Thoughts on Technology and Society

Trip Report: Google and Libraries: An international Conference From Timothy Murray On March 10 th I attended Google and Libraries An international Conference Held at Columbia University in New York City . The Key note was delivered by Yakov Shraiber of International Library Information and Analytical Center http://www.iliac.org/ This talk highlighted the rapid growth of Google in Russia . Google has only been in Russia for two years and now is the second most used search in Russia and has 30% of all searches in the Russian language. The national libraies of Russia are engaged in large scale digitization projects and are making content freely available online. These projects are complicated by Russia ’s recent decision to conform their copyright law to those of the EU. Jill Cirasella of Brooklyn College Library gave a presentation on the use of online tools in the library. The presentation is available: http://userhome.brook...

Last week I was in the UK talking with a colleague about what the future of electronic books will be. I believe that this paper is addressing in a more abstract way than my talk about an abstract page for books or book-parts, one of my key points. The point is that scholarly works need to be citable and addressable. (I am hugely antagonistic of IRs which are mentioned and seem to be foundational to the ORE technology) And I think this is in some ways on on the topic of what he thinks is important about updates to a book.

I just read an interesting case study for metered access to online content in Serials: The Journal for the Serials Community Pay-per-view article access: a viable replacement for subscriptions? Apparently Trinity saved more money than they planned to save. Some people who I respect have for a number of years now held the belief that a shift to use based pricing for online journals. But the community of libraries and publishers know that the short term outcome of such a shift would need to be relatively revenue neutral. (As the shift from print to online was. And some publishers created insurance of this during the transition by basing online pricing on past print spend at least for the transition.) The Trinity case shows an example where the total spend with Elsevier declined by even more than was intended. They attribute this in part to who at Trinity was authorized (students has to ask a librarian). This was not a revenue neutral transition. And it was also not access neutra...

First of all I can not believe how much attention goes to copyright as opposed to war mongering in Iran. It is all out of proportion. So there is a house bill " The College Opportunity and Affordability Act of 2007 " Which got some play in the tech-press here and here. But this was actually a sad sort of spin off of a different weird and totally wrong idea. Which was on the mp3 insider podcast in late summer 2007 as a rumor. The rumor was that the RIAA would get government to force the makers of mp3 players to pay a fee to the RIAA. (sort of like what the BBC does in the UK where everyone who owns a TV is supposed to pay some fee annually.) The COAA even got on to some academic news with Digital Campus Episode 16 - Steal This E-Book. But there is a real war going on. Today Declan McCullagh writes about a second piece of legislation . A couple of things about my media. I own and iPod and a Samsung Yepp 256mb mp3 player. I spent a month ripping CDs to the iPod fo...

I know this post is a year old but I could not find a description of WOWIO on the WOWIO site Wowio: It All Ads Up So a book with adds. I was thinking about this and all of the ad supported business models being floated lately (reminds me a bit of 1999 before the dot com crash) and I was thinking about the previous post I made today. Advertising has no future. Machines will do what they do and they will chose what we buy and there will be no point in fighting for our attention because we will have no money because why pay people to do thing a machine can do.

I just read a post on the Oxford University Press Blog which is typically non-committal on privacy. Privacy in Peril? Then I clicked to the author page for James B. Rule and saw that he also wrote �Bait and Switch� (on the alleged WMDs in Iraq), Dissent, Spring 2004. So why the title of this post. Well, I am one of those who feel a connection and (maybe some are making it more intellectually than I) between the illegal warrantless wiretaps Ad networks and the credit rating agencies. TRW etc. As James Rule points out, it is not that any specific step in the tracking is so objectionable it is that the tracking is so pervasive and systematic. I had this vision as I read of an 18 year old at the shoe store glancing at a screen on the cash register to find out a bit about me before coming to offer me help. And I though well that migh be good. Then I saw some things wrong with that picture. First the word 'Cash' attached machine for paying. Second training an 18 ...

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