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.