Rob Lopresti writes:\”
You may have heard recent reports about so-called \”stealth advertising,\” in which people called \”leaners\” are hired to tout a product. For example, one might lean against the bar in a crowded pub talking about a wonderful new beer. I may have just encountered the library equivalent. Yesterday I received an email from someone with no obvious connection to my university asking if we owned certain books. Since some of the ones we didn\’t own seemed relevant to our curriculum I looked them up on Google. Here is the page that came up first. Turns out all these books were published by Agora.
Was my correspondent hoping to find the books in order to write a profitable review? Or was there a different purpose in mind?\”
October 2002
Imbedded Links Make Poor Bedfellows
Lee Hadden writes: “The Oct 22, 2002 issue of the Wall Street Journal has an
article on how Danish courts are cool to the idea of sending patrons to an
imbedded link, rather than to the front page of any corporation. Read the
article online (subscription required) or in the paper version.”
The story is about Newsbooster, and Danish Newspaper Publishers’ Association. Newsbooster’s
crime was the use of something called “deep links” — content within a website — not
on the homepage.
Web error names the Booker Prize winner early
Entertainment Weekly Says Last week, as the newly revamped award, now called the Man Booker Prize, launched its new website, it inadvertently revealed the name of the winner, little-known Canadian novelist Yann Martel.
Lisa Jardine, the Booker jury’s chairwoman, told Britain’s Guardian newspaper that the glitch was an honest mistake, an accidental posting of test copy written for the site’s trial, and that Martel still had a ”one in six chance.”
They say oddsmakers didn’t buy that explanation and called off all bets.
Thanks again to Jen Young for another one.
USA Patriot Act: Librarians Keep Quiet
Newsweek has picked up on the Patriot Act with This One that says the ACLU has been searching for a librarian who doesn’t want to cooperate and is willing to serve as a test case in the courts. They say despite widespread outrage among librarians, so far no one has come forward, and the statute remains untested in the courts and There’s little chance that the role will be filled by the nation’s most famous librarian: Laura Bush.
“This statute trumps protections in place in 49 of 50 states, with consequences that could evoke images of Big Brother,”
shrink-wrap license being tested in court
Jen Young passed along A Link To Chronicle of Higher Education where they say law professors and academic-library groups are asking a federal appeals court to modify a recent ruling to make it clear that established copyright provisions, like fair use, sometimes trump software-licensing agreements that would otherwise narrow consumers’ rights.
The case in question, Bowers v. Baystate Technologies Inc., involves the shrink-wrap license on a piece of software
You can read the PDF Brief
“A scholar could lose his fair-use privilege to quote a novel … A library could lose its ability under the first-sale doctrine to lend books.”
Check Out Digital Library of Information Science and Technology
Paul writes \”
The School of Information Resources and Library Science and the Arizona
Health Sciences Library at the University of Arizona have launched DLIST,
the Digital Library of Information Science and Technology. DLIST is
available at dlist.sir.arizona.edu
The objective of DLIST is to serve as a repository of electronic resources
in the domains of Library and Information Science (LIS) and Information
Technology (IT).
Paul writes \”
The School of Information Resources and Library Science and the Arizona
Health Sciences Library at the University of Arizona have launched DLIST,
the Digital Library of Information Science and Technology. DLIST is
available at dlist.sir.arizona.edu
The objective of DLIST is to serve as a repository of electronic resources
in the domains of Library and Information Science (LIS) and Information
Technology (IT).
DLIST is running on Open Archives Initiative (OAI)
compliant Eprints v.2 software developed at the University of Southampton.
Eprints software, recently heralded as the future of scholarly
communication, facilitates the development of institutional and subject
archives and self-archiving practices.
Researchers and practitioners in LIS and IT create a wealth of content not
limited to formal papers. To capture this wealth of information and create a
library that is as useful as possible, DLIST materials include:
Published papers
Data sets
Instructional and help materials
Pathfinders
Reports
Bibliographies
We are actively seeking partners who can contribute to our archive building
and collection development efforts. If you have materials of this nature,
please consider depositing them with DLIST for use and access to a wider
audience.
We invite authors in the areas of Library and Information Science, and
Information Technology to self-register and deposit their papers. Authors
can choose to participate by contributing their research papers (either
before or after publication).
Seed monies for DLIST are from the University of Arizona College of Social
and Behavioral Sciences and the Proposition 301 funded initiative of the
Internet Technology Commerce and Design Institute.
For further information contact Paul Bracke, Project Manager, at
(520)626-1004 or paul![](\"./images/at.gif\")
ahsl.arizona.edu.
\”
Scolded author quits Emory
Weeding in the NY Times
Ron Force writes \”The New York Times has a
story
on the art and science of weeding library collections.\”
Free NYTimes.com registration required.
Question man campaigns for libraries
According to Ron Force, the Spokane Spokesman-Review
tells us that \”Matthew Lesko, star of late-night infomercials, will campaign for Stevens Co, Washington Libraries. Tax limiters are attempting to close the libraries.
\’The library is a gateway to our information society and, if we start getting rid of libraries, then the average person loses the gateway to the information that is the lifeblood of our society now,\’ Lesko said.\”
Google Under Scrutiny
ZDNet Austrialia reports that Google has removed controversial political and religious websites from search result listings. The article focuses on google.de and google.fr. They have removed white power sites from these versions of google because of legal action posed by German and French groups. Certain speech (such as pro-Nazi material) doesn\’t enjoy the same protection in those countries as it does in the US. Read the full story.
Related link: Chillingeffects.org – a website that monitors \”the legal climate for Internet activity.\” Many copyright, IP, free speech, and filtering issues are discussed.
Original link via MeFi.
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