Digital Preservation Matters - 31 October 2008

Google Settles Book-Scan Lawsuit, Everybody Wins. Chris Snyder. Wired. October 28, 2008.

Google settled a lawsuit by agreeing to pay $125 million to authors and publishers. In addition, out of print, copyright protected books will still be scanned and publishers have the option to activate a “Buy Now” button so readers can download a copy of the book. Google will take a 37 percent share of the profits, plus an administrative fee of 10 to 20 percent, and the remaining goes to authors and publishers. This creates a market for out-of-print works that were not likely to get back into "print" any other way, and it establishes a new non-profit Book Rights Registry to manage royalties.

Universities and institutions can buy a subscription service to view the entire collection, and U.S public libraries will have terminals for students and researchers to view the catalog for free.

Christian Science Monitor Goes All in on the Web. Meghan Keane. Wired. October 28, 2008.

The Christian Science Monitor plans to halt publication of its Monday through Friday newspaper in favor of daily web content. They are also creating a weekly Sunday magazine. This will cut The Monitor's subscription revenue in half, but it will also cut overhead in half as well. "Maybe the reason newspapers could go out of business is because they think they're in the newspaper business instead of the news gathering and dissemination business. To hang on to a two century old technology just because that’s the way we’ve always done it, that’s a recipe for failure."

Transition or Transform? Repositioning the Library for the Petabyte Era. Liz Lyon. UKOLN. ARL / CNI Forum. October 2008. [PowerPoint]

A recent study shows that data is continually re-analysed and new analytic techniques add value to older data. Data-sharing is seen as a form of trade or gift exchange: “give to get” rather than “give away”.

Preservation & sustainability Recommendations:

• Use DRAMBORA for self-assessment of data repositories
• Add PREMIS preservation metadata
• Collect representation information
• Examine that repository conforms to OAIS Model
• Survey partner preservation policies
  

Need to develop a Data Audit Framework for departmental data collections, awareness, policies and practice for data curation and preservation”. Steps include: plan, identify and classify assets, assess management of data assets, report and recommendations. Also need to formalize the role of data librarians.

Some challenges:

• Understand and manage risks
• Building a consensus in the community
• Appraisal and selection criteria
• Document the data; add metadata validate
• Data provenance, authenticity

Mourning Old Media’s Decline. David Carr. The New York Times. October 28, 2008.

There have been a number of newspapers having difficulties, not just the Christian Science Monitor. “The paradox of all these announcements is that newspapers and magazines do not have an audience problem … but they do have a consumer problem.” People get their information on the internet more than paper, but why does it matter? “The answer is that paper is not just how news is delivered; it is how it is paid for.” Part of the difficulty is that the move to digital media means that there are fewer people now employed in the industry who provide or report the information. The Google CEO said if the trusted brands of journalism vanish, the internet becomes a “cesspool” of useless information.

Christian Science Monitor Goes All in on the Web

Christian Science Monitor Goes All in on the Web. Meghan Keane. Wired. October 28, 2008.

The Christian Science Monitor plans to halt publication of its Monday through Friday newspaper in favor of daily web content. They are also creating a weekly Sunday magazine. This will cut The Monitor's subscription revenue in half, but it will also cut overhead in half as well. "Maybe the reason newspapers could go out of business is because they think they're in the newspaper business instead of the news gathering and dissemination business. To hang on to a two century old technology just because that’s the way we’ve always done it, that’s a recipe for failure."

Google Settles Book-Scan Lawsuit, Everybody Wins

Google Settles Book-Scan Lawsuit, Everybody Wins. Chris Snyder. October 28, 2008.

Google settled a lawsuit by agreeing to pay $125 million to authors and publishers. In addition, out of print, copyright protected books will still be scanned and publishers have the option to activate a “Buy Now” button so readers can download a copy of the book. Google will take a 37 percent share of the profits, plus an administrative fee of 10 to 20 percent, and the remaining goes to authors and publishers. This creates a for out-of-print works that were not likely to get back into "print" any other way, and establishes a new non-profit Book Rights Registry to manage royalties.

Universities and institutions can buy a subscription service to view the entire collection, and U.S public libraries will have terminals for students and researchers to view the catalog for free.

Digital Preservation Matters - 24 October 2008

HathiTrust: A Digital Repository for Libraries, by Libraries. Beth Ashmore. Information Today. October 23, 2008.

HathiTrust is a shared digital repository of two dozen libraries aimed at bringing the vast collections of print books and journals in libraries into the digital world for access, discovery, and preservation. "We have become convinced that there are some approaches to using this content, from an academic standpoint, that Google may not address." One of the areas in which the projects diverge is the importance placed on long-term preservation. "[Long-term preservation] is something we feel libraries need, and I think it has been one of the concerns about Google as a digitization partner. These resources need to be, in the long term, managed by libraries. This is something Google understood from the beginning in their partnership with us." One of the goals is an open technical framework. As well as a public discovery system which will hopefully be available in early 2009.

Bringing a Trove of Medieval Manuscripts Online for the Ages. John Tagliabue. The New York Times. October 20, 2008.

One of the oldest and most valuable collections of handwritten medieval books in the world, housed in the library of the abbey in St. Gallen, Switzerland, is going online with the help of a $1 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The reduced price of computer memory helped make this possible. This will make the library more visible. “On the Internet we now have more visitors than in the real library.”

Government Documents Online. NELA Conference Blog. CT State Library October 19, 2008.

Julie’s Schwartz’s Presentation: The Connecticut State Library initiated the Connecticut Digital Archive Project because so many state documents and reports are now only available online, and often are posted for only a month or two and then disappear. Search engines don’t provide access to most of these publications even though users expect easy access. The archive project harvests and ingests “born digital” Connecticut state publications, catalogues them in MARC, and integrates linked records in their OPAC, and available in WorldCat. The WebHarvest program can harvest an entire webpage and sometime find other documents on archived pages. Preservation metadata is important for accuracy and management. Standardization is in important principle of digital preservation.

Seagate's 1.5TB Barracuda drive -- quiet, sips power. Rich Ericson. Computerworld. October 23, 2008.

Seagate has a new 1.5 terabyte drive which provides good performance into a single internal hard drive, despite the large capacity.