LISNews: Librarian News

News.com Is Reporting on the copyright controversy that casts us as villains simply for doing our job.

And you thought Pat Schroeder was bad a few months ago?

\"They\'ve got their radical factions, like the Ruby Ridge or Waco types, who want to share all content for free, said Judith Platt, a spokeswoman for the Association of American Publishers.\"

They say Publishing houses primary targets are now the public library.
You go ahead and worry about filters, or hotels, me, I\'ll be worrying about The DMCA and The AAP. We\'ll see what impacts libraries more.

\"I don\'t see the doomsday of libraries not existing,\" said Wayne Overbeck, a professor of communications at California State University at Fullerton, who\'s been closely watching the digital copyright debates. \"But I do see libraries having a smaller collection. It\'s going to cost a lot more money than ever for libraries to be up to date.\"

TechReview has This Amazing Story by Seth Shulman on what he calls \"Looting the Library\" by publishers.

He says publishers new greedy \"pay-per-use model\" for information content that will largely shut libraries out. No kind words for Pat Schroeder who he quotes as saying that publishers have to \"learn to push back\" against libraries.
He points out Peter Chernin, president and chief operating officer of Rupert Murdoch\'s News Corporation is calling for legislation that \"guarantees publishers\' control of not only the integrity of an original work, but of the extent and duration of users\' access to that work, the availability of data about the work and restrictions on forwarding the work to others\". You can see what that would do.

I agree with him when he says:\"Too much is at stake to let the publishing industry undo the careful copyright balance we have all come to rely upon.\"

Where is the outrage on this that I see everyday over filters??

Questia seems to be using what some might consider questionable advertising techniques, personally I\'d call it SPAM, or worse, but make up your own mind.
Steven Bell pointed out (On COLLIB-L) some interesting posts he found on the new Google Groups (the old deja.com), so I did some searching, and found some very \"interesting\" posts from \"people\" about Questia. Interesting and people are emphasized here to highlight the important words I am questioning. They seem to be spamming, a number of academic oriented newsgroups, and Ebay under what may be considered false pretenses. The people posting the messages try to make it look like they are not affiliated with Questia (most of the time), but some evidence shows this is may not be entirely true. If they are really using this type of advertising they are guilty of fraud at worst, and being a slimy corporation at best. I have sent this story along to Questia for comment, and I really hope to hear back.

Read on to see what I found. -- Read More

International Herald Tribune has a Very Interesting Story on the future of the public library.

They say Yahoo and other information Web sites have taken over many of the functions of public libraries. A great deal of information is not accessible, because it is in libraries, and not on the internet which is a much more effective means of accessing information.

So what to do?
Each library would be responsible for maintaining and updating detailed Web sites in one or more narrow subjects, and this would be available on the internet. This will need a national task force to figure out and Laura Bush would be perfect for the job.