The power of the scholarly individual in the Internet Age

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I don’t get huge numbers of comments (people shouldn’t feel reluctant) but sometimes you get a post that makes it all worthwhile. I’ve had a mixed day, spilling tea on my laptop keyboard (which is why the previous post is almost infantile), having people help to sort it out, fighting a build on Hudson that took hours rather than minutes, having a colleague find a workaround, and so on…

  1. May 12, 2010 at 12:33 pm  (Edit)

    Thanks for this post, found via GeoEnable. I’m not a scientist tho I’ve been in touch with research institutions all my life, as a geologist now working the web. Check my recent blog psoting on what OpenData has allowed me to do after-hours on Cambs. history data. We just went through an audit of our workplace website and had Creative Commons posted as made sense, same as in my GIScloud maps linked in my blog. Thanks for your indefatigable efforts, to quote a friend also in data mgmt., “… an interesting day in the mine… why do I feel like I am the only one with the flashlight, and everyone else is in the dark when it comes to processes, procedure and planning?” Cheers, Andrew

Even a message as short as this creates an immediate bond. Looking briefly at Andrew’s blog he has clearly done a careful and attractive analysis of maps in the Cambridge region.

[I will now briefly make a fool of myself – what the hell , it’s only the web. Andrew has a *.ca extension, which is Canada. Identi.ca has a *.ca extension. Are either anything to do with Canada?]

Andrew’s blog shows how anyone can do works of scholarship without having to be employed by a University. As long as you are prepared to pay for your torch batteries, take the criticism sometimes, then there is no reason why anyone cannot become an Internet scholar. An excellent example of this is GalaxyZoo where “amateurs” (and I use that in a complimentary sense) were invited to help classify galaxies. This is primarily a matter of being able to operate rules for classification based on shape, size, texture, etc. It turns out that many “amateur” classifiers were as good as the “experts”. There are now hundreds of thousands of GalaxyZooites and it even got onto The Archers (a UK BBC farming soap of great popularity and duration).

The key thing is that it’s possible to make scientific discoveries or contributions without being a formal practitioner. I understand that there are nearly 20 peer-reviewed publications from GalaxyZoo which include non-astronomers.

There’s therefore no reason why Andrew should not become an expert on geographical history (assuming he already isn’t). There’s a long tradition of amateur scholarship in this country (my great-aunt, Alice Hibbert-Ware who lived in Girton) did a seminal study of the stomach contents and pellets of the Little Owl (Athene noctua) which had a major influence in persuading people that it was beneficial to agriculture and should be protected. The F/OSS software movement has many contributors who have no formal software training.

There are many opportunities. In the Open Knowledge Foundation we are strating to collate materials and practices relating to climate change. Canada has just exposed a large amount of data and invited contributions. I expect we shall soon have enough linked Open data on the web that we shall be able to create many new data-driven insights. There’s every reason why schools should be involved in such projects – the collection and analysis of data is a key skill.

So yes, Andrew, when it looks bleak (I call it “blood on the floor at midnight”) keep going.

 

 

 


 

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Canadian competition to re-use Government data

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Here is a great competition from Canada to re-use government data

http://apps4climateaction.gov.bc.ca/

 

Maybe we can Persuade Them To Label the Data As Open Data. Perhaps someone might like To make A Request Using IsItOpen?

 

 


 

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Adobe: “the current situation [lack of accessibility in Adobe Digital Editions] is simply unacceptable”.

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There are several reasons why the DRM practised by the British Library is completely unacceptable. Some are subjective, but some are objective. One of the latter is accessibility. This is a technical term (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accessibility ) defined as:

Accessibility is a general term used to describe the degree to which a product, device, service, or environment is accessible by as many people as possible. Accessibility can be viewed as the “ability to access” and possible benefit of some system or entity. Accessibility is often used to focus on people with disabilities and their right of access to entities, often through use of assistive techhnology.

In many cases, including the UK there is a legal requirement to address accessibility. Here, for example, is the Royal National Institute for Blind People (RNIB)

hthtp://www.rnib.org.uk/professionals/webaccessibility/lawsandstandards/Pages/uk_law.aspx

I would assume, though the law is never simple and there may be exclusions, that the British Library was bound by these requirements. What I contend is that the imposition of DRM severely reduces accessibility, and the blog run by Bill McCoy of Adobe (“This is the corporate (yet opinionated) weblog of Bill McCoy – General Manager, ePublishing Business, Adobe Systems Incorporated.”) agrees. He is writing about Adobe Digital Editions, the technology used by the BL to enforce DRM. I quote his copyrighted blog in full (without permission, arguing public interest). The date is the end of last year http://blogs.adobe.com/billmccoyDRM /2009/10/adobe-ebooks–.html. All emphasis is mine

Adobe eBooks – Update on Accessibility Support

 

A few inquiries have come in about a press release earlier this week by the Reading Rights Coalition noting that the Los Angeles Public Library has suspended purchasing eBooks compatible with Adobe Digital Editions, because there is no accessibility support in our solution. This post is intended to clarify the situation and provide an update on our roadmap.

The basic concern of the Reading Rights Coalition is legitimate. Adobe Digital Editions is a PC application that replaced the eBook support that was present in older versions of Adobe Reader. While there are many new capabilities in Adobe Digital Editions, most importantly support for epub in addition to PDF, and overall its more consumer-focused user interface, Adobe Reader did support screen readers and a “read out loud” feature, neither of which is presently in Adobe Digital Editions. This is a regrettable situation. It stems from the fact that, for a number of reasons, we made the decision to build Adobe Digital Editions in a technology called Adobe Flex, targeting the Adobe Flash desktop runtime that became Adobe AIR. While the browser-based version of Flash Player has for quite some time included accessibility support, the desktop configuration has not, and neither the AIR team nor our Digital Editions team was able to incorporate accessibility support in our respective version 1 implementations.

We agree completely that eBook accessibility is critical. Adobe is helping to create the cross-platform standard for interoperable eBooks. Clearly, accessibility support is a fundamental requirement. One of the key motivations for supporting epub was that it was a more structure-based and thus more inherently accessible file format makes. So, the current situation is simply unacceptable.

So what are we doing about it?

First, the next major release of Adobe Digital Editions, expected within the coming year, is going to support accessiblity features. Earlier this week, Adobe previewed AIR 2, and we disclosed that screen reader support was going to be included. This will be a key enabler for us.

Additionally, Adobe has begun working with several vendors of accessibility-oriented software and devices to get them access to Adobe eBook rendering and DRM technology via our Adobe Reader Mobile SDK, so their solutions can consume Adobe eBooks. Our Reader Mobile SDK is not a revenue generator for Adobe; our standard terms are focused on proliferation (and with 17 announced licensees so far this year we are doing pretty well on that front). This is similar to the Open Screen Project for Flash licensing. But since many accessibility vendors are either nonproffits or have limited financial resources, we have gone even further in extending extraordinarily favorable terms to get them access to our portable document technology. I expect we will be able to make some specific announcements around this very shortly, but the bottom line is that there will soon be multiple means for visually-impaired end users to consume Adobe eBooks.

One still controversial issue is that some publishers are concerned lest non-visually-impaired consumers get access to “read out loud” functionality that would potentially undercut sales of audio books. Adobe plans in this regard are to support in our DRM system a permission setting that will enable publishers to disable “read out loud” functionality in software systems that are NOT focused on the visually impaired. But, we plan to default this permission setting to “enable” and recommend strongly that publishers not set it to “disable”. As well we plan to exempt accessibility-oriented software from being limited by this setting. We feel this approach will strike an appropriate balance between giving publishers the rights to determine how to distribute their copyrighted content, and ensuring that accessibility is provided.

Again, the current situation is unfortunate. As someone who has helped foster the adoption of epub, including the decision to support DAISY as a type of basic content within epub, it is a black eye for me personally that Adobe’s solution does not presently provide accessibility support. I am grateful that the Los Angeles Public Library has only “suspended” purchasing Adobe eBooks, and I look forward to working with our partners to, in short order, remedy the situation.

I shall be asking the BL about accessibility for ILL. I have already sent them an FOI about the non-accessibility of the PDF they sent to me.

The current position seems to be that the BL destroys or seriously downgrades the material it issues to readers because it wishes to, or has to, protect the commercial interests of the companies who supply it. (What am I writing?? The material supplied is written by US, the academics. But let’s fight the easiest battles first).

What distresses me is that as far as I can see nobody in the UK library system has highlighted this problem, let alone challenged it with the energy of Los Angeles. If any librarian wishes to correct me, you can do it anonymously on this blog or mail me. But until then I shall assume that virtually no concern, let alone opposition, was raised. I believe it is actually a duty of librarians to address this sort of thing and if they enlist academics they would find support. Some of us care about accessibility.

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“no doubt at all that theDRM-limited system […] is appallingly unfunctional”

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Another very useful contribution. Chris Rusbridge has just stepped down from running the Digital Curation Centre.

Chris highlights the problem. It’s the publishers. I know at second-hand how difficult it was for the NIH to push through PubMedCentral and the deposition of work funded by NIH. And we can only text-mine two papers or something ridiculous.

 

Chris Rusbridge says:

May 11, 2010 at 4:52 pm  (Edit)

Peter, there is no doubt at all that theDRM-limited system you describe is appallingly unfunctional. I really liked your restatement of Ranganathan’s laws as being for publishers rather than libraries, as that is what I think is happening here. I was eLib Programme Director during the first stirrings of the digital world into libraries (perhaps an over-statement), and was party to some of the negotiations between JISC and the Publishers Association as we struggled to get agreement on how best to deal with digital documents. All this was, of course, well before “semantic” documents, and you should understand some of what happened bearing that in mind.

Prior to that time ILL was always paper to paper, using postal systems, and that is how the law was set up, including the requirement for a physical signature. In the eLib years we introduced a couple of paper to paper systems using electronic delivery. These essentially involved scanning the documents and sending them in various ways. The law required this transaction to be between librarians, and the end document had to be supplied on paper. A fee had to be charged, a few pounds I believe.

Publishers have never liked ILL systems, as they wanted to charge much larger author charges (I think they were typically 15 pounds or more at the time). But it was the law and they had to live with it. They did what they could to frustrate its improvement.

One thing we tried was an “electronic inter-library loan” system for the case where the source document was already in electronic form, eg an electronic journal that the library subscribed to (note, this means rented under licence, not owned). The idea was that the library could transfer a copy direct to the academic in electronic form under conditions that disallowed further copying. The system was described in “Morrow, T. (2002). EASY Does It: A Fresh Approach to Electronic Article Supply. In VALA 2002. Retrieved from http://www.vala.org.au/vala2002/2002pdf/25Morrow.pdf“. However, after the pilot experiment the publishers were not interested in continuing and it died.

I am confident that the BL was unhappy with the paper-electronic-paper system, and I know they spent much time in negotiation with the publishers to improve functionality for readers. Treating it as an exercise to get a copy to a reader rapidly, they presumably decided the DRM-limited functionality was an acceptable compromise. ILL never allowed you to make further copies of the material, and if you gave “your” copy to a colleague, then there was still only one. I think they felt they were replicating that functionality with improvements in speed, not envisaging the further analysis readers like yourself would in the future be capable of making.

So, perhaps viewed from that history, perhaps the current situation is more understandable. I don’t think it is a good situation for readers, and particularly for computational readers. I guess the publishers would say: buy a proper copy from us…

Please note, I’m not writing this as an apology for the publishers, who should b apologising themselves. I’d really like to see an improvement. But with the DE Act showing what continuing influence these industries have, improvement seems unlikely. But do keep pushing!

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“many librarians/libraries are very, very risk averse”

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Another very useful contribution from Stephanie Taylor. This is, perhaps, the main issue – that libraries and librarians are far too risk averse. I think the BL has been too risk-averse (though I have yet to find out whether they got legal advice) and libraries round the country have been too quiet. And now we are saddled with something awful that nobody wants and needs getting rid of.

One major concern is that by adding DRM the BL is giving a signal that it approves of technological control of content. This is very dangerous. It also gives the signal that its suppliers call the tune and not it. That also is very serious. Anyway…

Stephanie Taylor says:

May 11, 2010 at 12:17 pm  (Edit)

In response to Owen, in my experience there is a risk in using e-signatures, and many libraries are not prepared to take a risk. In my personal opinion, the risk is minimal, but it presents a real barrier as many librarians/libraries are very, very risk averse on the copyright aspects of interlending. The EThOS stance gave me some hope, as I thought such a high-profile project with heavy-weight partners would maybe inspire by example. This doesn’t, however, seem to be filtering down to general practice in quite the way I wished.

Also, I may be unduly cynical here, but I think that the potential ease of inappropriate re-distribution of electronic material has been balanced out with a clearer audit trail for rights holders to follow – and they have tightened the requirements accordingly on digital content, holding a much tighter grip than was possible with paper copies.

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BL: Update, including more useful comments from Owen Stephens

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The bulk of this message is valuable comments from Owen Stephens. My current plan is to draft a letter to the BL this evening. My conclusions are:

  • There is widespread unhappiness about the use of DRM by the BL
  • There is no compelling legal reason for it (though they may have got legal opinion and we may have to defer. After all, legal opinion took us into Iraq).

 

Just to clarify things. I want to help the BL. The BL is not evil, quite the reverse. I’m on the advisory board for UKPubMedCentral (a BL initiative) and I work closely with BL staff. Ben White sought my views on copyright when formulating BL’s views and we had considerable discussion. The BL is A GOOD THING.

 

However we seem to have got caught in a tar pit where the apparent legal restrictions are driving us further into the ooze. I want to find out why, as a Critical Friend (Brian Kelly’s phrase). Anyway here’s Owen.

 

Owen Stephens says:

May 11, 2010 at 9:32 am  (Edit)

Stephanie says “In UK law, the signature has to be obtained as a written signature, i.e. pen on paper”. This is not my understanding.

CILIP (the professional body for librarians and other information professionals) have for several years advised that electronic signatures in the form of a login to a library (or other) system can be accepted for the purposes of ILL. This advice was first published in 2002, and the text (available at http://www.cilip.org.uk/policyadvocacy/copyright/advice/e-signatures.htm) was updated in 2007

However, despite this very clear (and sensible IMO) conclusion there is still some debate. I know of at least 5 Universities that accept e-signatures for ILL while I also know of 4 that have decided that only print signatures are legal. I am very strongly of the opinion that the CILIP advice is good, and that e-signatures for ILL are acceptable.

Owen Stephens says:

May 11, 2010 at 9:47 am  (Edit)

It seems to me that the arguments for DRM for document delivery are just exactly the same as those made for DRM on Music/Video/E-books and other digital content – that the ease with which you can redistribute the copies means you need extra protection on the digital content to essentially increase the cost of redistribution.

I do not support this argument! I’m just noting it.

Owen Stephens says:

May 11, 2010 at 10:07 am  (Edit)

On the theses front I was the Project Director for the EThOSNet project, which was responsible for the collaboration between the BL and the HE community to establish the EThOS service (electronic theses) at the BL.

EThOS works as an ‘opt-out’ system – the details are described in the accompanying toolkit http://ethostoolkit.cranfield.ac.uk/tiki-index.php?page=EThOS:+Author+information&highlight=risk but essentially the approach is to say that the risk of a copyright owner taking legal action is very low, and if the service is publicised properly (so authors have a good chance of being aware their thesis will go into the service) and a strong takedown policy so that theses can be removed from the collection if an author objects.

Despite this clear advice, I know individual institutions have decided that they will contact authors before they supply theses to the British Library service.

The EThOS toolkit also strongly recommends that institutions implement deposit agreements for theses, and that thesis authors sign these before depositing their thesis with the university – effectively making it part of the thesis submission process. Model wording for such agreements or licenses is also supplied in the toolkit.

When a requester gets a thesis via EThOS they agree to a set of terms and conditions which cover the legal side – note that this is done electronically not in writing!

What would drive the BL/HE community to move this to a DRM basis? The only real argument I’d be able to see here would be if the takedown or refusal to supply rate is extremely high and there is evidence that offering thesis authors a DRM option would reduce this – so essentially only if the authors of the theses are asking for DRM.

Of course, never say never, but I would be suprised and personally extremely disappointed if the EThOS service was to step back from the progress it has made in this area.

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The BL’s position becomes somewhat clearer but additional comments welcome

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I’ve had a really helpful comment from Stephanie Taylor who says (in full):

May 10, 2010 at 6:06 pm  (Edit)

Hi,

I’m based in the UK and have an inter-library loans background in academic libraries. I’m currently working with UKOLN at the University of Bath as researcher and am also a consultant in various aspects of digital library services.

PMR thanks very much

The main difference between BL services and publisher services is that BL do not own the copyright of the the majority of the material they supply via SED. Certainly in UK academic libraries, requests for articles etc. from academic researchers are made to their home library. The library then requests a copy of the article (or other material) from BL on behalf of the original requester. To comply with copyright law, the original requester (in this case the academic researcher) has to sign a request form, including a copyright declaration, at some part during the interlending process. This is a legal requirement for obtaining non-returnable copies. In UK law, the signature has to be obtained as a written signature, i.e. pen on paper.

PMR I understand, especially after Andrew Walker unearthed the legislation. I get the impression that at times the BL treats the totality as being the same as the majority because it’s easier. For example they charge for Open Access if it’s too difficult to find out whether something is OA.

The supplier (BL, then the home library) have to be able to show a clear audit trail, including the original signature. Also, the supplier is required to demonstrate that the original requester (the academic researcher, here), has only received one copy of the requested article and that no permanent copy of the original article exists once it has been delivered to the original requester.

PMR Understood. In the past they had to trust the researcher not to copy it.

This archaic (in my opinion) law has held back the free flow of information from libraries to their patrons since the early days of e-publishing and digitisation. BL, along with many other libraries offering to share material via interlending, have implemented many systems that I would consider restrictive in order to be seen to comply with this legislation. Academic publishers in particular seem to be very loath to make any concessions in this area – in fact, it seems to me that many copyright owners have used the more traceable elements of a digital transaction to tighten up how their material is used and shared among library patrons.

PMR very well put and echoing my own views.

In my opinion (and it is very much my personal professional opinion, and doesn’t represent the views of any of my employers) librarians could best serve their patrons by challenging this legislation. But it would need to be a concerted effort, with support from higher levels and done as a large group. If a library, even BL, acted alone, then they could (and in my personal experience would) be prosecuted.

PMR: Again echoes my own views. I think this should be challenged – or rather should have been and now should be challenged. Yes, the BL might be prosecuted. It might be prosecuted for what? Sending a researcher a copy after the researcher has signed that they will not copy it? This is like putting microchips in people so they can’t vote twice.

I’d really, really LOVE to get academic researchers, BL staff and other interested librarians together to sort out an effective plan of action to take this on. It has always seemed mad to me that it is possible to move around vast sums of money, buy a house and manage shares online, yet a signature written on paper is required to request a copy of an article from an obscure academic journal. Equally, I see the point has already been made that once an individual has a copy of any material, they could make further copies (illegally) and distribute them – this was as true when people used photocopiers and faxes as it is today where email attachments can be forwarded.

The big problem is who is held responsible – and as long as responsibility can be laid at the door of an individual library, librarians are wary of challenging this law individually via direct action. Ultimately, it could be the job/career of an individual librarian on the line here. If we could act as a group, mass disobedience backed up by a reasonable strategy for lobbying for change, it would be for the benefit of everyone in the UK, in my opinion.

PMR: I am not a politician but it appears to me that the BL has been ultra-timid. I intend to pursue this with them. The problem is that they set the scene for everything else. It wouldn’t surprise me if they now DRM theses.

This is extremely useful for preparing my letter to them.

[In case you think I do nothing but blog, I am running a functional workflow over Nick Day’s Crystaleye fulltext feed for Acta Crystallographica E (which is OPEN ACCESS), extracting the chemistry using a series of make-like components and processes which will go into Lensfield, uses Daniel Lowe’s Opsin to translate chemical names, and Lezan Hawizy’s chemicalTagger for Natural Language Processing. It takes about 15 minutes per 1000 papers and comes up with the most semantic chemistry documents anywhere. I *could* run it all at once but I’m looking at the results as we go.]

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Does Secure Electronic Delivery **REQUIRE** DRM?

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Does Electronic Delivery (even Secure Electronic Delivery) REQUIRE DRM?

This is at the heart of my argument. Owen Stephens has given a careful and useful reply and since he is the only Librarian in the UK taking this up with me I’ll take time to reply. I’ll comment in detail (with a few snips) and then continue my case.

  1. May 10, 2010 at 3:55 pm  (Edit)

    I should be clear up front that I’m not defending the use of DRM for this purpose […] When I talk about ‘advantages’ – the two key advantages that I see to the BL SED system are:

    Speed – items can be delivered more quickly
    Cost – it is cheaper to process electronic copies, especially when they are delivered directly to the requesting reader (adopting your preferred terminology!) – which is an option the BL have always offered

    I think these both offer advantages to the reader – speed I think is direct advantage, whereas reducing cost clearly offers overall opportunities to the community of users if not to users directly on an individual basis (although I concede that cost savings are sometimes just cost savings, and don’t confer any particular benefit)

    PMR: I am complete agreement so far. I haven’t seen “DRM” in the above paragraphs. Maybe I’m technologically ignorant. But I get e-publications from commercial publishers which don’t appear to have any DRM – and certainly not anything that stops cut and pasting, self-destructs, etc. The publishers have a very clear stranglehold over the University – if they think that I am breaching the rules they switch off the supply of articles and this is frequent.

    Whether you think these advantages outweigh the disadvantages (I would argue) is a different matter. Clearly you don’t – and I can absolutely see your argument.

    PMR I don’t see yours at all, so far. I’m clearly missing something.

    I would absolutely agree that the DRM completely hobbles the use of these electronic copies, and I agree completely with the point about trust. I also completely agree that delivering articles without the DRM would be much much better for the reader. What I think you miss is that it would also be a big benefit for the library and institution – DRM costs time and money to implement (e.g. see discussions about rolling out the ‘FileOpen’ software to all computers in a University on the LIS-ILL discussion list), and problems caused by DRM (e.g. inability to open a file) take time for library staff to resolve.

    PMR: I absolutely fail to see the benefit (unless FileOpen or ADE is much cheaper than ordinary PDF readers. (I am not even in this reply railing against PDF – I can manage a hamburger, but this is simply burnt to charcoal).

    I think one challenge for libraries is that for some readers the utility of getting an item delivered quickly, by email is high enough to outweigh the costs – and for others not. Librarian’s have a choice as to whether they provide the service, or hold out for a better deal. I would draw a parallel between this and discussions about the BBC and DRM on iPlayer streams – many people think it is wrong for the BBC to apply DRM to their online offering. The BBC (and others) argue that without this they would not be able to provide the content online at all.

    [discussion on “user” snipped.]

    PMR: So I am mystified. The rest of the suppliers of academic e-material (Elsevier, ACS, Nature, etc.) send normal unmutilated PDFs. There is no special software. We could, if we wished, send copies to the whole world. But if we break the rules and they find out we get cut off. Why can’t the BL do the same? They know who it’s going to. I have filled out a form in blood and sent it by carrier pigeon so speed is irrelevant. If I foul up I burn in hell.

    So what’s so special about the BL? It can tell the users that they must obey the 1989 Copyright regulations and if they don’t they go to the Tower of London. Are they EXPLICITLY required by law to impose DRM? If so, I’ll shut up. If not, they can behave in a reasonable way like a reasonable person (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasonable_person ). When they sent out photocopies they didn’t use vanishing ink – they told people the law said they could only make one copy. Why not the same here?

    What am I missing?

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How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love DRM

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Owen Stephens says:

May 10, 2010 at 9:34 am 

I’m not sure if you are still looking for answers on this, and if so what answers you are looking for?

A brief summary of my knowledge, although I suspect you’ve gathered all this by now:

The BL has never (afaik) offered electronic delivery of documents without DRM. This service has always been called ‘SED’ (Secure Electronic Delivery). It was originally implemented using Adobe DRM (eventually Digital Editions, something else earlier I think), and this year has been moving/moved to using a new system called FileOpen.

My experience was that librarians did raise many of the concerns that you raise here when SED was first introduced (in 2005), and many libraries did not implement to start with because of DRM issues (sometimes principle, more often practical in my experience)

However, in the end I think the advantages of offering SED to users overcame any initial reservations about it.

In terms of getting more information on this I’d recommend asking questions on the JISCMail LIS-ILL list – I think this is where you’d get more detailed and expert answers – https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A0=LIS-ILL

Owen is in the Library Information Science area, and this is very useful, thanks.

I am interested to know that there were concerns. I wonder how many libraries raised this with their institution as a matter of academic freedom.

You say “I think the advantages of offering SED to users overcame any initial reservations about it.” I and Henry see no advantages. We see a pile of disadvantages. The BL is offering this to named academics who can presumably be trusted. If they can’t they can be brought to book, one by one. There is absolutely no advantage to the reader.

Note that Owen uses the current term “user” (sometimes “enduser”). This is not the “reader” who is a forgotten species; it is normally the librarian or purchasing officer. The conflation of user with reader is a serious issue.

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Nahtanagran’s laws of modern library science

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Ranganathan’s laws are seminal to library science and the practice of libraries. Far too many librarians have forgotten them. They should recite them at the start of each day.

These laws are:

  1. Books are for use.
  2. Every reader his [or her] book.
  3. Every book its reader.
  4. Save the time of the reader.
  5. The library is a growing organism.

Part of the issue is that Ranganathan uses the word “book”. This can be misleading today. So let’s translate “book” to “something that a reader might want to get information from”. Read “journal”, “ethesis”, “video”, etc. I am sure we can do better later. Never use the word “enduser”.

But here is an encouraging start for how libraries are changing to modify their practices in the C21. It’s been formulated by another scholar of library science, Nahtanagran. I don’t think the two ever met:

  1. Books are for selling.
  2. Every purchaser his [or her] books.
  3. Every book its purchasers.
  4. Make money for the seller.
  5. The seller is a growing organism.
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