The United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has upheld (pdf) the Creative Commons License as valid, as well as establishing its relationship to copyright law.  Basically, if someone uses a work in violation of a Creative Commons license, the license itself vanishes (because it is an additional allowance of use under copyright), and the full copyright restriction becomes the rule by which use is judged and restitution made.

Long live Creative Commons!

found via the Lessig blog

Getting The Most Out Of Your Library is an article from the Digital Web Magazine.  The article is great:  a basic guide for techies on the resources found in many libraries (from Art and Graphics books, coffee kiosks, and online resources otherwise locked behind a payment wall.

This is the first time I have encountered this site, and I like what I see.  There seems to be a web designer focus to the articles, and they seem to be broader than the “how to” or “prettify your site” articles that are so common.  Not that there is anything wrong with either category; it is simply refreshing to find some straightforward articles on ideas and approaches to web design work.

found via Catalogablog

Saw a shelf browse created for an Innovative (III) OPAC that is quite neat.  It lives on a development site for the Cambridge Public Library in Ontario, Canada and integrates Syndetic Solutions book covers into a pseudo-shelf listing.  Here is a direct link to a record.

Note that this has been done without resorting to Flash.  Try turning off the page’s CSS and you will see that it works just fine (just with a different scroll direction).  The page’s html still doesn’t validate, but I suspect that there aren’t any III opacs that validate properly, though I hope to be proven wrong someday.

Someday libraries will collectively understand what a good API can do for our web presence, and then the ILS companies will improve their products accordingly.  At least I hope so….

thanks to Mike Cunningham for posting the link to the Innovative User’s Group list