Best Wishes to William Patry

William Patry has announced the end of his Patry Copyright Blog.

For the past four years, William Patry has provided a well-written inside look into the messy world of copyright legislation. In an area where most of us are as much at sea as beginning Hebrew students are with BDB, Patry gave us intelligent landmarks by which to chart our course when trying to understand copyright. Anyone who has interacted with copyright law cannot help but appreciate the reasonableness of his postings even in areas where there are disagreements. His writings have given me hope that people can (and sometimes do) apply common sense to copyright laws.

Sadly enough, however, he cites as one of the main reasons for discontinuing his blog that the current state of copyright law is too depressing. It is hard not to agree with him. He writes, "Copyright law has abandoned its reason for being: to encourage learning and the creation of new works. Instead, its principal functions now are to preserve existing failed business models, to suppress new business models and technologies, and to obtain, if possible, enormous windfall profits from activity that not only causes no harm, but which is beneficial to copyright owners."

Copyright law affects education and especially affects libraries as we gain access to more digital resources. We will need more voices like William Patry's if we are to ensure the availability without prohibitive cost of the resources our students need.

Consortial Leverage, Canadian-Style

The ATLA conference's opening plenary session was a fascinating inside look at the consortial purchasing power of the Canadian Research Knowledge Network. The presentor was Leslie Weir, University Librarian at the University of Ottawa, president of the Canadian Association of Research Libraries, and chair of the Scholars Portal Operations and Development Committee (among many other accolades and accomplishments).

CRKN began in 2002 as the Canadian National Site License Project that brought together the Canadian Foundation for Innovation, ten Provinces, and 64 universities to invest $50 million in negotiating national site licenses for electronic resources. They also started the Ontario Infrastructure Initiative committed to extending the national research network backbone from the Montreal, Toronto, and Ottawa metropolitan areas to the rest of Canada as well.

In 2004, these initiatives became CRKN which encompassed 72 universities and worked to invest $100 million first in medical and science resources, and--just finalized in June 2008--14 collections in the social sciences and humanities.

Some of CRKN's goals are to:

• Secure the archiving of e-resources--they want a purchase model, not a lease model
• Provide reliable and rapid access to e-resources
• Lead innovation in information delivery, including the promotion of libraries as key partners through prominent branding
• Integrate with courseware
• Link resources that are difficult to collocate
• Avoid duplication of effort in the management of e-resources--they do not want to have everyone separately checking in the same e-journals

I was particularly impressed that CRKN purchases not only the resources themselves, but the necessary licenses to the vendor platforms to permit the downloading of many of the collections onto a single site customized for uniform storage and retrieval of items. This allows for much easier browsing across collections, encouraging serendipity which is still a significant factor in e-resource discovery. CRKN has enhanced the usability of e-resources by providing customizations like a tabbed display for easy linking to tables and figures from articles and a time-line display that provides an overview of when keyword terms came into use in the literature.

While CRKN also provides the RACER document delivery system to enhance the sharing of materials between subscribing schools, the overall goal has been to reduce interlibrary loan by providing direct access to e-resources. This is accomplished through the Scholars Portal which provides a federated search across 130 databases.

Many of the CRKN institutions also take advantage of a consortial RefWorks subscription that allows members free access to RefWorks's bibliographic management software. Students and faculty who move between subscribing institutions are able to retain their personal databases of research citations as long as they remain within the network.

CRKN also has two new initiatives: ODESI (Ontario Data Documentation, Extraction Service and Infrastructure Initiative), which provides access to national statistical data, and a $750,000 investment in e-books from many different vendors that are all downloaded onto an ebrary platform (along with many open access titles) to provide a uniform delivery system for all ebooks.

OCUL, the Ontario Council of University Libraries, plans to follow up this extensive investment in e-resources with a usability study as well as increased investment in multimedia materials and the development of a discovery layer that will integrate university OPACs with Scholars Portal data.

Leslie emphasized at the beginning of her presentation that most Canadian universities are public rather than private institutions, which has made cooperation on this scale possible. In the United States, we have many excellent state-wide consortia, but it is difficult to imagine our eclectic and competetive higher education institutions achieving this level of cooperation at the national level. Until U.S. institutions can achieve even greater cooperation than we already have, access to scholarly e-resources will continue to be extremely uneven across the spectrum of American colleges and universities.

Digital Technology In Churches

My thanks to John Jaeger from Dallas Baptist University whose frequent news postings on ATLANTIS brought this item from the Barna Group to my attention:

New Research Describes Use of Technology in Churches

According to the Barna Group, the pace of adoption of technology in Protestant churches has been slowing over the past two years. The Barna Group attributes this to churches having to pause for breath while they figure out how to configure the software they already have, while other churches "attempt to get by" before bringing digital technology into traditional church ministry.

George Barna has been researching the incorporation of digital technology by churches for a decade now. He comments:

"The fact that market penetration of digital technologies seems to top out around two-thirds of the market could easily change if the digital-resistant churches conceived ways of facilitating their vision through the deployment of such tools. That is what made these tools so appealing to larger churches: being able to apply the tools to furthering their ministry goals."

From my vantage point working in a seminary, though, I am wondering if some churches are starting to have a moment of reflection about whether their ministry goals are compatible with digital technology. Technology can be a tool that allows one to do what one has always done in a better or more efficient way, but technology can also be transformational. It can change what one does in ways that are difficult to predict.

Do the ministers that we are training need new ways to network and reach out to people in cyberspace, or do they need ways to bring the Facebook-frenzied away from their blinking screens into a community of believers? Do they need the capability to do both?

I continue to think of a theological library as a place that serves both purposes. We are making good use of the best technologies to improve access to the wealth of the writings of the Church, but we are also providing physical places where scholars can interact with each other and with books in a way that cannot be done online. I hope our churches will be able to do the same.

I'm On Facebook . . . So Now What?

I've jumped into Web 2.0 with one toe. (It hurts when you land like that!) I have created a Facebook page for our library, but now I'm wondering what to do with it.

For starters, I have discovered that one can create either a group page, which people can then join, or one can create a business page, and people can become "fans" of your library via the business page. Those of you that are experimenting with Facebook, which kind of page are you using? It seems to me like the group page provides more avenues for interaction.

Secondly, according to some of our communications people, most of our Anglo students have Facebook accounts while most of our African American students have MySpace accounts. Are others noticing this kind of racial divide? Does one have to maintain a presence in both MySpace _and_ Facebook in order to build/serve an online community?

(Thanks to Matt Ostercamp from Information and the Future for pointing me to a very helpful essay by Danah Boyd examining the socio-economic divisions between MySpace and Facebook.)

And what do people do with their library Facebook pages? My view is that the library page will eventually be part of an overall campus presence on Facebook, so it may only serve a limited purpose in terms of our online campus community. But if any of you have creative suggestions for things to do with a Facebook or MySpace page that your patrons have appreciated, I would love to hear about it.

The Ongoing eBook Morass

My thanks to techdirt.com for a posting that got me thinking this morning about the morass that is the state of ebooks in libraries.

I have been having an email exchange with InterVarsity Press trying to obtain permission to provide online access to articles from their New Testament dictionary series for course reserves. It turns out that IVP has already licensed their material via Logos's Essential IVP Reference Collection which is strictly CD-based, and thus they cannot provide permission for online use of their materials in another format. As I grumbled to IVP, CD-based materials are untenable for us to support distance and online education -- we need access to web-based materials for our students.

The sad reality is that the ebook is still a great concept in search of the right technology. There is a great paper by Linda Wilkins and Paula Swatman from the 19th Bled eConference in June, 2006 entitled E-Book Technology in Libraries: An Overview. A quote from the end of their paper:

"Despite attempts by the Open E-book Forum (now The International Digital Publishing Forum) to provide general access to electronic content, a wide variety of proprietary standards still exist rendering most e-books compatible only with certain devices. The lack of an agreed standard implies that an ‘agreeable machine’ to deliver books to a mass audience has not yet arrived on the scene (Turney 2005)."

And the scenery has not changed in the past two years. As the Library Journal reported last month, an experiment by the Sparta Public Library in New Jersey in loaning out Amazon.com's Kindle not only runs afoul of Amazon.com's license, it represents quite a financial risk in terms of the cost of the equipment and content that one is allowing to walk out the door. Perhaps a more hopeful model of the use of ebooks in a library setting is the North Suburban Digital Consortium right here in the Chicago area.

Which brings me back to the posting at techdirt.com pointing out the absurdities of trying to make ebooks available via interlibrary loan (if the license even allows one to do so). What at first blush should be a technology that increases the availability of a resource by making it easily transmittable, in reality is a technology that only serves to trap that resource in a complicated web of copyright restrictions. Librarians have already been dealing with the complexities of ejournal licensing which can sometimes be different title-by-title within packages provided by the same vendor. As the ebook grows in popularity and available formats, we will likely find ourselves equally perplexed with sorting through the conflicting restrictions of ebook licenses.

Amazon.com an Ally in the Copyright Wars?

Amazon.com's blog announced yesterday that they will be offering downloadable music without programmed copyright restrictions from EMI Music and over 12,000 other labels. That means that today's iPodders will no longer have to direct their energy to subverting DRM software before listening to and sharing their tunes.

Surely, if licensed music can be made this accessible for the purpose of entertainment, that means that there will be better grounds for making information accessible for the purpose of education. Or does that label me as an optimist?

A New Tool In the Copyright Wars

I was pleased to see in the Chronicle's Academe Today an article about a new Copyright Renewal Database at Stanford University. It appears that this database could be an invaluable tool for tracking down the copyright status of books published in the "gray years" from 1923-1963.

In spite of the much publicized efforts of Google Book Search and Microsoft Live Book Search, we are still a long ways away from having everything online. In the humanities in general and in religion and theology in particular we will still be dependent on a vast historical corpus for a long time to come. And judging by the kinds of publishing data to be found in places like YBP's annual book price update report, we are still building the modern corpus at record rates. It could be 120 years or longer before we will have online access to these materials. Stanford's Copyright Renewal Database is a laudable effort, but there are still many battles to be fought in the copyright wars.