“Today, Stevie Wonder attended a World Intellectual Property Organization meeting in Geneva to ask delegates to support the World Blind Union’s proposed treaty for copyright exemptions for visually impaired and other disabled people. “Please work it out. Or I’ll have to write a song about what you didn’t do.”
More at BoingBoing.com
As the school year ramps up, and students move back into the dorms, storage becomes an issue…storage for their digital “stuff”, that is! TechCrunch suggests a few ways to deal with the storage dilemma.
“Nowadays, going from home to college doesn’t always mean a huge upgrade in connection speed (as it did for me), but you’re still going to find yourself downloading, trading, and storing stuff more than ever. But there are also more opportunities for streaming and storing things online. What are your best options for managing all that data?”
More at TechCrunch
According to the Wired Campus blog, Google is quietly sponsoring up to $50,000 for scholars to pursue “collaborative research … to explore the digital humanities using the Google Books corpus.” Some of the potential projects that could be funded include:
“• Building software for tracking changes in language over time.
• Creating utilities to discover books and passages of interest to a particular discipline.
• Developing systems for crowd-sourced corrections to book data and metadata.
• The testing of a literary or historical hypothesis through innovative analysis of a book.”
Read more at The Chronicle of Higher Education
Copyright is an oft misunderstood topic, though there are many resources developed by libraries (including copyright information developed by Cal Poly’s Robert E. Kennedy Library) to assist neophytes.
Copyright is an area of interest, and as such, I found it fascinating that the oldest work still protected by U.S. Copyright law was created by none other than John Adams.
“It looks likely, therefore, that the 1753 Adams diary is both the oldest work in the US still protected by copyright and also the work whose Federal copyright protection will expire the longest after creation: in this case, over three centuries. Our oldest still-copyrighted work is over a century older than the oldest in the UK, and its copyright will last much longer than any UK competitor. Does this matter (other than for reasons of national “pride”)? I think it does for two reasons. First, it is a reminder that when one thinks about copyright, it is important not to think just about date of creation, but also date of publication. Wikimedia Commons gets this wrong, insisting that the diary is in the public domain. But secondly, when things get old enough, people tend to stop worrying about copyright – even if technically, works are still protected by copyright.”Full posting at Library Law Blog
“Some colleges get hundreds of e-mail messages a month from music, movie, and book publishers notifying them that a student or professor is illegally sharing copyrighted material over the campus network. Colleges are required to look into each alleged violation…
Some music, movie, and book publishers have already automated their end of the notification process, setting up systems that scan the Internet looking for anyone trading their works and zapping out messages to network administrators. That makes it easy for the companies to send out thousands of notices each month. As a result, more colleges are likely to enlist software robots, whether home-built or commercial, to respond.”
More from The Chronicle of Higher Education
NC State Library just released an iPhone app that displays historic photographs based on your location on campus.
“The system, called WolfWalk, alerts pedestrians to information about nearby buildings and shows them hundreds of archival photos. One of the oldest is an 1890 shot that depicts the first freshman class, when the institution was called the North Carolina College of Agriculture and Mechanical Arts.”
What a fantastic mash-up of old and new. Read more on The Chronicle of Higher Education.
The Spanish-based “Ranking Web of World Repositories” has posted their top 400 institutional repositories for 2010, and it just so happens DigitalCommons@CalPoly made the list at #241. Not so bad, considering we launched just 16 months ago in 2008!
Check out the parody video that University of Denver students created to show their frustrations with technology in the classroom. While I’m certainly not a luddite, I find the video particularly revealing when one student comments that others use of technology (ahem, facebook) during class becomes distracting.
[Found on The Chronicle of Higher Education]
On February 1, 2010, the faculty of the Z. Smith Reynolds Library, Wake Forest University, unanimously adopted an open access policy to guide deposit of the author’s final version of scholarly works in the University’s institutional repository.
The policy, in part, reads:
“Recognizing that academic scholarship hinges upon the ability to access and utilize research output, the Library Faculty of the Z. Smith Reynolds Library, Wake Forest University (WFU), hereby adopt an open access policy to achieve the widest possible access to and long-term preservation of their scholarly works.
Each faculty member grants Wake Forest University the right to archive and make publicly available the full text of the author’s final version of scholarly works via the University’s open access institutional repository. This provides the University the nonexclusive, worldwide, irrevocable, royalty-free license to preserve and redistribute the work. When publisher agreements do not automatically grant permission to archive the author’s final version, the faculty commit to negotiating for such rights. Faculty members will submit an electronic version of the author’s final version in an appropriate format as soon as possible, respecting some publishers’ requests for embargo.
Furthermore, the faculty endeavor to publish their scholarship in open access venues when possible, or alternately to seek the right to archive the final published version in lieu of the author’s final version.
This policy will apply to all scholarship created while a member of the WFU faculty, excluding works previously accepted for publication and works for which authors entered into incompatible licensing or assignment agreements prior to the adoption of this policy, and excepting books and book chapters as necessary. The Dean of the Library will waive the application of the policy for future scholarship upon written notification from the author, who informs the Dean of the reason. ”
The full text of the OA policy can be found at: http://zsr.wfu.edu/assembly/
Heard about this dataset deluge that has been predicted? Wondering what your college can do? Hire a Data Information Strategist. At least that was Duke University’s answer to this issue. Read the interesting interview from The Chronicle of Higher Education.
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