Librarian Way

Current copyright law impedes digitization projects and means that manuscripts, books, drawings, correspondence, and other tangible works will not be made publically available to researchers. In some cases, the works are much too fragile to let people handle them on location, so the works are lost information. Peter Hirtle highlights the loss of information through the current copyright protection laws in “Adopting ‘Orphan Works’,” a FAQ column article in RLG DigiNews April 15, 2005, Volume 9, Number 2. “‘Orphan works’ are works whose current copyright owner cannot be located.”

Hirtle explains that the 1989 copyright law removes “formalities associated with copyright protection” and establishes original copyright of an expression “as soon as it is fixed in a tangible medium.” There are significant problems in tracking copyright holders if they are no longer required to register their copyright. Furthermore, identifying who the copyright passed to after death can be impossible. The problem is made worse because “the duration of copyright has increased by an order of magnitude from the time of the Founding Fathers. …has expanded to become a term equivalent to the life of the author plus seventy years. Longer copyright terms greatly increase the likelihood that the identity of the current copyright owners will be lost.” In a footnote, Hirtle mentions that copyright infringement can cost up to $150,000 plus legal fees per infringement.

The article has many good links, including a link to a letter [PDF] from University Librarian Brian Schottlaender of UCSD to the US Copyright Office, in which he states, “The uncertain copyright status of orphan works imposes significant limitations on the UCSD Libraries’ ability to provide access to patrons in the digital world.” Schottlaender uses the Scripps Institute of Oceanogprahy Archives as an example, and he explains that Scripps Archives has made about 4000 images and 100,000 photographs available over the internet, but “this represents only a small subset of our photographic holdings.”

[Via Current Cites, April 2005]

The May 2005 issue (vol. 5, no. 7) of Cites & Insights: Crawford at Large is available. Crawford’s Cites & Insights 5:7 - Ethical Perspective: Weblogging, Ethics and Impact is available in both the PDF and online in HTML.

The article includes a response to J.D. Lascia’s essay on influence peddling in weblogs.

The article also brought Jon Garfunkel’s Civilities | Constructing Informative Viewpoints to my attention. I saw that Web site and forgot about it. I am glad I was reminded of it. The highlight of Crawford’s column is a response to several of Garfunkel’s postings, such as Deconstructing Blogs: Presenting Blogger Archetypes | Civilities and Social Media Scorecard | Civilities.

Crawford comments that Civilities requires registration in order to comment. I am actually going in that direction. I notice that Civilities uses Drupal | drupal.org, which is a content management system that includes a weblog module. There are two reasons I want registration: 1) to protect the poster from having to leave their email address accessible on the comment page, and 2) to protect my Web log from spam posters. I have had to systematically close comments on older entries in order to prevent spam. Of course, I an still using the shareware version of Movable Type, which does not have comment holding.

Though it seems it is not available yet through online databases, an article “The Many Faces of EDGAR,” by Amelia Kassel, was published in the May/June 2005 issue of ONLINE Magazine, pages 37-40.

EDGAR is the free online government database for the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Kassel explains that you search the EDGAR database to find financial, marketing, management, and legal informaton about a company or industry. She says that sometime information is proprietary, but “…there are often bits and pieces with clues about a company that are important for searchers working in the fields of market research and competitive intelligence.” She compares the government search engine with fee-based value-added EDGARs, such as 10k Wizard, LIVEDGAR, and EDGAR Online.