Transitions

Lisa Spiro, Director of the Digital Media Center at Rice University’s Fondren Library, overviews digital humanities developments in 2008 in two postings:

• Digital Humanities in 2008, Part I
• Digital Humanities in 2008, II: Scholarly Communication & Open Access

Part 1 discusses the emergence of Digital Humanities, and Part 2 looks broadly at the scholarly communication landscape, discussing open access to educational materials, new publication models, the Google Books settlement, and cultural obstacles to digital publication.

Excerpt from Part 2:

… This year saw some positive developments in open access and scholarly communications, such as the implementation of the NIH mandate, Harvard’s Faculty of Arts & Science’s decision to go open access (followed by Harvard Law), and the launch of the Open Humanities Press. But there were also some worrisome developments (the Conyers Bill’s attempt to rescind the NIH mandate, EndNote’s lawsuit against Zotero) and some confusing ones (the Google Books settlement). In the second part of my summary on the year in digital humanities, I’ll look broadly at the scholarly communication landscape, discussing open access to educational materials, new publication models, the Google Books settlement, and cultural obstacles to digital publication. …

 

From the Official Google Blog (9/8/08):

excerpt:

For more than 200 years, matters of local and national significance have been conveyed in newsprint — from revolutions and politics to fashion to local weather or high school football scores. Around the globe, we estimate that there are billions of news pages containing every story ever written. And it’s our goal to help readers find all of them, from the smallest local weekly paper up to the largest national daily.

The problem is that most of these newspapers are not available online. We want to change that.

Today, we’re launching an initiative to make more old newspapers accessible and searchable online by partnering with newspaper publishers to digitize millions of pages of news archives. Let’s say you want to learn more about the landing on the Moon. Try a search for [Americans walk on moon] on Google News Archive Search, and you’ll be able to find and read an original article from a 1969 edition of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Not only will you be able to search these newspapers, you’ll also be able to browse through them exactly as they were printed — photographs, headlines, articles, advertisements and all.

This effort expands on the contributions of others who’ve already begun digitizing historical newspapers. In 2006, we started working with publications like the New York Times and the Washington Post to index existing digital archives and make them searchable via the Google News Archive. Now, this effort will enable us to help you find an even greater range of material from newspapers large and small, in conjunction with partners such as ProQuest and Heritage, who’ve joined in this initiative. One of our partners, the Quebec Chronicle-Telegraph, is actually the oldest newspaper in North America—history buffs, take note: it has been publishing continuously for more than 244 years.

From The New York Times, Nov. 9, 2008

excerpt:

Late last month, American authors and publishers reached an agreement with Google to settle lawsuits over Google’s Book Search program, which scans millions of books and makes their contents available on the Internet. The deal lets Google sell electronic versions of copyrighted works that have gone out ofprint.

“Almost overnight, not only has the largest publishing deal been struck, but the largest bookshop in the world has been built, even if it is not quite open for business yet,” wrote Neill Denny, editor of The Bookseller, a trade publication based in London, on his blog.

The settlement remains subject to court approval, and the bookshop would operate only in the United States for now. But the agreement is only one of many initiatives under which books are making what may be the biggest technological leap since Gutenberg invented moveable type.

From LJ Academic Newswire, One for All? As Google Deal Is Evaluated, Critics Question Single Library Terminal, Nov. 11, 2008:

excerpt:

While the Google Book Search settlement has prompted much debate, commentators have only begun to question how it might affect library service. One of the big questions: the deal’s allowance for free access at a designated terminal within public libraries. On one hand, getting every library a free access terminal for patrons to use the full Google Book Search database is a win for libraries—certainly neither Google nor publishers were obligated to consider libraries needs in their deal. On the other hand, critics note, mandating a “single terminal” is a  counterintuitive restriction in the digital age, and unfairly lumps all libraries, large and small, well-funded or not, into a single, geographic point of access.

“I strongly object to at least one aspect of the proposed Google Book Search settlement, which lets libraries offer just one terminal per library building for access to various books,” blogged Teleread’s David Rothman. “How backwards—not just the one terminal limit, but also the whole notion of linking access to your presence inside a library!”

Digital Library Federation president Peter Brantley called the restriction “irksome” and hinted that a one-size-fits-all provision was inadequate in the face of a lingering digital divide. “I do not know where program management at Google wakes up every morning; I do not know what pretty suburbs publishing executives wake up in every morning,”Brantley blogged. “But in Richmond, CA, [Brantley’s home city] and in many cities around the country, it is heinous to suppose that one public terminal given free reign to the corpus of the world’s literature is an adequate set aside against the promise of the opportunity that Google, publishers, and authors have made possible.”

From The Chronicle of Higher Education, Harvard Says No Thanks to Google Deal for Scanning In-Copyright Works, Oct. 30, 2008

excerpt:

Harvard University has examined Google’s recent legal settlement with publishers and authors, and found it wanting. The Harvard Crimson reported today that the university would not allow its in-copyright holdings to be scanned by Google Book Search because of concerns over the terms of the $125-million settlement, which was announced on Tuesday.

The deal, touted as a watershed moment in mass access to books, promises to make millions more titles available online. Scanned books could be previewed at designated public-library terminals or at institutions that bought a subscription from Google. Users would have to pay to purchase copies of the books, with Google, the publishers, and the authors sharing the proceeds. The settlement awaits final approval by a judge.

Harvard’s concerns center on access to the scanned texts — how widely available access would be and how much it might cost. “As we understand it, the settlement contains too many potential limitations on access to and use of the books by members of the higher-education community and by patrons of public libraries,” Harvard’s university-library director, Robert C. Darnton, wrote in a letter to the library staff.

More Commentary on the Google settlement:

Kevin Smith’s Looking for the devil in the details

Karen Coyle’s “pinball” comments here.

Open Content Alliance’s objections here.

This Washington Post article on Google’s New Monopoly (requires free membership).

PC World’s article on how business considerations have trumped ideals in this negotiation.

by Philip Davis, The Scholarly Kitchen, Oct. 13, 2008

Excerpt:

Earlier this year, Davis reported on a study by sociologist James Evans suggesting that online access to scientific journals is leading to more recent citations and a narrowing of the diversity of those articles which are cited.

This study was not taken at face value, and three information scientists (Vincent Larivière, Yves Gingras, and Éric Archambault) all at the University of Quebec in Montreal have released a new analysis taking aim at the diversity claim.

Their manuscript, “The decline in the concentration of citations, 1900-2007,” deposited September 30th in the arXiv, uses a simpler methodology. They report the percentage of papers that received at least one citation, the percentage of papers needed to account for 20%, 50%, and 80% of total citations, and the Herfindahl-Hirschman index, a measure used to estimate market concentration.

. . . What makes this controversy interesting is that both studies make theoretical sense.  A narrowing of science conforms to attention economics and preferential attachment (why the cited get more citations and the rest get ignored); a broadening of science conforms to information foraging theory, the principle of least effort, and the increasing ease of retrieving relevant articles.  The results of both studies imply something different about the state of science, whether scientific information is being disseminated efficiently, and whether the literature is reflecting more diversity of opinion or more conformity.

Read the entire post at: http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2008/10/13/citation-controversy/

Read more commentary on the topic at:

Great minds think (too much) alike. Economist; 7/19/2008, Vol. 387 Issue 8589, p89-89, 2/3p (available to UI affliates only)

After a century of continuous publication, The Christian Science Monitor will abandon its weekday print edition and appear online only, its publisher announced Tuesday. The cost-cutting measure makes The Monitor the first national newspaper to largely give up on print.

The paper is currently published Monday through Friday, and will move to online only in April, although it will also introduce a weekend magazine. John Yemma, The Monitor’s editor, said that moving to a Web focus will mean it can keep its eight foreign bureaus open.

“We have the luxury — the opportunity — of making a leap that most newspapers will have to make in the next five years,” Mr. Yemma said.

The Monitor is an anomaly in journalism, a nonprofit financed by a church and delivered through the mail. But with seven Pulitzer Prizes and a reputation for thoughtful writing and strong international coverage, it long maintained an outsize influence in the publishing world, which declined as its circulation has slipped to 52,000, from a high of more than 220,000 in 1970.

read more….

New York Times, Oct. 28, 2008

The University of Michigan has reached the 1 million book milestone in its digitization program. That figure represents around 13% of the 7.5 million books in the library’s collections. The books are available via the library’s catalog or via Google Book Search, as part of the Michigan Digitization Project.

Most of the scanning has been done as part of the library’s controversial deal with Google. The search giant is working with dozens of major libraries around the world to scan the full text of books to add to its index. But Michigan is one of the only institutions to agree to scan every one of its holdings — even those that are still covered by copyright. Some publishers have sued Google for copyright infringement over the scanning effort, though officials from Google say their effort is legal because they are not making the full text of copyrighted books available to the public.

The Wired Campus News Blog, Feb. 4, 2008
and Open Access News, Feb. 4, 2008

Fran Berman, director of the San Diego Supercomputer Center, and Brian Lavoie, a research scientist at OCLC, have been named co-chairs of a Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access, which is being funded by the National Science Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The Library of Congress, the National Archives and Records Administration, the Council on Library and Information Resources, and JISC will also be involved in the task force.

Here’s an excerpt from the press release:

Berman and co-chair Brian Lavoie . . . will convene an international group of prominent leaders to develop actionable recommendations on economic sustainability of digital information for the science and engineering, cultural heritage, academic, public, and private sectors. The Task Force is expected to meet over the next two years and gather testimony from a broad set of thought leaders in preparation for the Task Force’s Final Report. . . .

The Task Force will bring together a group of national and international leaders who will focus attention on this critical grand challenge of the Information Age. Task Force members will represent a cross-section of fields and disciplines including information and computer sciences, economics, entertainment, library and archival sciences, government, and business. Over the next two years, the Task Force will convene a broad set of international experts from the academic, public and private sectors who will participate in quarterly panels and discussions. . . .

In its final report, the Task Force is charged with developing a comprehensive analysis of current issues, and actionable recommendations for the future to catalyze the development of sustainable resource strategies for the reliable preservation of digital information. During its tenure, the Task Force also will produce a series of articles about the challenges and opportunities of digital information preservation, for both the scholarly community and the public.

from DigitalKoans, September 25, 2007

The number of libraries participating in the Google Book Search Library Project just got a whole lot bigger with today’s addition of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC). The CIC is a national consortium of 12 research universities, including University of Chicago, University of Illinois, Indiana University, University of Iowa, University of Michigan, Michigan State University, University of Minnesota, Northwestern University, Ohio State University, Pennsylvania State University, Purdue University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Google will work with the CIC to digitize select collections across all its libraries, up to 10 million volumes.

Readers will have access to many distinctive and unique collections held by the consortium. Users will be able to explore collections that are global in scope, like Northwestern’s Africana collection or dive deep into the universities’ unique Midwest heritage, including the University of Minnesota’s Scandinavian and forestry collections, Michigan State’s extensive holding in agriculture, Indiana University’s folklore collection, and the history and culture of Chicago collection at the University of Illinois-Chicago.

Google will provide the CIC with a digital copy of the public domain materials digitized for this project. With these files, the consortium will create a first-of-its-kind shared digital repository of these works held across the CIC libraries. Both readers and libraries will benefit from this group effort:

* The shared repository of public domain books will give faculty and students convenient access to a large and diverse online library before housed in separate locations.
* This new collaboration will enable librarians to collectively archive materials over time, and allow researchers to access a vast array of material with searches customized for scholarly activity.

For books in the public domain, readers will be able to view, browse, and read the full texts online. For books protected by copyright, users will get basic background (such as the book’s title and the author’s name), at most a few lines of text related to their search, and information about where they can buy or borrow a book.

“This library digitization agreement is one of the largest cooperative actions of its kind in higher education,” said CIC chairman Lawrence Dumas, provost of Northwestern University. “We have a collective ambition to share resources and work together to preserve the world’s printed treasures.”

Two CIC member universities are already working with Google Book Search, the University of Michigan and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and this new agreement will complement the digitization work already taking place.

The CIC becomes the latest partner in the Google Books Library Project, which in addition to the University of Michigan and University of Wisconsin-Madison, also includes Harvard University, Stanford University, Oxford University, the New York Public Library, Stanford University, University of California, University of Texas at Austin, University of Virginia, Princeton Library, the Complutense University of Madrid, the Bavarian State Library, the Library of Catalonia, the University Library of Lausanne and Ghent University Library. Google is also conducting a pilot project with the Library of Congress.

The Google Books Library Project digitizes books from major libraries around the world and makes their collections searchable on Google Book Search. More information can be found at: http://books.google.com.

Google Press Center, June 6, 2007

Amazon, which made its name selling books online, is now entering the book-digitizing business.

Like Google and, more recently, Microsoft, Amazon will be making hundreds of thousands of digital copies of books available online through a deal with university libraries and a technology company.

But, unlike Google and Microsoft, Amazon will not limit people to reading the books online. Thanks to print-on-demand technology, readers will be able to buy hard copies of out-of-print books and have them shipped to their homes.

And Amazon will sell only books that are in the public domain or that libraries own the copyrights to, avoiding legal issues that have worried many librarians — and that have prompted publishers to sue Google for copyright infringement.

Read the article in it’s entirety at: http://chronicle.com/daily/2007/06/2007062206n.htm

Chronicle of Higher Education, 6/22/07

From the March 22 issue of Nature. For the full text, see http://ealerts.nature.com/cgi-bin24/DM/y/hc530SpivX0HjB0BOpY0EA

Excerpt:

The US government is considering a massive plan to store almost all scientific data generated by federal agencies in publicly accessible digital repositories. The aim is for the kind of data access and sharing currently enjoyed by genome researchers via GenBank, or astronomers via the National Virtual Observatory, but for the whole of US science.

Scientists would then be able to access data from any federal agency and integrate it into their studies. For example, a researcher browsing an online journal article on the spread of a disease could not only pull up the underlying data, but mesh them with information from databases on agricultural land use, weather and genetic sequences.

Nature has learned that a draft strategic plan will be drawn up by next autumn by a new Interagency Working Group on Digital Data (IWGDD). It represents 22 agencies, including the National Science Foundation (NSF), NASA, the Departments of Energy, Agriculture, and Health and Human Services, and other government branches including the Office of Science and Technology Policy.
The group’s first step is to set up a robust public infrastructure so all researchers have a permanent home for their data. One option is to create a national network of online data repositories, funded by the government and staffed by dedicated computing and archiving professionals. It would extend to all communities a model similar to the Arabidopsis Information Resource, in which 20 staff serve 13,000 registered users and 5,000 labs.