Librarian Way

The QuickTime movie of the lecture The Access to Knowledge Treaty: What if WIPO Actually Worked For Us? A Digital Dialog Lecture with Cory Doctorow, is available on the Internet Archive.

This was the lecture Cory Doctorow gave at UC, San Diego, on March 14, 2005: SSHL News & Events: Digital Dialog Lecture with Cory Doctorow.

[Via J. R. Jacobs on GOVDOC-L.]

On Free Government Information, Oznog is blogging from the Spring 2005 Depository Library Council Meeting (April 17-20).

Daniel Cornwall is requesting conference notes and impressions, which will be posted to a new “Grassroots Proceedings” that is planned for this Web site.

[Via D. Cornwall on GOVDOC-L.]

For issues, see also
FCW.com, April 19, 2005: Librarians face existential crisis. Librarians “…expressed concerns about the credibility and archiving of electronic documents. A number of technologies for authenticating and updating e-documents are not in place, and GPO officials have only just begun a major project using new technology to search the Internet to find all government documents published directly to the Web.”

April 20, 2005 revision via R. Kimble on GOVDOC-L.
The proceedings for several years of both spring and fall annual meetings are available via GPO Access. Per Kimble, the Spring 2005 Council proceedings will be posted in about 30 days. FDLP Desktop: Proceedings of Federal Depository Library Conferences (http://www.access.gpo.gov/su_docs/fdlp/pubs/proceedings/index.html)

The April 2005 issue of Searcher: The Magazine for Database Professionals has an article about Open Access (Wikipedia entry). Jill Grogg’s article “Linking Users to Open Access,” “offers help for librarians who face the daily task of providing users with integrated access to quality scholarship, whether free or fee-based.”

The issue also has an article by David Mattison titled “RedLightGreen and Open WorldCat.” The article has a summary of comparisons between Open WorldCat [OCLC - WorldCat] and RedLightGreen (p. 19).

Speaking of Open Access and a tie-in with my current research interest, Library Autonomous Zone’s blog entry New open access govt information journal, has a link to Open Government: a journal on Freedom of Information.

This journal is international: Most of the articles in the first issue, March 2005, seem to be related to the UK’s Freedom of Information Act (2000), though the same issues are important to other nations too. This journal is currently a series of PDF files—even the editorial! I wish they had at least added abstracts so that one is not forced to download each PDF. More people will find and use the journal if they don’t have to do the extra steps of downloading, opening, and deleting just to see the what the article is about. I downloaded “The Third International Conference of Information Commissioners,” by David Goldberg, which gives a some highlights of the February 2005 conference. The conference is urging governments without a freedom of information law to implement one. In the article there are a number of links to more PDF files, but one points to the conference Web site, Info Cancún 2005. The introduction on the Info Cancún Web site begins, “Transparency and access to public information have become fundamental topics, indissoluble of political and social change in the world.”