal note, this week saw the passing of our 20-year-old cat, Hickory, and the addition of a 6-month-old kitten, Mittens, to our family. Needless to …
The turn of the year brings commentary on the past 12 months and thoughts on the future. This edition of DLTJ Thursday Threads looks at the relationship between libraries and electronic books with an offer by Sony to explain e-reader hardware to libraries and an opinion piece that libraries need …
When I say "<blank> is a question answering system. A question can be posed in natural language and ... <blank> can come up with a very precise answer to that question" -- what comes to mind to fill in the <blank>? If you guessed a system developed by IBM to appear alongside …
This week's Thursday Threads highlights includes two legal cases that bear watching. The first is the case of SkyRiver/Innovative Interfaces versus OCLC (covered on DLTJ previously); now that the case has been moved to OCLC's home court (the federal district court located in Columbus, OH), it is asking for …
It has been a long week, so for many of you this edition of DLTJThursday Threads will actually be read on Friday. The spirit was willing, the topics were certainly out there in the past seven days, but the necessary distractions were numerous. Please enjoy this edition whenever you …
Late, late in the day last Friday, the principle parties in the Google Book Search case submitted a revised settlement agreement agreement to the court. This post takes a look at the changes to the settlement from a library perspective. To keep this manageable, I'm not including discussion of library-oriented …
The title of this post was updated (replacing "Display" with "Performance") a day after it was originally published. See the update at the bottom of the post for more details.
