The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has information on their site about HR 1201, a.k.a. The Fair Use Act, currently working its way through the U.S. House of Representatives, that would strengthen the fair use concepts that have been in existence for decades for videocassette recordings, and apply them to other media.

The primary benefit would be that makers of electronic equipment able to store digital information (computers, flash drives, mp3 players, etc.) would enjoy the same understandings as vcr manufacturers when it comes to the use of their products: the user is responsible for making sure they respect copyright law.

When a device can be used in a legal manner, it is not fair to punish those who create it when others use it in an illegal manner.

from ©ollectanea

On the surface, Nines is a searchable database for nineteenth-century studies (their name stands for “a networked infrastructure for nineteenth-century electronic scholarship”). When you go beneath the surface, however, there is a great deal of potential to be explored.

The software behind Nines is the open-source Collex, which allows you to collect objects found within searches, organize them, compare them, and in other ways develop new approaches to your scholarship. Imagine this type of tool for a topic you are researching in depth.

Research is changing, and the rate of change is increasing.

PubReMiner is an interesting tool that lets you see the metadata behind your PubMed search, and lets you narrow your search with quite a bit more understanding of the ways in which you can do so.

This was included as part of a list on Journalology

LibLime, the U.S. based support company for the Koha open-source integrated library system (ILS), has acquired Katipo Communication’s Koha division.

This is interesting news: not only will LibLime be in a much better position to offer support (it now employs many of the developers who maintain the software), it puts them in a good position to offer support in New Zealand and Australia.

I think we are seeing the early stirrings of the future of library automation:  multiple companies will offer support for a few different open-source ILS platforms.  What the library will be purchasing is the service, not the product.  They can switch support providers without having to change products.  The companies can focus on the support, and share the effort towards software development.

To see a LibLime supported Koha installation, visit the Nelsonville Public Library’s website.

from oss4lib

You’ve heard of the Wisdom of Crowds; you’re familiar with the Long Tail (Wired Magazine article). If you aren’t, you need to do a bit of reading!

This brief blog entry puts them together in an interesting way….

from TechEssence

Creative Commons has updated its license structure to allow for more flexibility when choosing a license, as well as balancing the laws of different countries with the ideals inherent in the CC license.

The U.S. now has its own category, rather than the “generic” CC license.

from Open Access News

This has been around for quite a while, but is such a good place to find online resources (Reference, Verse, Fiction, and Nonfiction) that it is worth posting:  Bartleby.com.

Roy Tenant has posted an Open Letter to ILS Vendors. He makes his case wonderfully.

I suspect that we shall see an exodus away from the big vendors, and towards the open source solutions. The momentum is beginning to build; it will only take

1. the ability to pick and choose features for your installation, and
2. ease of installation and maintenance,

to really get the ball rolling. And I can see those changes coming….

(this post should have been up a few days ago… busy, busy, backson!)

WorldCat has now incorporated my favorite RedLightGreen (also this post) feature:  Citations!

Click the “cite this item” link in the results page and you now have MLA, APA, Turabian, Chicago, and Harvard citation styles for that specific item.  Couple this with an ISBN search, and you have an excellent way to create citations from your references.

from WorldCat Update email

Definition of Free Cultural Works is a Creative Commons-like licensing platform meant to give creative originators greater control over created works.

The project is just beginning, but I wonder what they will provide that isn’t covered, or able to be adapted, under CC licenses?

from Open Access News

WorldCat Identities is a beta site (don’t web tools all seem to be, anymore? perhaps a good thing, as continual tweaking is good for the soul, as well as a service) that is a focused search tool for authors.

The best I can recommend is type in a few authors and see what you get. If you can’t think of someone right off, use the tag cloud… or try this.

I am sensing that if OCLC were to put all of the interesting tools it has been creating into one user-friendly mega-tool (with a few new toys to fill in the gaps), that the library world might be in for quite a shake-up.

from Catalogablog

I read The Ecstasy of Influence:  A Plagiarism, posted on Harpers.org a couple of days ago, and am still thinking about it a great deal.  It is hard to describe the essay without spoiling the impact for the reader, but it is definitely several things:

• It very well might change the way you view copyright law, especially if you think you know something about copyright.

• It is an examination of the art of creation, as well as the creation of art, and how each one of these exists because of the incredible commons of knowledge, art and creation that exists within our society.

• It is also, once you finish the essay and begin reading the “KEY” section, revealed to be an interestingly different sort of essay that is suddenly morphed into something very different, and in such a way as to challenge how you address the concepts within it.

Definitely, definitely, definitely read this, and recognize that the spirit, as well as the law, of copyright exists throughout our culture, shaping our thoughts and ideas in ways both subtle and direct.

March of the Librarians, by Nick Baker, is a fantastic parody of March of the Penguins, set in the environs of Seattle during the ALA Midwinter last month.  It brings back memories of Chicago 2005 (the last ALA I attended).

Where can us library types get our temporary tattoo fix?  No need to head out on that highway, just take a gander at Archie McFee!

Could be a good promotional idea for a library….

from Librarian.net

Wouldn’t it be nice if there existed a web page containing links to all the Blue Books for the states? There are two:

ALA’s GODORT Wiki

Bradley University’s Wiki

If you look under the history tab for each of the pages, you will see that Bradley University’s page was the likely source for the GODORT page.

from ResourceShelf

From Library 2.0: An Academic’s Perspective, the Librarian’s 2.0 Manifesto.

I hesitate to jump on anything that is labeled with the “2.0″ label, but this has some good reminders of how to serve our patrons.  Many of the items are relevant to “Library 0.1″.

Thanks Chuck & Donna!

Here are links to some interesting telephone number lookup services:

Fone Finder

Phone Validator

World Telephone Numbering Guide

from ResourceShelf

Coming on the heels of my previous post is an article about just the sort of creativity I referred to, although it deals with programming rather than marketing.  Isn’t it better to get attention from activities than simply promoting, though?

from ResourceShelf

ALA’s ACRL (Association of College & Research Libraries) has posted an interesting article called “Developing a long-range and outreach plan for your academic library: The need for a marketing outreach plan“. It describes a series of promotional activities to market an academic library to the campus as a whole.

I am not sure that their approach is, as a whole, what a campus library needs for promotion. Their initial budget is $10,000, which I suspect is waaay beyond most marketing budgets, even for many of the larger libraries.

Some of the expense seems high: $3,000 annually for an e-newsletter, which although it includes the creation of a newsletter designed to reach 5,000 people, shouldn’t require more than someone who can create a listserv and design a good, basic template to contain the articles. Web hosting services usually offer some sort of site statistics in their packages.

I could consult with a library, helping to get it started and training someone on staff to keep it running, and not have it cost more than $600 dollars (and it wouldn’t require more than $70 per year to keep it going, as long as they used the tools and resources developed in the initial consultation.

Also: $4,000 of the cost is for signs and promotional giveaways. These are great: you need well-made signs, and giveaways are neat. Buy a bunch of customized pens, create your own bookmarks, and be creative in finding other things that your students will use that you can “brand”. However, I would skip the stickers, and make the money go a lot further than the few hundred students who would actually get the swag listed in the article.

Academic libraries that could consider spending $10,000 on this type of promotion (few and far between) are likely to be able to tap into campus resources for signs, promotions, and technical support. Those who cannot afford that type of money (most of us) can still do a great deal to promote their services, and oftentimes have a great deal of on-campus support to draw upon.

I recommend creative brainstorming among the library staff, with some funds available to support good ideas. The ideas themselves are free (as in priceless), and should be the core of your promotional activities. Plus, the library staff become part of the promotion, which is a bonus.

All of this, of course, has been my $0.02 (and assorted other change)

original link from ResourceShelf

Apparently this has been around for a while, but there is a nifty feature in Google Scholar that is turned off by default.

If you follow the Scholar preferences link, you can find an option to export citations into one of five citation formats (correlating with citation management software): BibTeX, EndNote, RefMan, RefWorks, and WenXianWang. For those using the software, this makes Google Scholar a better tool than before.

Something else I noticed while playing with this: if your library uses a link resolver, you should sign up with Google to allow Scholar results to link into your databases. Your patrons will appreciate it.

from Google Librarian Central