Scraped into Arcturus
Dan Hagon, who is a computer scientist not a librarian, has posted my FriendFeed a useful resource from the University of Glamorgan library system. This confirms many of the facts I have assumed. http://lcss.glam.ac.uk/lrc/ills/
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Secure Electronic Delivery (SED)
University staff and researchers can request delivery of articles from the British Library’s rich collections directly to your PC. The documents are sent via a link from your e-mail, making them accessible to you anywhere with an internet connection. Electronic delivery eliminates postal delays and offers you a fast and efficient service. To register for this service, please complete the registration form (PDF) and return a signed copy […]
Requesting articles
- Download and complete our standard inter-library loan request form. For copyright reasons we need a hard copy of your signature, so please post the form (address above) to us or hand it in to the LRC.
- When we process your ILL request and send it to the British Library, they will scan the article/pages requested. The document created is a PDF document (a widely used electronic document format).
- The British Library will forward an e-mail from archie@bl.uk.
- Clicking on the link within the e-mail will download and open the document. Because the document is not attached to the e-mail, there is nothing to interfere with firewalls or clog up your inbox. Just click on the link while connected to the Internet to download the document. The link works best if you are using Microsoft Outlook as your e-mail client.
- The electronic copy will be available to download from the server at the British Library for 14 days, after which the file will be deleted.
Access and Printing
You are permitted to make only one paper copy from the electronic copy. We recommend printing it out when you first download it.
The items will be stored in My Bookshelf on Adobe Reader. We recommend you print your document on first viewing. Note, you will not be able to store your document on your PC.
Setting-up SED
Before receiving your document, it will be necessary to have Adobe Digital Editions installed on your PC. Adobe Digital Editions is a free eBook reader used to read DRM-protected PDF files and extends the e-Book capabilities that were integrated in previous versions of Adobe Reader and Adobe Acrobat.
Adobe Reader software is available as a free download. […]
The easiest way to do this is to download and print this test document from the British Library’s Secure Electronic Delivery website.
We strongly recommend that you do this before you try to download a document delivered by secure electronic delivery. We recommend you use Microsoft Outlook as your e-mail client.
PMR:
This shows some common features of the library culture.
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Copyright paralysis apparently requires a physical signature from the requester. Does it really? Who made that decision? And what terrible thing would happen if there wasn’t a physical signature. Note, of course that sending physical signatures is utterly incompatible with modern electronic practice.
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The MissionImpossible technology is absolutely right. The document will self-destruct in 14 days.
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There are at least two proprietary technologies required or promoted. [I don’t share the totality of Glyn Moody’s syllogism that everything Microsoft does is eveil and so is everyone who works with them, but you shouldn’t have to use Outlook]. The Adobe DRM machine is presumably the forerunner of the FileOpen.
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The SED is restricted to academics and researchers (i.e. evil students who are not to be trusted are not allowed to use it). So the DRM is because the BL does not trust academics and researchers.
I will have a little experiment and see what happens with the test document.
The BL Secure (for whom?) electronic delivery system allows me to download an encrypted file from the server (I have 14 days in which to do this), and use it in effect just once, to print the contents. I have tested this, and indeed what I cannot do is
a) copy (for paste) anything
b) print to anything except a real printer
c) print more than once
I certainly cannot eg. extract data from the document for re-use (say a set of molecular coordinates), or eg any DOI like links to other documents. Nor can I extract any metadata which might describe the document (this capability is summed up by saying that I cannot inject this document into a system such as eg Mendeley, in order to add value to the information.
Finally, were the document to contain interactive components (for example Acrobat 3D objects), I could not interact with them (certainly not 14 days after the document is placed on the BL server). I would imagine that Acrobat 3D is not the only potential manner in which users might interact with documents in the future.
So my question to the BL would be: how can I add value to the document you sent me in a digital sense if you only let me print one copy?
On Henry’s point about metadata extraction, an OCR method should work, even if there’s nothing embedded in the document. Here at CARET we’ve been looking into OCR recently, although our primary motivation has been to extract data from older scanned papers, but this might be a good rationale for newer ones, too.
How infuriating! I’m one of those people who the BL won’t trust (they probably think rightly). But on a Mac, you can print and then save as PDF to create a file. Adobe might have a way around that, but there will, presumably, be little they can do to pull the postscript out of /var/spool/cups/ after printing to a real offline (or paperless) pure-postscript printer.
But, as I say, I can only get at the test document which may be less protected.
The bad guys (who presumably make millions out of selling papers on Van De Walls Effects in pi-pi Stacking on the back streets of Shanghai) will be doing this right away, and those of us who just want to read the damn thing when and where we choose, and process the raw data, get shafted.