I just attended the 2nd annual conference of Digital Commonwealth - a consortium of more than 100 Massachusetts libraries who have combined their digitization projects into one massive effort. Worcester, Mass. is just close enough that I could day trip it, but it meant getting out on the road at 6:30 AM on a rainy fall morning. I didn't have to be there quite that early, but I wanted to avoid the worst of rush hour in Hartford. Sure enough, I pulled in to the parking lot at College of the Holy Cross with time to spare. I could see from the registration table that this was not lightly attended. It turns out that they started turning people down after 300.
In the announcements we were told that the balloons that decorated the ballroom were in honor of the group's new portal at http://www.digitalcommonwealth.org/ . The first keynote speaker was Mary Minow, who spoke on the legal aspects of digitization. I had been guilty of oversimplification in digital matters - to me, if it was published before 1923 we were good to go. It turns out that many books published between 1923 and the late 1970's never had copyright renewal, so they are also candidates for digitization. In the past, looking up the status of these titles involved klunky research, but now there is a website up that lists the renewed titles in this time period. You can check now at http://collections.stanford.edu/copyrightrenewals/bin/page?forward=home. Another very useful source is the Peter Hirtle chart at http://www.copyright.cornell.edu/training/Hirtle_Public_Domain.htm, that addresses in general terms the issues with every type of material, including unpublished works of art. Recipes, ideas and facts are all in the public domain. That means that if everything I write here is true, it cannot be copyrighted. I saw Minow at a later program and told her my theory that the reason the establishment is holding the line at 1923 is that works of Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Steinbeck start appearing shortly afterwards, and publishers are still making fortunes selling those books. Follow the money.
In the announcements we were told that the balloons that decorated the ballroom were in honor of the group's new portal at http://www.digitalcommonwealth.org/ . The first keynote speaker was Mary Minow, who spoke on the legal aspects of digitization. I had been guilty of oversimplification in digital matters - to me, if it was published before 1923 we were good to go. It turns out that many books published between 1923 and the late 1970's never had copyright renewal, so they are also candidates for digitization. In the past, looking up the status of these titles involved klunky research, but now there is a website up that lists the renewed titles in this time period. You can check now at http://collections.stanford.edu/copyrightrenewals/bin/page?forward=home. Another very useful source is the Peter Hirtle chart at http://www.copyright.cornell.edu/training/Hirtle_Public_Domain.htm, that addresses in general terms the issues with every type of material, including unpublished works of art. Recipes, ideas and facts are all in the public domain. That means that if everything I write here is true, it cannot be copyrighted. I saw Minow at a later program and told her my theory that the reason the establishment is holding the line at 1923 is that works of Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Steinbeck start appearing shortly afterwards, and publishers are still making fortunes selling those books. Follow the money.
Marshall Keys, library visionary spoke after the break, and put the digitization work in a Library 2.0 perspective, starting with the understatement that "Recall in Google is greater than precision." He told of the perceptions of the library that evolved in his days of being a librarian, starting with the concept that the library is a warehouse for books to the current concept that the libary is a server farm where we keep the data. The danger of projects like the commonwealth is that they can become dormant warehouses for data. Automation progresses from "We do things differently" "We do different things." Libraries must adopt a strategy of constant change - all life is beta. Libraries need to meet the emerging needs of their users.
If we don't adapt, we will face competition on all sides from commercial interests who do understand the Gen Xers. A good example is Book Swim, http://www.bookswim.com/, which rents out books in the way that Netflix rents out movies. You can keep any book as long as you want, but you have a preset limit as to the number of books available to you. Keys mentioned the Westerville Public Library in Ohio as an example of Library 2.0 that does not result in a loss of control or image. The library, already well known to me as a super user of Innovative Interfaces technology, has a motto "Busier than a freakin' Wal-Mart." Not your grandmother's public library. One of the things they did that caught my eye was to check out dvds to teens along with dvd-viewing goggles and headsets. That might be a good answer in libraries like my own that have a video preview crunch. As soon as I find the URL for Keys' presentation, I'll add it to this page.
To complete the double-whammy, I went to Elizabeth Thomsen's lecture - also about Web 2.0 and the libraries. Thomsen is from NOBLE - the North of Boston Library Exchange. It is her contention that libraries can harness the enthusiasm of users by using third party sites such as FLICKR. Her golden example was Image Australia. This is a two-tiered site that tries to create a major digital record of Australia. It is tied in with a FLICKR account where anybody can contribute anything, and they hope it's relevant. The editors go through the mounds of material and pick out the gems for inclusion in the real site. She then showed how she added extra layers of data to Google Maps and Google Earth. As someone who has contributed photos to Google Earth and to Wikipedia, my ears really perked up here. Her presentation can now be accessed at http://www.slideshare.net/ethomsen/futureofthepast .
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