©ollectanea

Two of my alma maters UVA (undergrad) and University of Wisconsin (Law School) are among the universities to partner with Google on library digitization projects. A complete list of the library partners
is interesting to review. If you click on the links for at least the public institutions, you can read the full contract the schools have in place with Google. What is interesting is what the university library partner can do with the digital copy owned by the university. For example, in the Wisconsin contract with Google, UW has the right to contribute the University Digital Copy to a central depository of digital works that it shares with consortium libraries. This includes the University of Chicago, the University of Illinois, Indiana University, and other major midwestern universities. All of the technological controls must also be implemented by the consortium libraries.

An article in the New York Times titled History, Digitized and Abridged caught my eye this morning. There is a nice photo which shows two shelves of old books. A few (very small number) are show in white as empty boxes. Presumably these white boxes represent the small portion of books that will be digitized in a number of collections. In other words, lots of books, videos and film clips that are on the shelf won't be digitized. Why should we care? The reason is that the newer generation (think of the millennials and whatever generation comes after) of scholars use the web almost exclusively as a source. This will ultimately leave a huge gap in history. Many reasons exist for why the entire world's cultural heritage cannot be digitized, Google's efforts notwithstanding.

Need a little something to smile about? Peter Suber reports that the Metropolitan Museum of Art and ARTstor are making Met images available for free to scholars for educational and scholarly publishing uses: Peter Suber, Open Access News. Enjoy.

Judith Thomas does a masterful job of explaining best practices and challenges in creating a digital motion media collection in this article, Digital Video, the Final Frontier - 1/15/2004 - netConnect. I'm studying digitizing video right now at the iSchool, and this was an optional reading. I found it most inspiring because there's not one mention of copyright or rights or permissions in the entire article. It's simply not on the table. Wow. That's like a dream, isn't it?

Several years ago I was invited by the Library of Congress to participate in a 3 day discussion about digital archiving. The setting was in gorgeous Berkeley, CA at a fabulous hotel. The other invitees were a glittering array, including the Register of Copyrights, MaryBeth Peters. I gladly accepted, and I felt honored to be invited. But, a curious thing happened at the very beginning of the gathering. All the participants agreed that they would define the copyright issues out of the discussion. I don't know how the Register felt about this, but it made me feel a little under-utilized, to say the least (useless, puts it more bluntly). I was absolutely amazed at the quantity of ideas entertained, the quality of the solutions proffered, the creativity of the group. If copyright had been on the table, the group might just was well have sat around the pool gossiping. It would have been, in effect, a nonstarter.

Since that meeting, I've begun more and more to believe that for some things libraries need to do for the future, they just need to be done without much concern for what the law says today. The very idea that anyone who's job it is, or I should say who's mission in life it is, to preserve for posterity, simply cannot stand by and watch important pieces of the 20th century just crumble before their eyes because of fear of getting sued, more often than not, by someone who could care less what you're doing, or who's actually dead, or who's descendants could care less, etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc.

I noticed earlier today a post at Michael Geist's blog about a remarkable speech by Bruce Lehman, former Commissioner of Patents and architect of the DMCA, notably including the anti-circumvention provisions, in which he suggests that we're entering a post-copyright era. He also admits that the DMCA as an approach has failed...

This idea that copyright is becoming irrelevant is actually one of the things that contributed considerably to my decision to get a degree in information studies and refocus, away from copyright. It's just terribly out of sync right now and as much as I hate to admit it, I truly feel that it just has to be ignored in some of its more egregiously out of sync aspects. (I'm waiting to be struck dead by a lightening bolt... waiting... waiting...) This is like the moral dilemma of our time (for those of us who think about things like this), like civil disobedience. Defiant preservation, organization, indexing, and access. Will wrong-headed and failed laws go quietly into the night at some point, or do we just turn away and embrace new paradigms created on their ruins, such as Creative Commons licenses and new business models that rely on something other than artificial scarcity to motivate creativity? And will libraries just quietly do what has to be done?

I read with interest today that the President of the Bibliotheque National, Jean-Noel Jeanneney, has apparently been forced to resign:Jean-Noel Jeanneney quitte la presidence de la BnF - Tour de Toile du BBF. You might wonder why this seems important to me, unless you know what I'm studying at the iSchool...

But, more generally, it's of interest because Jeanneney is an impassioned critic of all things Google. In fact, in his slim volume, Google and the Myth of Universal Knowledge, he says at one point, something to the effect, "Whatever Google does, we should do the opposite."

His principle criticism was that selectivity and organization should be at the heart of the process of digitization, and of course, Google's goal is to digitize everything and let the users sort it out through search, tags, bookmarks, etc. He also criticizes our reliance on the market to do what he thinks should be done with public money in Europe. At the core of Google's undertaking, and implicitly rejected in France's efforts that so far involve only public domain works, is reliance on fair use to justify digitizing books still in copyright. Being an employee of a Google Library partner, I'm not neutral on the matter, but I must say that the book is very well written and raises good points. Nevertheless, one commenter on the blog where I saw this note about Jeanneney's departure seemed to suggest that there might be a connection between the fact that Google had so far digitized 10 million books and the Bibliotheque National, 100 thousand, and Jeanneney had essentially castigated Google for performing well. While neither of the figures is likely accurate, they get the general gist of the point across.

As always, there's no doubt a lot more to the story than initial reactions suggest, but I wonder whether Jeanneney's departure signals an opening for a new attitude towards mass digitization projects in France. Not coincidentally, I am headed there in 5 weeks to interview several librarians about their views of the future of the library in France. I have both Bibliotheques Nationales on my agenda, as well as 2 University libraries and a municipal library (Lyon). It's an exciting time to be thinking about the future of libraries, and May is a fine month to visit Paris.

It was a big week for copyright. Events were reported all over the blogosphere. My friend and fellow grad student, Carlos Ovalle, has a nice roundup on his blog, Copy This Blog, where he reports several unsurprising legal opinions based in the sad music industry war against college students, and in a post a few days earlier, the related decision of Ohio University to ban p2p software on its system.

MPAA's former head, Jack Valenti, died this week. Lawrence Lessig offers an interesting memoir.

And the Stanford Center for Internet and Society posted a note about a decision that determined that downloads were not performances for ASCAP/BMI/SESAC royalty purposes.

Tobe Liebert, one of my favorite law librarians (I have lots of favorite law libraians -- our UT Law School Library is one of the best!), posted a note about Siva Vaidhyanathan's explication of his position regarding the three serious dangers of the Google Book Search Project, well articulated and succinct. His argument raises important questions about a future that includes wildcard projects like Google Book Search. If you have a chance to see Siva in person, don't miss it.

On another note, I am winding down my first full year of grad school. Classes end next week. Papers are due, presentations will be made, files of printed articles will be dumped (recycled, of course). It has been a really amazing experience for me, one that still astonishes me, nearly 9 months into it. I'm registered for the summer session and for the fall. I shift focus next year to research, having been accepted into the Ph.D. program. In the meantime, I head off to France to do a little bit of research, sort of getting my feet wet in the Seine (and the Cote d'Azure). Whatever I conclude based on my little sojourn will be reported through the CIP, perhaps even here on the blog. I'm going to write a paper, though I have to admit, I call it that only reluctantly, because I am planning to put my money where my mouth is -- I'm focusing on the future of the book, and I'm going to place all my research data, analysis, results and predictions in forms that explore that future. So, it will be fun, as well as instructive for me to figure out novel ways to report research in progress. I hope you'll enjoy that exploration too. The future of libraries is affected directly by the future of books so it is in our interests to pay attention to the expansion of the expressiveness we experience in books today.

Just noticed an interesting entry at the Institute for the Future of the Book (if:book), if:book: chromograms: visualizing an individual's editing history in wikipedia that connected up for me with an article I had read earlier at Peter Brantely's blog, shimenewa, Recontracting authors' rights.

Peter was commenting upon the marvelous possibilities for research that open access provides -- not merely access to results, but access to a rich data treasure that can be mined for connections, where the value is in the collection rather than the individual work. The if:book note is about just that kind of mining: researchers at IBM are mining the very open Wikipedia for information about how editors work, how they manage a peer production project.

Open access is not an end in itself. It is instrumental. It admits possibilities that no one has thought of today. These possibilities are the heart and soul of research. Open access enables the heart and soul of research. Freely accessing others' writings is not the payoff for open access, it is a small, first step, a door through which creativity enters. It is worth pursuing. It is worth spending scarce resources to make it possible, not so an article can park itself in an institutional repository, but so that someone who isn't yet born can connect up some dots some day because the article and a gazillion other things were there for her to ponder, search, mine, analyze, ...

I have just returned from a nice 2 week stay in France where I conducted a little research on the French attitude towards the future of libraries in a networked world. In light of the scathing book Jean-Noel Jeanneney, President of the Bibliotheque Nationale, had written earlier (Google and the Myth of Universal Knowledge) criticizing American digitization efforts spearheaded by Google, I wasn't all that sure what I would find. But, I've concluded that the bell curve obtains in France just as it does here in the USA (the long tail doesn't describe everything). French libraries are all over the map with respect to their attitudes towards and adoption of strategies to define their futures.

While I was there, Google announced its first francophone (french-speaking) library partner, the University of Lausanne (Switzerland). In commentary on the French blog, "Under the Duster," it was noted that the Swiss had not spent a cent to digitize their patrimony: Google numerise en Suisse romande - Sous la poussiere. I have no basis to judge the accuracy of such a statement, but it does not surprise me. The effort to digitize cultural history is overwhelmingly huge. It requires support from every sector. It can't be accomplished by governments alone. It can't be accomplished by libraries alone. It can't be accomplished by Google alone. It hasn't taken very long for us to figure this out. I think it's time for us to move beyond critiques of those who are making the effort and start to think about things further down the road, as Don Waters suggested in a recent essay about strategic thinking regarding our efforts to facilitate open access to scholarship. The availability of long-forgotten books online, or at a minimum, the availability of information about them and where they can be obtained, is a dramatic change and we need to start thinking about the implications of this and how to best take advantage of it.

Finally, it's important to note that the European Book Search partners have limited their participation to books in the public domain. This is not a surprise -- no other country in the world has a fair use provision like ours, or, therefore, an opportunity to argue the merits of mass digitization for books still in copyright as a fair use. We are on our own here, completely. Very American.

I don't often lose sleep over copyright issues anymore. But last night I could not stop thinking about the Copyright Office's new resource for *children.* Please have a look if you haven't already: Taking the Mystery Out of Copyright. There's a text only version if you want to skip the cartoons and the music (assuming you are not 13). This bothers me on so many levels, but I'm only going to address one level here, the most obvious. My experienced, calm, collected voice is telling me to wait a few days before I write this. Ok, at least wait a few days before I publish it. Clearly, I am ignoring that voice. I should at least acknowledge that I'm probably overreacting. I no doubt will feel differently about it after I have thought about it for awhile. Maybe I'll write about it again after a few days.

That said, do children really need to know about copyright? Well, I reluctantly must admit that yes, they do. Should they need to know about copyright registration, copyright history, and the role copyright plays in protecting film, music, art and literature? Well, it's not like they need to be protected from this, like it was senseless death, war violence or something cruel and ugly. So, it is commendable that the Library of Congress offers a well-done, straightforward, and fairly neutral informational piece. What would we expect the Library to talk about, other than what it does, which is, in this case, copyright registration. A narrow slice of the copyright pie, to be sure, but again, that's one of the things the Library does that no one else does.

But on the other hand, remember what it was like to be 13? Was registering your copyrights something you were all that concerned about? Should you have been? Have things changed that much with respect to how likely it is that the metaphorical box of things you created during your 13th or 14th year of life needs protection? From what? From becoming part of the stream of creativity (my metaphors are all over the place) from which you yourself borrowed to create?

If I had one opportunity to tell kids about copyright, I suppose I would mention its role in protecting the commercial interests of creators and distributors like the film, music, art and publishing industries, but in the next breath I would appeal to their own sense of how most things we all create are not meant for commercial exploitation, but instead are meant to be shared, reused, remixed and borrowed from. I'd say, "Look inside that box of things you created last year. Let's look at where all your things came from. Let's see how borrowing and modifying and adding your own ideas works in real life, and what we all need to keep that going."

The lesson I would teach is about the fact that *YOU HAVE TO DO SOMETHING* if you want your own creativity to be added to and be a part of a flowing, lively stream, rather than be caught up in a little eddy that goes nowhere. Congress (something here about infinite wisdom) has created a set of rules that, without your doing anything beyond the mere act of creating (tangible things, of course), keeps everything you create in that box, locked away, maybe forever, but at least for, let's see, you're 13? Let's say you'll live to 78, your box of stuff stays locked away for the rest of your life (65 years) plus 70 more years. Yes, in 135 years your box of stuff will possibly join the stream of creativity. If the box is still around then. And somebody finds it. And they know you and only you created it, and when you died. And they know about copyrights. If that doesn't fit your idea of what you want, then YOU HAVE TO DO SOMETHING. You have to let people know that you have something else in mind for your box of stuff. Fade to Creative Commons logo/website.

The assumption that everything needs "protection" for 1 1/3 centuries is so out of step with the reality of how we all create and most importantly, *why* we all create (overwhelming, not to make a living from our creations), and the serious consequences of being out of step with reality makes me very sad, and angry. The waste, the untapped creativity, and the criminalizing of creativity cannot be defended in my opinion. One size does not fit all. Given the enormity of the explosion of creativity enabled by the networked environment, to say nothing of creativity in the real world, the lessons we need to teach are about taking responsibility to do individually what Congress cannot seem to do for us as a nation -- create a copyright that fits our widely divergent needs, rather than one that both stifles us creatively and turns us into criminals (or potential civil litigants -- there's another interesting copyright lesson for kids) if we ignore it. We need to tag our creative works with simple statements that express how we feel about their place in the creative stream. I would recommend Creative Commons licenses for many reasons, but any statement about sharing is better than doing nothing and thereby consigning your work to copyright's centuries-long holding bin, or perhaps appropriately named, wastebasket.

The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) recently announced a deal that would permit Amazon to copy and then sell historic film and videotape from its vast documentary and newsreel collections. A Washington Post article gives the details of this "non-exclusive" agreement. This is troubling to a few folks out there who inherently distrust any venture that would allow a private company to make a profit from public domain material.

Personally, I welcome this sort of arrangement. NARA was careful to note that the arrangement is "non-exclusive," thus the public should be ensured the same access to this material that previously existed. My one experience with NARA with non-print material highlights the desirability of bringing third parties into the mix, even if there is a cost involved. A professor once asked me to get a copy of a Supreme Court oral argument from the 1960's. NARA does indeed keep such things, but does not provide copies of the tapes or transcripts. You are instead referred to a list of local vendors in the DC area who will then, for a fee, go to NARA and made a copy of the tape for you. All in all, it was an awkward process and I ended up paying for this public domain material anyway. So, I can live with Amazon.

An interesting hypothetical could arise if someone makes copies of a NARA film purchased through Amazon, and then either tries to resell these or otherwise makes them available without Amazon's consent. Would Amazon object? Would it have any basis to object?

Peter Brantley and Carl Malamud have just asked the Copyright Office to make its retrospective database of registrations of copyright freely available to the public: Carl Malamud Tackles the Copyright Office. The claim is that the information is public domain (the Copyright Office apparently claims copyright on it) and that it is a valuable dataset that, if publicly available for research activities, could yield improvements to the search process itself as well as other information about the registration process.

It is rather remarkable that the massive numbers of registrations and renewals are only searchable back to 1978. Stanford made headlines when it provided access to the "determinator," its database of earlier records that are proving indispensable to determining which of the works registered during the period 1923 - 1963 are in the public domain because their owners did not renew their copyrights as was required during that time.

University of Texas is joining this effort to determine the copyright status of works that have been digitized by Google, but not just for the purpose of making those works that are found to be in the public domain more accessible, but also to further the research efforts of others along these same lines. We plan to document in detail the process we go through to make our determinations, the resources we find indispensable to our work, and when we are unable to make a determination, all the evidence that we were able to bring to bear on the question of copyright status so that others might be able to pick up where we left off. This is the kind of work that requires a "knowledge community" to further it. I know that the Copyright Office is a part of that knowledge community. Contributing its records to the research community is a special step that only it can take, a unique contribution I hope it will make.

Peter Suber, Open Access News reports that the EU has just provided 1M euros in funding for a project to explore issues related to the public domain in a digital age. One million euros! That is a lot of money.
Works in the public domain enjoy much attention these days because of the new opportunities that digital networks offer us to draw upon this public store of knowledge. As a result, problems with accessing and using this public resource that seemed tolerable in the past now seem glaringly unacceptable: a term that lasts as much as or more than 100 years for most works, even works that have so little economic value that their owners have not bothered to keep up with the works or make them available commercially (that would be almost all protected works...); we lack efficient ways to make copyright determinations for U.S. works that required renewal; the consequences for an error regarding such determinations can be catastrophic (statutory damages for infringement).
These and many other issues are prompting a number of efforts to work out technical solutions (for example, work flows for determining copyright status) and, as illustrated by the EU project, to assess the direction our copyright laws should take to encourage a fuller use of these materials without undermining the incentive the laws provide to authors, or the rights to integrity and attribution more clearly embedded in European and Latin American copyright laws (moral rights).
As a Google Book Search Library Partner, the University of Texas at Austin shares concern about the public's ability to make full use of public domain works, in particular those that have been digitized in our Benson Latin American Collection. We recently launched a public domain project focusing on the work flow to identify authors of Benson collection items whose works are in the public domain. At first we viewed the project in terms of improving access to the works themselves, but as we have gotten into the details of devising a process, it seems clear that the process itself has the greater value. We are concentrating on 3 or 4 countries now, even though the Benson collection has volumes from many more countries. We expect that by carefully documenting our process, making it public on a Website and commenting on aspects of it through a project blog, and collaborating with other Google partners and seeking input from others who are tackling similar projects, we will be able to add to the store of knowledge about how to improve access to not only our own books, but those of many other libraries (and even those belonging to individuals -- check out Siva's reference to the Open Library Project).
A fellow graduate student at UT Austin's School of Information, Maria Gonzalez, is doing the lion's share of the work to create the work flow and collect the data that will document both our process and the status of each work we analyze. We are very excited about the project and I hope to be able to announce the launch of the project Website and blog soon.

A consortium of publishers announced this week that it had agreed upon a safe harbor for users of orphan works. The press release was reported widely (see, for example, the Law Librarian's Blog). Although the press release did not include a link to the actual safe harbor rules, they were easy to find on the Websites of the participating publishers. I read them and thought to myself as I did, that they were similar in some ways to the legislation that failed to pass last year here in the U.S. They were much simpler overall, leaving out many of the refinements that the bill had, such as rules for nonprofits that allowed take-down in lieu of payment of a royalty and continued use. After all, these publishers are not proposing law, so they don't have to consider the needs of all stakeholders. What is it exactly that they are proposing, or in fact, is this a proposal at all, or a done deal with users of their works?

These publishers are pursuing a strategy that is becoming more common these days. Rather than attempt to amend copyright law to address the horrible situation we have gotten ourselves into with our century-long terms, broad and deep rights, narrowly tailored (in some cases to the point of uselessness) exemptions, no easy way to opt out of it all, or to find owners, they advocate "letting the market take care of it," one publisher at a time. It might sound daunting, especially to someone who wants to use orphan works (think of all the questions you have to ask yourself about all the different publishers' different standards, and which publishers have no agreements with "the public" at all, etc.), but this is more or less the strategy Lessig pursued when he created the Creative Commons after he recognized that there would never be a legislative or court-imposed resolution to the problems created by repeated lengthening of the copyright term. Both of these actions (Lessig's and the publishers') evidence a recognition that relying on lawmakers and courts to "fix" the problems with copyright is not going to work in some cases. So we turn to contract instead. Lessig might have thought that fixing outrageously long terms and the over-protective scope of copyright, one creator at a time, would be a daunting task, but it was the only thing that showed any promise at all of ever working. And it has worked -- quite well. To be fair, I don't think he's given up entirely on law, but, then again, perhaps he has.

Anyway, for these publishers, it's a plan. Their deal goes something like this: "If you use a work that you think is an orphan, but it turns out the work belongs to one of us and we figure that out, we promise not to take your first born child; rather, we'll just charge you what we would have charged you if you'd come to us in the first place. In return for this forbearance on our parts, we expect that you'll diligently search for us, and here's what we think a diligent search includes:

*** in virtually all cases searches and reviews must be conducted of these kinds of resources identified generically as:

• Published indexes of published material relevant for the publication type and subject matter; • Indexes and catalogs from library holdings and collections; • Sources that identify changes in ownership of publishing houses and publications (see below comment on imprints) including from local reprographic rights organizations; • Biographical resources for authors; • Searches of recent relevant literature to determine if the citation to the underlying work has been updated by other users or authors; • Relevant business or personal directories or search engine searches of businesses or persons; and • Sources on the history of relevant publishing houses or scientific, technical or medical disciplines.

Additionally, where the user can identify a prior publisher that appears to be out of business, the list of imprints available from this [link] should be consulted immediately prior to each use.

The [link] referenced above is not a live link, but it is reported to be "a list of journal publisher imprints that the associations have compiled."

So what are we to make of this deal we're being offered (and the strategy in general)? I must assume that the publishers know what they are talking about in their bulleted list of things we have to do, so arguably publishers will not have a difficult time figuring out what a reasonable search involves. But me? I am clueless. The only thing I recognize in the long list is the library catalog (but which catalog?). I'm sure the publishers all sat around together and agreed that they could handle this. I wonder if they had someone like me at their table? Or librarians. I asked my friend, Lexie (a librarian) if she knew what the bullets were about. She hasn't gotten back to me yet, but she will.

In the meantime, I invite you to think about what these requirements mean. Examples would be helpful. I'll try to suspend judgment until I've gotten a better idea of what's involved here, but I'm pretty sure this "reasonably diligent" search requirement is not going to light a fire under very many potential users of orphan works. Because, it's not just the "what we have to do" part of the bargain that looks like it might not be such a good deal, but the other side, the "and here's what we'll give you in return" part isn't looking so hot either.

For commercial uses, the reasonable royalty is probably fine. But for nonprofit libraries, archives, museums, etc., no. If we did our reasonable search and couldn't find you, and you surface at some point, we need to be able to oblige your desire to send your work back into the dark for you, but not to pay you.

The other problem I mentioned earlier is that we now know what a reasonable search looks like to these guys:

American Chemical Society
American Institute of Physics
BMJ Publishing Group Ltd
Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels e.V.
Elsevier
Institute of Physics
John Wiley & Sons (including Blackwell)
Oxford University Press journals
Portland Press Limited
Royal Society of Chemistry
SAGE Publications
Springer Science+Business Media
Taylor & Francis

I wonder which other publishers are going to sign on; which ones will say nothing; which ones will come up with different standards. And how that landscape will or *will not* encourage the responsible use of orphan works.

Well, that's it for now. We all need to think about this. Orphan works are one of the biggest challenges we face today. These are works that are destined never to see the light of digital day unless we find a way to get them online while making reasonable efforts to protect the interests of their owners. The time when obscurity was the only option for non-economically viable works is over. We need to find ways to get on with it. Are these publishers on to something, or are they living in a dream world where all potential users have the kinds of knowledge and resources they do to dig deeply into the history of everyone who ever wrote something that's orphaned today? My really cynical side thinks that maybe that's the idea -- only other publishers will be able to take advantage of this deal, which would make it amount to no more than professional courtesy.

After 6 weeks of drafting, posting, tracking blog statistics, and weekly writing in a journal about the experience, I have just completed my blogging experiment at Mass digitization ~ Changing copyright law and policy, by posting the Conclusion today. Here's the first paragraph:

The story of mass digitization’s effect on copyright law and policy is the story of confronting and eventually calming fears. Sometimes the only way to calm fears is just to stand up, stride towards the light switch, and show that there’s nothing to be afraid of. Turn on the light. Look under the bed. Open the closet door. See? There’s nothing there. Didn’t Franklin Roosevelt say something about this?

Since I announced the start of the experiment here on Collectanea, I thought I would announce its conclusion as well. If you haven't visited yet, or if you visited early in the drafting process, you might like to visit again to read the entire draft (7 fairly short sections). Be sure to check out the Project Resources page. It has links to all the online materials referred to in the draft, and other materials that support or illustrate the argument.

It has been a very interesting experience to draft in blog-style. My next step will be to polish the draft and give it journal-style. I will be able to compare the two drafts and perhaps say something useful about how the styles differ. I also have skads of data about daily page views, time on the pages, and how many pages were viewed per visit. It's amazing what Google Analytics can tell you about your blog. If it weren't for Google Analytics in fact (and other blog statistics programs), the story we would relate about our experiences blogging would be far removed from the truth because without stats, we only know readers are there if they comment. Hardly *anyone* comments though. The comment rate on Mass Digitization was roughly .2% -- that's point two percent, not two percent. So, for 1000 pages viewed, the blog received 2 comments. This rate is consistent with rates I've read in broad studies of blogs. Of course, there are exceptions, but most of us are not really visibly building a community of commenters.

But we are reaching people. Those 1000 pages viewed represent about 500+ people who stopped by, even if only for a few minutes. So, the blog entries did get viewed in whole or in part by many folks who might not read the article in its polished journal-style form. It is an interesting hypothesis, how blogs affect scholarship. I will be posting my paper on that subject at the Crash Course when I complete the paper in about 2 weeks. And Mass Digitization will be published on CIP's Website in the spring.

If you are one of those 500+ people, THANK YOU! It is very nice to know you are there --

Well, it’s official: The University of Texas at Austin Libraries has launched our documentary blog for our public domain and orphan works project, free*the*books. We invite you to view and post comments! Our new blog is focused on our research about international copyright laws that control the use and distribution of digitized books online.

As a Google Library Partner, UT Libraries will digitize over a million books from its rich collections within the next six years. Digitization of 800,000 books in the Benson Latin American Collection began in June of this year followed by this companion project to develop an authoritative process for determining the copyright status of books published in various Latin American countries and to identify foreign works in the public domain.

We have found little guidance to help us reliably identify which of our books are already in the public domain so we are piloting a project to develop new tools for ourselves and for anyone who wants to tackle these difficult public domain problems. We will document our process, our progress and our results on the blog’s pages along with links to web resources we find useful.

The initial pages of the blog include online resources to determine critical author birth and death data, prototypes of legal evidence tables and draft guidelines by which books, wherever published, may be determined to be in the public domain

We will be adding features, more pages and new posts to the blog on a regular basis and from time to time will also have guest contributors to add variety and fresh perspectives. We invite suggestions and comments from other Google Library Partners and anyone undertaking similar or related projects.

Email us at freethebooks@gmail.com or IM us at our Meebo widget in the sidebar of the blog. We are here; we are building an evidence base and we are looking for virtual partners!

No need to comment really: Sony BMG Plans to Drop DRM. DRM is history in the music biz. Now for books and movies.