This one has been a long time coming, but this morning, Judge Denny Chin (who actually has a long history of siding with copyright holders) found that Google’s book scanning project is fair use. This is a huge victory in a variety of ways. TechDirt has the story.
November 2013
My family was evicted from our bookstore and this is our kickstarter
The Book House has been operating as an independent community new/used/rare bookstore in St. Louis for nearly 30 years. The books were housed in a victorian era mansion that is famously haunted and has been deemed a historical landmark. It is affiliated with various charities including Second Chapter, a group/foster home for disabled children.
This is the house that I grew up in. Unfortunately, we do not own the property. The landowners were only interested in selling an entire lot of several establishments, and we were unable to get approved for a mortgage, so we have been leasing for decades. A few months ago, we learned that the property had been sold to an industrial storage company. The building is going to be demolished.
Interesting Story…
Farewell, Thomas.gov. Hello, Congress.gov.
On November 19th, Thomas.gov, the venerable website of the United States Congress, will begin to redirect visitors to Congress.gov. The new site, which launched in beta in September 2012, will become the primary governmental resource for the text of legislation, past, present and future, along with reports from committees, speeches from the floor of Congress and cost estimates from the Congressional Budget Office.
Extremely Narrow Levy Vote Win For Library Not Yet Official
The Star Beacon reports that Ashtabula County District Library won their levy election Tuesday by 60 votes according to unofficial results. With 170 provisional ballots still to be checked plus absentee ballots bearing postmarks no later than November 4th having until November 15th to arrive potentially numbering over 200, there remains a chance of the slim victory being wiped out. The official canvas of results is due by November 26th from the Ashtabula County Board of Elections.
The Decline of Wikipedia
Wikipedia and its stated ambition to “compile the sum of all human knowledge” are in trouble. The volunteer workforce that built the project’s flagship, the English-language Wikipedia—and must defend it against vandalism, hoaxes, and manipulation—has shrunk by more than a third since 2007 and is still shrinking. Those participants left seem incapable of fixing the flaws that keep Wikipedia from becoming a high-quality encyclopedia by any standard, including the project’s own. Among the significant problems that aren’t getting resolved is the site’s skewed coverage: its entries on Pokemon and female porn stars are comprehensive, but its pages on female novelists or places in sub-Saharan Africa are sketchy. Authoritative entries remain elusive. Of the 1,000 articles that the project’s own volunteers have tagged as forming the core of a good encyclopedia, most don’t earn even Wikipedia’s own middle-ranking quality scores.
Full piece at MIT Technology Review
Who Needs Wikis When You Have Github?
A new taco recipe library highlights something interesting about the nature of spontaneous collaboration on the web.
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/11/who-needs-wikis-when-you-have-github/281121/
Libraries in the Time of MOOCs
MOOCs give librarians new opportunities to help shape the conversation about changes in higher education and to guide administrators, faculty, and students through these changes. To assume this role, librarians must understand the MOOCs landscape. Numerous stakeholders will have an interest in the massive intellectual property that ultimately resides in libraries’ owned and licensed digital repositories. Studying and adopting technologies to manage and monitor MOOC usage of library resources will be essential to controlling access and tightening Internet safeguards.
http://www.educause.edu/ero/article/libraries-time-moocs
Found link to article here:
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