PACER is the online access portal for “U.S. Appellate, District, and Bankruptcy court records and documents nationwide”.  Because the documents it provides are created by the federal judiciary, they are not copyrightable; because PACER is the only place to obtain these records, it is a critical link to those who need case information.  PACER also charges a per-page fee ($0.08 per page up to 30 pages in a specific document) for access.

RECAP (which is PACER spelled backwards) is a new, open source Firefox extension which appears to follow all the rules:  you access documents through PACER, paying all assessed fees, and you get your docuements.  RECAP, however adds two elements to the mix:

1. RECAP automatically uploads any document that is accessed by users of the extension to a public repository hosted by the Internet Archive.
2. RECAP will alert the user when a document they wish to access is available through the public repository.

On the surface, it may appear that people are conducting an end-run against the court’s system for providing documents.  However, a broader view strongly suggests that these documents are public, and that the PACER system is actually an exception in the realm of access to public records.

The Executive and Legislative branches of the federal government provide documents free to the user; this is an attempt to make the workings and decisions of the judiciary as public as the other branches.  RECAP is a fully legal means to provide information in a way that is the spirit of the law.

Further reading:

• The Case Against PACER
• Firefox Extension Liberates US Court Docs from Paywall
• Use RECAP to Bypass Court Document Paywall

It’s called the Millennial Disc, and it is being marketed as a 1,000 year storage for digital information.

Before we run out and buy a stack of these for our archives, I would simply ask:

How many years before some aspect of this technology – the 5″ 12cm digital storage disc, the disc formatting, the communication channel between the drive and the computer – becomes obsolete?

This is not meant to be a snarky or rhetorical question.  The Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project has been dealing with those very issues:  extracting an obsolete data format from an obsolete storage media using restored obsolete equipment.  If the team didn’t have a couple of original machines, and a technician who understood how they worked, the images would be incredibly difficult (approaching impossible) to recover.  And this is going back only 43 years.

I used to use CD-ROM, CD-RW, and later the DVD variants, for most of my data exchange.  Now it is cheaper, easier, and faster to simply use a USB flash drive.  I don’t expect the 5″ 12cm disk to be around longer than 5 or 10 years.  Neither should libraries.

Any archival storage should utilize high-quality, durable storage material.  There should be a regular, ongoing evaluation as to when the storage media should be replaced.  Always keep some old equipment (with old software) around to ensure your ability to convert.

found via LISNews

Copyfraud : Poisoning the Public Domain is an introduction to some of the ways that content providers (websites, publishers, etc.) abuse copyright protections when they use public domain materials.  A couple of minor points, however:

• The act of assigning a copyright to something already in the public domain is the issue; taking a Project Gutenberg text, formatting it, and publishing it is of great benefit to people, as long as one doesn’t claim protection that doesn’t actually exist for the material.
• The Creative Commons Public Domain Tools is not a license, nor is it  an attempt “to become the arbiter of  public domain licensing”, but a way to allow people to have an easy and effective way to display that a work belongs to the Public Domain.

found via LISNews

In a merging of two of my great interests, NASA has issued a Request For Information (ROI) on how best to “analyze and catalog notes from spaceflight pioneer Wernher von Braun into an electronic, searchable database or other system.“

Sample Page from Von Braun's Notes

At first glance, this is something that would be solved by using library tools and software.  However, the list of potential ways to set this up seems to illustrate the gaps in library technology (all points are mine):

• Users should be able to see the notes as they exist.
• The text in the notes, as well as all labels and notations, should be fully keyword searchable.
• All elements of the notes, including text, formulas, diagrams, etc. should be able to be targeted and described in a way that allows for keyword searching.  This includes “tagging”, but also commentary, description and critique.
• Users should be able to define relationships (create links) between ideas within the notes, as well as documents and other resources from other collections.  For instance, someone seeking information on the Saturn V Engine Bell should find all drawings, notes, diagrams, and formulas within the notes, as well as outside resources relating to all of these.

This project begs for a combination of a traditional database (for storing and searching text) with the added functionality provided by social software products.  Nothing in the list is beyond the current means of technology… think  of a wiki combined with flickr-type functionality that can utilize PDF documents and you have a good starting point.

Why hasn’t this been done?  How many libraries and archives have document sets like this that could become a researcher’s favorite collection, with the right application of technology?  Have any been digitized with a social annotation feature?

Why do I suspect that the development of this will come from outside the library community?  We should already have projects that utilize this kind of mash-up philosophy… our collections could be so much more powerful.

There are some great things being done in the library technology realm, and many people and projects that are worth praising.  But now and then I see something like this and wonder how we missed this obvious application of existing technologies.

found via ResourceShelf and Wired Science

Remember those 16mm films from your school days?  Well, at least some of them have been saved from dumpsters and archived on the A/V Geeks website for online viewing.  As a former high school A/V Geek myself, this warms my heart.

They even have the perfect film to show people what things were like before personal computers and OPACs and such: Library Science Triggers.

There is no description, so I can only assume that this was created to let library staff know what not to do when working a public desk (“You know where the card catalog is!!” and “I’m sorry sir, but I don’t make the rules!”).

found via MetaFilter

Update: A brief description has been added, letting the viewer know that these videos are meant to “trigger” discussions amongst the viewers.

The UCLA Library has acquired the library including many papers of Aldous Huxley, who died in 1963 (the same day as John F. Kennedy).

As Island is one of my favorite reads, this gives me one reason to actually want to visit Southern California.

found via LISNews

Gramophone Archive is the complete, searchable collection of every issue of The Gramophone since April 1923.

Enjoy audiophiles!

found via MetaFilter

Papers of the War Department : 1784 to 1800 is a searchable archive of documents from the early history of the United States that, until recently, were thought to have been irretrievably lost in a fire.  Over the past decade, researchers have searched for copies of these documents in collections throughout the country, and have reconstructed the collection online.

This could also be viewed as a lesson of the benefits of distributed copies of valuable documents/information.

found in MetaFilter

About 2 million images from the LIFE Photo Archive have been digitized and are available via Google Image Search.  What is even better is that, over the next few months, the remaining 8 million images from the collection will be added.  Many of these have never been published, so there ought to be some historically interesting and significant gems in this collection.

You can search the collection by using the above link, or add “source:life” (without the quotes) to your image search query.

via the Official Google Blog

Go to WorldCat and type in a search.  The results contain books, video, audio, you name it.  One of the more recent additions is the Digital Images Collections, which can be wonderful to view.  How to find them, though?

Type in your search terms, then add cntnt (“Content” without the vowels) as an additional term (which acts as a limit).  Viola!

Try chicago cubs cntnt

Try airplanes cntnt

Try carnegie libraries cntnt

You get the idea…

found via the WorldCat blog

Wired.com has a great set of photographs detailing the process that goes into scanning books for the Internet Archive’s text  project.

The process isn’t what I envisioned… I expected something that would look like it came from the radiology department of your local hospital rather than that relatively normal Canon EOS SLR digital cameras.  Of course, to gain a bit of perspective, one needs to see just how upscale these cameras are

• Canon EOS 1D
• Canon EOS 5D

found via HangingTogether.org

The Public Domain Archive and Reprints Service is something that I have thought would make an interesting business model:  take public domain materials and publish them using a print-on-demand service.

With the various scanning projects, there are more and more public domain works available electronically each day, and the benefits are many.  Whether out-of-print, rare, fragile or some combination of all three, many books won’t work in a circulating collection.  This can put many books back into library circulation.

This could also be a potential model for rare book and archival collections : scan everything and make the newly published version available for your public users — without risking the originals.

from LISNews

Kind of an interesting application of the Zotero add-on for Firefox : the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University (no relation ) and the Internet Archive are working to create a storage for scholarly annotation of online documents.

The annotation would work through added functionality (in the form of a new button) on the Zotero workspace, and could create an entirely new means to access scholarly critique and commentary. Simply put, this will make one of the most interesting and promising add-ons even better by allowing the user to collaborate with other researchers.

Research 2.0 anyone?

from Open Access News

Additional:  note that this will also create an option to save an archival copy of an electronic document on the Internet Archive servers.  This centralized storage will also provide benefits beyond the initial commons concept.

additional info found on Dan Cohen’s blog

The Diary of Saad Eskander, Director of the Iraqi National Library and Archive is available via the British Library website.  In the diary, Dr. Eskander details the day-to-day challenges faced by the library staff as they attempt to do their work, and live their lives, in what has to be one of the most challenging environments for librarianship.

found on MetaFilter

This article from Linux.com is a great overview of what it takes to run a digitization project with fragile material and across great distance, as the Library of Congress and Archive.org work together on a project to preserve some of the rare materials in the library’s collection that are at risk of decaying.

from NewsForge

As an update to this post, it seems that the situation with the EPA library is getting worse.

Presumably in response to a congressional request to halt the closure of its libraries, the EPA is removing thousands of documents from its web servers, and has sold $40,000 worth of library furniture in their Chicago library for a total of $350. The woman who bought the furniture is estimating that she will re-sell it for $80,000 (perhaps when the EPA changes course again and buys its own furniture back).

(Darn! I could use a few good bookshelves right about now at a bargain price!)

from ResourceShelf

According to a press release, the Internet Archive has been granted an exemption from the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), allowing it to continue archiving web sites, software and such.

Hopefully this is the movement towards more reasonable copyright applications when it comes to libraries and archival organizations!

from Open Access News

All right then, begin the list:

1) An article spotted in this morning’s paper that offers a great summary for those not familiar with the archive: Content of Dead Sites Lives in Archive .

2) They earned a 2006 Education Award Laureate from the Tech Museum Awards (also contains additional information about what they do). (from Open Access News)

3) And they started a blog earlier this month which showcases interesting content and their activities: What’s New at the Internet Archive. (from ResourceShelf)

Cornell University has a collection of historical literature on witchcraft, including confessions of accused witches, debates about scripture and witchcraft, and instructions for those investigating possible witchcraft.

from ResourceShelf (end of post)

A new report is out from the UNESCO Memory of the World Programme that is best described by its full title:

Risks Associated with the Use of Recordable CDs and DVDs as Reliable Storage Media in Archival Collections – Strategies and Alternatives (pdf)

The report contains good information for any library that is storing, or considering storing, digital information on CDs or DVDs for any length of time.

from ResourceShelf