Today, the Authors Guild, the nation’s largest and oldest society of professional writers, filed a petition with the Supreme Court of the United States requesting that it review a lower court ruling that allowed Google, Inc. to copy millions of copyright-protected books without asking for authors’ permission or paying them. At stake, the Guild claims, is the right of authors to determine what becomes of their works in the digital age. Read the full press release here.
Blake
American Libraries Edits Upset Authors
We probably do not need to spell out why we are disappointed by this but, just for the record, we have two major problems:
These were not superficial changes and the editors at American Libraries should have spoken to us before publishing them.
More substantially, we feel it is grossly inappropriate for a magazine that is supposed to represent libraries and librarians to insinuate a vendor’s perspective directly into an article without the authors’ knowledge or permission. This is especially true when the vendor has a very obvious financial motive for being part of the conversation.
Let us state for the record that we did not speak to anyone at Gale/Cengage about this article, we had no role in developing or carrying out the survey, we did not see those quotes prior to publication and would not have included them in our article if we had.Importantly, our problem is not with Gale/Cengage but with the way American Libraries is handling their relationship with them in the context of the article we wrote.
From Um … about that American Libraries article we wrote | Stewart Varner
Should scientific papers be anonymous?
Hanel, a psychologist at Cardiff University in the United Kingdom, posted a manuscript recently calling for anonymity in science articles. More than that, Hanel suggests stripping identifiers from virtually all academic output: doing away with name-based citations, CVs on researchers’ web sites, author names on book chapters, titles on academic journals, and more.The immodest proposal — made available on arXiv, a preprint server, before peer review — is akin to destroying the academic village in order to rid it of pests. But while some of what Hanel recommends is impossible at best, and perhaps even counterproductive, his overarching point seems pretty solid. When it comes to protecting the scientific literature from bias, the safeguards that academics now use are sorely inadequate.
How ‘Do Not Track’ Ended Up Going Nowhere
The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which was also a member of the task force, took matters into its own hands. It released a final version of a free plugin called the Privacy Badger for Firefox and Chrome browsers in August. Whenever a user turns on Do Not Track within the browser setting, Privacy Badger acts as an enforcer — it scans any website to determine if the publisher has agreed to honor this privacy request. If it can’t find a policy, it scans for third-party scripts that appear to be tracking — and blocks them.
“At the core of our project is the protection of users’ reading habits and browsing history,” the EFF wrote in introducing Privacy Badger. “And a conviction that this is personal information that should not be accessed without consent.”
Scholarly HTML: interoperable exchange of scholarly articles
Abstract
Scholarly HTML is a domain-specific data format built entirely on open standards that enables the interoperable exchange of scholarly articles in a manner that is compatible with off-the-shelf browsers. This document describes how Scholarly HTML works and how it is encoded as a document. It is, itself, written in Scholarly HTML.
Why I Miss Old Fashioned Library Cards
Was looking at the back of the book to see who had previously checked it out an invasion of their privacy? The Kobe Shimbun had discovered Murakami’s reading when the old books with their library slips were being discarded. That was not intrusive hacking but something closer to dumpster diving.
That information about readers still exists but is now hidden within the library, its access confined to those who operate the check-out system. The system is more efficient but I miss seeing how many readers preceded me. My reading is a bit more isolated as a result, the literary equivalent of Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone. But my reading choices are no longer public knowledge.
From History News Network | Why I Miss Old Fashioned Library Cards
Rhizome Awarded $600,000 by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to build Webrecorder
Rhizome is thrilled to announce today that The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded the institution a two-year, $600,000 grant to underwrite the comprehensive technical development of Webrecorder, an innovative tool to archive the dynamic web. The grant is the largest Rhizome has ever received and arrives at the start of its 20th anniversary year in 2016.
The web once delivered documents, like HTML pages. Today, it delivers complex software customized for every user, like individualized social media feeds. Current digital preservation solutions were built for that earlier time and cannot adequately cope with what the web has become. Webrecorder, in contrast, is a human-centered archival tool to create high-fidelity, interactive, contextual archives of social media and other dynamic content, such as embedded video and complex javascript, addressing our present and future.
From Rhizome
Sacramento’s ‘Library of Things’ Lets You Borrow GoPros, Sewing Machines, and Ukuleles
The program makes great sense in urban communities, which thrive on publicly connected spaces and resources. Other cities have similar services—the Berkeley Public Library, for instance, created a Tool Lending Library stocked with weed eaters, hedge trimmers, demolition hammers, and electric plumbing snakes.
Reddit users discussed the idea in the Today I Learned community. They noted some of the non-book items they can check out at their own local libraries.
From Sacramento’s ‘Library of Things’ Lets You Borrow GoPros, Sewing Machines, and Ukuleles | Upvoted
(thanks little_wow)
Will Future Historians Consider These Days The Digital Dark Ages?
We are awash in a sea of information, but how to historians sift through the mountain of data? In the future, computer programs will be unreadable, and therefore worthless, to historians.
From Will Future Historians Consider These Days The Digital Dark Ages? : NPR
It’s 2016 already, how are websites still screwing up these user experiences?!
We’re a few days into the new year and I’m sick of it already. This is fundamental web usability 101 stuff that plagues us all and makes our online life that much more painful than it needs to be. None of these practices – none of them – is ever met with “Oh how nice, this site is doing that thing”. Every one of these is absolutely driving the web into a dismal abyss of frustration and much ranting by all.
And before anyone retorts with “Oh you can just install this do-whacky plugin which rewrites the page or changes the behaviour”, no, that’s entirely not the point. Not only does it not solve a bunch of the problems, it shouldn’t damn well have to! How about we all just agree to stop making the web a less enjoyable place and not do these things from the outset?
From Troy Hunt: It’s 2016 already, how are websites still screwing up these user experiences?!
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