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Planet Code4Lib http://planet.code4lib.org 2016-07-24T18:15:15+00:00 http://intertwingly.net/code/venus/ Access Conference: We're looking for Access 2017 hosts! http://accessconference.ca/?p=3452 2016-07-22T19:59:40+00:00
The Access 2016 Planning Committee is now accepting proposals from institutions and groups to host Access 2017! Bring Canada's leading library tech conference (not to mention one of the best conference audiences to be found ANYWHERE) to your campus or city!

Interested? Submit your proposal to firstname.lastname@example.com, including:

The host organization(s) name

Proposed dates

The location the event will likely be held (e.g. campus facility, hotel name, etc.)

Considerations noted in the hosting guidelines

Anything else to convince us that you would put on another fabulous Access conference!

Proposals will be accepted until September 2, 2016. The 2017 hosts will be selected by the 2016 Planning Committee, and notified in early September. The official announcement will be made on October 7th at Access 2016 in Fredericton!

Questions? Let us know at firstname.lastname@example.com!
 James MacKenzie http://accessconference.ca District Dispatch: Libraries cheerlead for fair copyright http://www.districtdispatch.org/?p=17268 2016-07-22T18:11:48+00:00
I've written a lot about 3D printing on the District Dispatch. One of the most unlikely topics I've discussed in connection with this technology is cheerleading…That's right. If you're a loyal DD reader, think back to May. If you're hearing bells ring, that's because the first week of that month, I outlined a court case between two manufacturers of cheerleading uniforms. The case pits international supplier Varsity Brands against the much smaller supplier Star Athletica. Varsity Brands is suing Star Athletica on the grounds that the latter's uniforms infringe on its copyrighted designs. Even though copyright protects creative expression and cheerleading uniforms are fundamentally utilitarian, Varsity Brands' argument rests on a liberal interpretation of something called "separability." If a utilitarian item has creative elements that can be clearly separated from its core "usefulness," it may receive copyright protection. Varsity Brands says that the stripes and squiggles in their uniform designs represent these sorts of elements.

Photo by Peter Griffin.

The courts are divided on this argument…But the U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear the case and give Varsity Brands, Star Athletica and copyright junkies everywhere a final and – hopefully – clarifying ruling. So, what the heck does this have to do with 3D printing? Actually, a lot. If the Supremes were to come down in favor of Varsity Brands' interpretation of separability, they would set a dangerous precedent: any design that's not 100 percent functional – i.e., has one or more elements with even a whit of creativity – might be protected by copyright. Imagine the fear of infringement this might instill in an avid "maker."…It would likely be enough to hamstring his or her creative potential. Thankfully, the 3D printing community thought of this early.

As I mentioned in my last post about this case, industry players Shapeways, Formlabs and Matter and Form already submitted an amicus brief to the Supreme Court warning of the "chill" an overbroad interpretation of separability in the Varsity Brands case might place on 3D innovation. Believing as we do in the importance of creativity inside and beyond library walls, the library community has decided to pick up its pom-poms and stand alongside them. ALA, the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) have signed onto a similar brief penned by the D.C.-based public policy organization Public Knowledge. The brief argues that: "…copyright in useful articles ought to continue to be highly limited, such that a feature of a useful article may be copyrighted only upon a clear showing that the feature is obviously separable and indisputably independent of the utilitarian aspects of the article."

Our argument on this case is in keeping with one of the basic tenets of our efforts to promote public access to information: that copyright should be limited and promote progress and innovation. Lucky for us, we have the Constitution on our side.

The post Libraries cheerlead for fair copyright appeared first on District Dispatch.
 Charlie Wapner http://www.districtdispatch.org District Dispatch: OITP welcomes new chair, Marc Gartler http://www.districtdispatch.org/?p=17262 2016-07-22T14:57:36+00:00

Marc Gartler, new chair of OITP's Advisory Committee

I'm pleased to announce that Marc Gartler is the new chair of the Advisory Committee for ALA's Office for Information Technology Policy (OITP), as appointed by ALA President Julie Todaro. Marc succeeds Dan Lee of the University of Arizona, who served as OITP chair for two years. We are deeply grateful for Dan's leadership and service to OITP and ALA.

Marc Gartler recently chaired OITP's subcommittee on America's Libraries in the 21st Century, served on the advisory committee for ALA's Policy Revolution! initiative, and served on OITP's Copyright Education subcommittee. Over the past few years he has participated in policy discussions with representatives from the FCC, Google, the Gates Foundation, and other organizations whose interests dovetail with those of ALA. OITP, ALA, and libraries have benefited from Marc's counsel on diverse issues from copyright to maker spaces.

Marc manages two neighborhood libraries for Madison (Wisc.) Public Library, a recipient of the 2016 National Medal for Museum and Library Service. He leads one of the City of Madison's Neighborhood Resource Teams, which coordinate local government services and develop relationships among City staff, neighborhood residents, and other stakeholders. A former college library director, Marc served as a consultant for the Ohio Board of Regents and Colorado Department of Higher Education. He is a graduate of the PLA Leadership Academy, and holds an MS in Library & Information Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and an MA in Humanities from the University of Chicago.

We look forward to working with Marc.

The post OITP welcomes new chair, Marc Gartler appeared first on District Dispatch.
 Alan Inouye http://www.districtdispatch.org Open Knowledge Foundation: Announcing IODC Unconference http://blog.core.okfn.org/?p=20193 2016-07-22T09:21:25+00:00
We all know the feeling of the end of a conference, where after long days full of content, you leave with more unanswered questions. Conferences are a great place for networking, learning different topics and sharing achievements (and sometimes even failures), but in their nature, they are organised in a way that is less participatory and more broadcast than an exchange of information.

The organising committee of the International Open Data Conference are aware of this, and try to use other ways to share ideas with people without stages and slideshows, that can complement the main event. This is why one of the pre-events to the conference will be an unconference that will give inputs to the main event.

Post its from the unfestival @okfest

An unconference is an open event that allows its members to propose their own topics for discussion. Just like last year, the unconference will enable people to discuss open data issues that are close to their heart with like-minded peers from across the world. We hope that by having an unconference, we can give voice to a broad range of different experiences and points of view.

We believe that this will help us ignite discussions and find new ways to continue the conversation during the conference. So even if you are not part of a panel in the main event, you can influence the IODC's outcomes by participating in the unconference.

This year, Open Knowledge International will lead the efforts of the unconference for IODC, with the support of the IDRC, The Web Foundation, ILDA and Civica Digital, and we want to share with you every step of the way. The goals that we set are:

To offer a safe space to promote understanding and experience sharing from the open data movement across the world, to have honest and open reflection on how we create change

To initiate new relationships and build solidarity within the open data community.

To create an opportunity to dive deeper into topics and issues that are important to the community.

To do so, we want to invite you to take an active role in the running of the event. Firstly, we need to hear from you and to set the mood for the event. We opened this forum category, and we are looking forward to seeing what kind of topics can be explored during the unconference.

In the next couple of weeks, we will send more information and registration details. In the meanwhile, save the date: Tuesday, October 4th, at 9.30 at IFEMA, North convention centre.

We hope to see you there and share experiences!

 Open Knowledge International http://blog.okfn.org LibUX: Accessible, sort of – #a11eh http://libux.co/?p=1065 2016-07-21T21:37:04+00:00
We use a hashtag (#a11y) which makes it convenient to talk about the accessibility of sites, apps, tools, and content. It's a numeronym.

 Accessibility is often abbreviated as the numeronym a11y, where the number 11 refers to the number of letters omitted. This parallels the abbreviations of internationalization and localization as i18n and l10n respectively. Computer accessibility

And what with the increasing risk of liability peaking interests in web accessibility standards, developers look for ways to quantifiably, programmatically validate the accessibility of their work.

But it's my experience that this isn't enough. Working on the accessibility of research databases in higher-ed as well as the content and tools made available by libraries, you learn how WCAG 2.0 AA compliance communicates nothing about the ease of its use. These tools — which are necessary to do good work — do not measure usability.

What's more, our inability to communicate the quality of the experience using "#a11y" — which plays an important part growing awareness — means, in some small way, we fail to acknowledge the nuance and care required of meaningful, accessible code.

Statements like "we're constantly working to make GOV.UK as accessible and usable as possible #a11y" and "you can search full-text articles entirely by keyboard #a11y" don't really distinguish the grade of the former from the slog of the latter. To those of us who don't rely on screen readers these just affirm that, hey, these sites are accessible. Equal kudos.

The disparity emerges in their use. Compliant, roger. But to navigate to search results in the site referred to in the last example requires first tabbing through 47 options, inputs, facets, all this after the skip link.

We are in the habit of doling out the applause for accessibility, and sure while accessible content after 47 tabs is better than none, I think — in the same vein as WTFMobileWeb — it is okay to wag the finger a little. We can do better. We can conceptually differentiate from measures that check all the boxes and those that remember the person on the other side of the screen reader.

So, I propose a new hashtag: #a11eh.

 A new hashtag: #a11eh – describing content or an app that is accessible insofar that it validates, but still hard af to use, lazy #a11y. Twitter

The post Accessible, sort of – #a11eh appeared first on LibUX.
 Michael Schofield http://libux.co District Dispatch: RNC forum focuses on rethinking STEM education http://www.districtdispatch.org/?p=17251 2016-07-21T21:16:03+00:00
This week, I was fortunate to attend the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) policy panel at the Republican National Convention (RNC), "How the next administration can foster innovation, boost productivity, and increase U.S. competitiveness."

Information Technology and Innovation Foundation policy panelists at the Republican National Convention discuss ways the next administration can encourage innovation

The discussion evinced a key tension in the debate over the role regulation should play in innovation, and the means by which policymakers can foster growth and American competitiveness in the tech space.

The panel, moderated by ITIF President Robert Atkinson, included Congressmen Blake Farenthold (R-TX), Bob Latta (R-OH), and Michael Turner (R-OH), alongside Facebook Chief Privacy Officer Erin Egan, Entertainment Software Association President Michael Gallagher, Senior Vice President of Bayer Corporation Raymond Kerins, Corporate Vice President of Technology and Civic Engagement at Microsoft Dan'l Lewin, and James Greenwood, CEO of the Biotechnology Innovation Organization (BIO).

Atkinson opened the discussion by stating that conventions are about leadership and idea-sharing: and a key area of concern was the dearth of cooperative partnerships between government and private industry. He trumpeted the need for more public-private tech partnerships in the decade ahead.

Congressman Turner emphasized that the innovation economy in the US is critical to economic growth; for every intellectual property-based job created, 2.5 additional jobs are developed to support it. The panelists all agreed on the vital role that innovation industries will play in American growth, and focused in on what role policymakers can play to further develop the tech sphere and to identify current weaknesses.

A key area for improvement that is highly relevant to libraries is in STEM education, and telling the story of how innovation can work for people who may be concerned about new technologies disrupting job markets. The panelists agreed that to make technology work for everyone, decision makers must restructure education and workforce training.

At present, there are 43,000 students graduating in STEM fields each year, but 600,000 available jobs in the science and technology sector. Meaningful reforms are needed to close this gap between training and demand.

What are some specific ways to boost technology training in our education and workforce development systems?

Gallagher, Kerins and Lewin had some specific ideas – many of which have implications for libraries:

Start by teaching computational thinking. There is a fine line between what machines can do best, and what humans can do best. We need to educate students early on to think from a mindset of how to work with machines to innovate.

Add more computer science education in high schools. We need high-level engagement so students can see the real career possibilities in STEM fields Libraries can do their part by offering more STEM training and programs to get kids involved in technology, inspiring and motivating youth to pursue technology fields.

Use games, especially video games, to get people into STEM. Looking at the popularity of new gaming trends such as Pokémon Go, games are at the forefront of accessible, inexpensive human-machine interaction. They can accelerate tech learning by making it fun – students go from being tech consumers to creators when they interact in gaming worlds.

Further develop public-private partnerships such as Bayer Corporation's initiative, "Making Science Make Sense," in which employees are given three days per year to visit schools and teach about career opportunities in STEM. This not only builds a network of public-private partnerships, but advances awareness of careers in innovation. Perhaps libraries can tap into this space of partnering with businesses and corporate professionals to teach STEM topics through company programs.

During the Q-and-A, I posed a question for the panel: what are some of the main policy barriers to bringing more Americans into the tech and innovation space, especially at a time when a lot of people are fearing that new technology may disrupt their jobs?

Kerins advised that industry needs to better communicate the skills and jobs they need to schools and policymakers, so that so that programs can be designed at the local and state levels to fill new job fields.

Congressman Farenthold believes a key barrier is a one-size-fits-all education system, in which individual high schools don't have a lot of room for innovation. He emphasized that community colleges are bright spot though, with lots of growth and training for people of all ages. Effecting successful education policies depends on educating policymakers on the need for increasing STEM partnerships and training at the community level and guiding solutions.

These perspectives provide unique insight for libraries as institutions of learning: many of the recommendations the panel made for schools can easily apply to libraries as well. They also underscore the importance of engaging in state and local advocacy to effect meaningful education policy change.

Ensuring U.S. education programs keep pace with technology development will be the key to ensuring the innovation economy works for everyone. Libraries can help make this happen by providing access to, and building programming around, cutting-edge digital technologies.

The post RNC forum focuses on rethinking STEM education appeared first on District Dispatch.
 Margaret Kavaras http://www.districtdispatch.org Library of Congress: The Signal: Co-Hosting a Datathon at the Library of Congress http://blogs.loc.gov/digitalpreservation/?p=26069 2016-07-21T19:45:02+00:00

Archives Unleashed teams at wrap-up, day one. Photo by Jaime Mears.

On June 14 and 15, the Library of Congress hosted Archives Unleashed 2.0, a web archive "datathon" (otherwise known as a "hackathon," but apparently any term with the word "hack" in it might sound a bit menacing) in which teams of researchers used a variety of analytical tools to query web-archive data sets in the hopes of discovering some intriguing insights before their 48-hour deadline is up. This was the second instance of this event- the University of Toronto hosted the first in March 2016- in what organizers plan to be a regular occurrence.

Why host a datathon?

For organizers Matthew Weber, Ian Milligan and Jimmy Lin, seasoned data scholars and educators, Archives Unleashed is an exercise in balancing discussion and practice — or what Milligan calls yacking and hacking — to help improve web archive research. The text on the Archives Unleashed website states, "This event presents an opportunity to collaboratively unleash our web collections, exploring cutting-edge research tools while fostering a broad-based consensus on future directions in web archive analysis."

Team Museum's URL text analysis of mimetypes found on museum websites. Photo by Jaime Mears.

But what is the value for the host institution – the Library of Congress or any other? There are actually many unique benefits; here are a few:

New patterns of information emerged from the web archives.

We networked with data scholars and, perhaps even more important, learned what we can do to support sophisticated technological research. (It helps the discovery process if staff members participate alongside researchers)

We collaborated across divisions within the Library of Congress and discovered areas of shared common interests. National Digital Initiatives was the main point of contact for event hosting, Library Services (which makes Library of Congress collections available) provided the data sets and the John L. Kluge Center and the Law Library provided content expertise and additional support.

We got our colleagues excited about the potential use of our collections and this emerging research service.

Even if none of these points are relevant for your institution, think of this exposure as a way to begin familiarizing your institution with the future of historical research. As Milligan said in his pre-workshop presentation, you "can't do a faithful historical study post 1996 without web archives."

Team Turtle. Photo by Jaime Mears.

What do you need to host a datathon?

 Technical experts. Weber, Lin, and Milligan provided support to researchers throughout the process, from feedback on initial proposals to technical support with tools and unruly data sets. If you don't have anyone on staff to fill this role, look outside your staff for technical experts to partner with you.

 Data sets. Not to be underestimated, data sets are the heart of the datathon. You don't need to know everything about the data sets you serve (that's what the researchers will provide), but the data sets need to be fairly small so they can be moved around easily (ours were no more than 10 GB each). It's important to prepare effective messaging about the data sets in order to entice attendees to use them. If there are use restrictions associated with the data sets, you may need to prepare release statements for the researchers to sign.

 Content experts. This is where your library can shine. Not understanding the context of a data set can make skewed results difficult to untangle. Someone who understands the subject matter can save researchers a lot of time by helping them analyze visualization results. For example, The Law Librarians were able to look at a word cloud from a set of Supreme Court nomination websites and explain some of the dominant words that the researchers were seeing, and they were able to suggest particular buzzwords that researchers could use in their text analysis queries.

Team Turtle's ARCs to WARCs workflow. Photo by Jaime Mears.

 Infrastructure. Researchers brought their own laptops but reliable and even enhanced broadband was crucial. The bandwidth needed to move or query data sets as large as a terabyte in size, especially when time is an issue, is formidable.Luckily, preventative actions can be taken to mitigate this stress on the network. The Unleashed organizers set size restrictions on our data sets (no more than 10GB each), and pre-loaded applications and all data sets (including those from the Internet Archive and University of Waterloo) onto virtual machines to minimize transfer times and surprises. If that isn't an option, ask the researchers to download local copies of the data sets they wish to use in advance of the event so time isn't wasted moving them around. "Infrastructure" also includes tables and chairs, whiteboards and presentation support.

 Researchers. The datathon participants came from as far as Jakarta, from mixed backgrounds and interests, although the majority are involved in academia with specializations in media studies, history, computer science and political science. Some work for libraries and archives. Although they had varying technical abilities, most of the participants had experience with data-research methodologies and were familiar with the tools. To attract this group of people, organizers used a simple application process for participants and were able to provide some funding for travel and meals, and coordinated the workshop in conjunction with the Saving the Web symposium hosted by Dame Wendy Hall.

This list is scalable and can be tweaked to fit diverse budgets and spaces. Collaboration is essential. Even if you have staff members who are technical experts, even if you have all the money, partnering with other library units and external experts diversifies who might attend, the available data sets they bring and in general raises the potential for creativity and revelation.
 Jaime Mears http://blogs.loc.gov/digitalpreservation Islandora: Islandora Foundation 2016 Annual General Meeting http://islandora.ca/41287 at http://islandora.ca 2016-07-21T18:34:23+00:00

The Islandora Foundation held its Annual General Meeting today, with representatives from just over half of our member institutions. The draft minutes are available here. Some highlights include:

Nick Ruest was elected as Treasurer for 2016 - 2018. He has served as acting Treasurer since Mark Leggott's resignation from the board earlier this year.

Amendments to the Islandora Foundation by-laws were approved, defining the Terms of Service for Directors and Officers of the Foundation and the role of the Vice Chair & Secretary as an ex-officio member of the Board of Directors.

A set of Strategic Goals for the Islandora Foundation were approved. For 2016 - 2017, the IF is committed to:

Grow and sustain the Islandora Community.

Retain and expand Islandora Foundation membership.

Promote the use of Islandora in larger institutions.

Promote and facilitate use of Islandora in library schools and related educational programs.

Research and pursue grant opportunities and partnerships.

Focus Islandora development resources on Islandora CLAW

Produce a clear communication plan and messaging around Islandora CLAW and contributions needed.

Hire a Technical Lead to focus on the technical direction of Islandora CLAW development. (editor's note: ✓)

Continue Islandora CLAW development with Fedora 4 and Drupal 8.

Support the Fedora 4 community and development efforts.

Support the PCDM community.

Continue to pursue open source repository interoperability, such as Hydra and Archivematica.

Support legacy installations of Islandora

Continue support for Islandora 7.x-1.x releases as long as needed by the community.

Clarify and communicate Islandora Foundation Governance

Review our governance and structure against peer organizations.

 manez http://islandora.ca Equinox Software: Johnston Joins NC Cardinal http://esilibrary.com/?p=2795 2016-07-21T18:15:34+00:00

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Duluth, Georgia–July 21, 2016

Equinox is pleased to announce that Johnston County Public Library has been successfully migrated to Evergreen in the NC Cardinal Consortium. The Equinox team completed the migration in late May. Johnston County Public Library includes ten branches and serves almost 48,000 patrons with over 174,000 items.

Johnston joins Cumberland, Neuse, Henderson, Rockingham, and Iredell in the use of the Acquisitions module within NC Cardinal. The addition of Johnston's 10 branches brings NC Cardinal's grand total to 153. Equinox is proud to be a part of NC Cardinal's continued growth!

Mary Jinglewski, Equinox Training Services Librarian, worked closely with Johnston during the transition, providing training on Evergreen. She remarked, "It was a lovely experience training with Johnston County Public Libraries. I believe they will be a wonderful addition and community member of NC Cardinal."

About Equinox Software, Inc.

Equinox was founded by the original developers and designers of the Evergreen ILS. We are wholly devoted to the support and development of open source software in libraries, focusing on Evergreen, Koha, and the FulfILLment ILL system. We wrote over 80% of the Evergreen code base and continue to contribute more new features, bug fixes, and documentation than any other organization. Our team is fanatical about providing exceptional technical support. Over 98% of our support ticket responses are graded as "Excellent" by our customers. At Equinox, we are proud to be librarians. In fact, half of us have our ML(I)S. We understand you because we *are* you. We are Equinox, and we'd like to be awesome for you. For more information on Equinox, please visit http://www.esilibrary.com.

About Evergreen

Evergreen is an award-winning ILS developed with the intent of providing an open source product able to meet the diverse needs of consortia and high transaction public libraries. However, it has proven to be equally successful in smaller installations including special and academic libraries. Today, almost 1400 libraries across the US and Canada are using Evergreen including NC Cardinal, SC Lends, and B.C. Sitka. For more information about Evergreen, including a list of all known Evergreen installations, see http://evergreen-ils.org.

About Sequoia

Sequoia is a cloud-based library solutions platform for Evergreen, Koha, FulfILLment, and more, providing the highest possible uptime, performance, and capabilities of any library automation platform available. Over 27,000,000 items were circulated within the Sequoia platform in the last year. It was designed by Equinox engineers in order to ensure that our customers are always running the most stable, up to date version of the software they choose. For more information on Sequoia, please visit http://esilibrary.com/what-we-do/sequoia/.

 Sara http://esilibrary.com David Rosenthal: QLC Flash on the horizon tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4503292949532760618.post-6405715366664258979 2016-07-21T15:00:35+00:00

Exabytes shipped

Last May in my talk at the Future of Storage workshop I discussed the question of whether flash would displace hard disk as the bulk storage medium. As the graph shows, flash is currently only a small proportion of the total exabytes shipped. How rapidly it could displace hard disk is determined by how rapidly flash manufacturers can increase capacity. Below the fold I revisit this question based on some more recent information about flash technology and the hard disk business.

First, economic stress on the hard disk industry has increased. Seagate plans a 35% reduction in capacity and 14% layoffs. WDC has announced layoffs. Unit shipments for both companies are falling. If disk is in a death spiral, massive increases in flash shipments will be needed.

Flash vs HDD capex

There are a number of ways flash manufacturers could increase capacity. They could build more flash fabs. This is extremely expensive, but as I reported in my talk, flash advocates believe that this is not a problem:

The governments of China, Japan, and other countries are stimulating their economies by encouraging investment, and they regard dominating the market for essential chips as a strategic goal, something that justifies investment. They are thinking long-term, not looking at the next quarter's results. The flash companies can borrow at very low interest rates, so even if they do need to show a return, they only need to show a very low return.
Since then the economic situation has become less clear, and the willingness of the governments involved to subsidize fabs may have decreased, so this argument may be less effective. If there aren't going to be a lot of new flash fabs, what else could the manufacturers do to increase shipments from the fabs they have?

The traditional way of delivering more chip product from the same fab has been to shrink the chip technology. Unfortunately, shrinking the technology from which flash is made has bad effects. The smaller the cells, the less reliable the storage and the fewer times it can be written, as shown by the vertical axis in this table:

Write endurance vs. cell size

Both in logic and in flash, the difficulty in shrinking the technology further has led to 3D, stacking layers on top of each other. Flash is in production with 48 layers, and this has allowed manufacturers to go back to larger cells with better write endurance.

Flash has another way to increase capacity. It can store more bits in each cell, as shown in the horizontal axis of the table. The behavior of flash cells is analog, the bits are the result of signal-processing in the flash controller. By improving the analog behavior by tweaking the chip-making process, and improving the signal processing in the flash controller, it has been possible to move from 1 (SLC) to 2 (MLC) to 3 (TLC) bits per cell. Because 3D has allowed increased cell size (moving up the table), TLC SSDs are now suitable for enterprise workloads.

Back in 2009, thanks to their acquisition of M-Systems, SanDisk briefly shipped some 4 (QLC) bits per cell memory (hat tip to Brian Berg). But up to now the practical limit has been 3. As the table shows, storing more bits per cell also reduces the write endurance (and the reliability).

As more and more layers are stacked the difficulty of the process increases, and it is currently expected that 64 layers will be the limit. Beyond that, manufacturers expect to use die-stacking. That involves taking two (or potentially more) complete 64-layer chips and bonding one on top of the other, connecting them via Through Silicon Vias (TSVs). TSVs are holes through the chip substrate containing wires. Although adding 3D layers does add processing steps, and thus some cost, it merely lengthens the processing pipeline. It doesn't slow the rate at which wafers can pass through and, because each wafer contains more storage, it increases the fab's output of storage. Die-stacking, on the other hand, doesn't increase the amount of storage per wafer, only per package. It doesn't increase the fab's output of bytes.

Now, Chris Mellor at The Register reports that Good gravy, Toshiba QLC flash chips are getting closer:

3D TLC flash is now good enough for mainstream enterprise use. ... QLC could become usable for applications needing read access to a lot of fast, relative to disk and tape, flash capacity but low write access. Archive data, on the active end of a spectrum of high-to-low archive access rates, is one such application.

Back in March, Jeff Ohshima, a Toshiba executive, presented ... QLC flash at the Non-Volatile Memory Workshop and suggested 88TB QLC 3D NAND SSDs with a 500 write cycle life could be put into production.
QLC will not have enough write endurance for conventional SSD applications. So will there be enough demand for manufacturers to produce it, and thus double their output relative to TLC?

Exabytes shipped

Cloud systems such as Facebook's use tiered storage architectures in which re-write rates decrease rapidly down the layers. Beacuse most re-writes would be absorbed by higher layers, it is likely that QLC-based SSDs would work well at the bulk storage level despite only a 500 write cycle life. It seems likely that only a few of the 2015 flash exabytes in the graph are 3D TLC, most would be 2D MLC. If we assume that half the flash from existing fabs becomes 3D QLC, flash output might increase 8x. This would still not be enough to completely displace hard disks, but it would reduce disk volumes and thus worsen the economics of building them. Fewer new flash fabs would be needed to displace the rest, which would be more affordable. Both effects would speed up the disk death spiral.

 David. (firstname.lastname@example.com) http://blog.dshr.org/ Journal of Web Librarianship: Discovering Indigenous Australian Culture: Building Trusted Engagement in Online Environments http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19322909.2016.1197809?ai=1dl&mi=co84bk&af=R 2016-07-21T09:52:38+00:00 10.1080/19322909.2016.1197809
Kirsten Thorpe Kirsten Thorpe http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/wjwl20/current District Dispatch: Young Women Rising: The Atlantic at the RNC http://www.districtdispatch.org/?p=17246 2016-07-20T20:35:13+00:00
Who are millennial voters, what do they want from government and what does this increasingly powerful demographic mean for public policy? These are questions that The Atlantic's panelists discussed during their Republican National Convention (RNC) event, "Young Women Rising."

As a research associate for ALA's Office for Information Technology Policy (OITP) based in Cleveland, I am attending several of the policy events being held in conjunction with the Republican National Convention. Yesterday, I participated in this "Young Women Rising" event.

Panelists discuss electoral values of millennials at Republican National Convention

Kicking off the event, Harvard University Polling Institute of Politics Director John Della Volpe highlighted the importance of authenticity to young voters. In this cycle, young voters see Bernie Sanders as an authentic leader, but have clear reservations about Mr. Trump and Secretary Clinton.

The statistics on millennials' relationship to government are dour: 75% do not trust government; a strong majority doesn't trust capitalism in its current practice; and over 50% don't believe the American dream is accessible to them personally. Della Volpe provided context for this when he said, "Millennials are seeking a compassionate capitalism, a little Teddy Roosevelt 'break up the banks' and a little Franklin Roosevelt 'provide a social infrastructure.'"

The panel of female Republican journalists, activists, and leaders expanded on the issues of including young people, especially young women between 18 and 35, in the platform. In a party dominated by male voices and often criticized for its policy views regarding women's issues, it was interesting to hear from a group of female leaders who support the party and Donald Trump. They emphasized that in engaging millennials, the party message needs to connect with the young voters through original, authentic channels and not the forceful, dated methods typically used in political advertising and rhetoric.

Columnist Kristen Anderson emphasized that studies show that kindness towards people from all walks of life and policies that promote equality are the most important values young voters look for in leadership. In addition, young people are more likely to volunteer and become involved in their communities than previous generations, and due to low trust in traditional government institutions, are seeking to become involved in their communities through non-profit, non-governmental organizations.

Anderson also suggested that young Americans today are delaying traditional transitions to adulthood – marriage, home ownership, having children– until their 30s, allowing many of their early adulthood policy positions and values to solidify. Many 18 year olds will vote in 3 or 4 election cycles before they reach typical milestones of adulthood, suggesting that many of their political inclinations will become a strong part of their generational voting identity.

What can policymakers do now to empower young voters to again trust in the power of government as a force for social good and leadership in America? A question from the audience concluded the discussion on a thought-provoking note: who are we really talking about when we discuss millennial, particularly young female, voters? Where do lower income women, people of color, and young immigrant voters aged 18-35 fall? For a group that is concerned largely with equality and inclusive politics, looking at the issues that affect young Americans across more than partisan lines may be a good place for policymakers and influencers to start in building relationships with millennial voters.

How does this discussion affect technology policy and libraries? Young voters are a key demographic to study and educate about the issues that affect technology policy and libraries because libraries appeal to millennials' desire for services that promote equal opportunity. Focusing on how the library provides a service for the whole community, is a safe space for people of all walks of life, and provides programs to create equal opportunities would be the key to influencing millennial voters through authentic and compassionate policy proposals.

More to come!

The post Young Women Rising: The Atlantic at the RNC appeared first on District Dispatch.
 Margaret Kavaras http://www.districtdispatch.org LITA: Jobs in Information Technology: July 20, 2016 http://litablog.org/?p=9378 2016-07-20T18:58:11+00:00
New vacancy listings are posted weekly on Wednesday at approximately 12 noon Central Time. They appear under New This Week and under the appropriate regional listing. Postings remain on the LITA Job Site for a minimum of four weeks.

New This Week

Computercraft Corporation, PMC Journal Review Program Coordinator and Journal Selector, Bethesda, MD

University of North Carolina Wilmington, Web and Discovery Services Librarian, Wilmington, NC

Penn State University Libraries, Head, Engineering Library, University Park Campus, University Park, PA

Seton Hall University, Digital Collections Infrastructure Developer, South Orange, NJ

EBSCO Information Services, Software as a Service Specialist, Ipswich, MA

Visit the LITA Job Site for more available jobs and for information on submitting a job posting.
 Mark Beatty http://litablog.org FOSS4Lib Recent Releases: ArchivesSpace - 1.5.0 https://foss4lib.org/node/%2A/5679 at https://foss4lib.org 2016-07-20T17:45:32+00:00
Last updated July 20, 2016. Created by Peter Murray on July 20, 2016.
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 Peter Murray https://foss4lib.org/node/%2A/releases OCLC Dev Network: BibIt: Choosing a UI Framework http://www.oclc.org/developer/news/192e2afe86ce8418cb76a1682c57813bf0a01b8e2abc2082e2485c07fd3f4cba 2016-07-20T15:00:00+00:00
Learn about the UI frameworks used in Bib It, a simple application for allowing non catalogers to add data to WorldCat.
 Karen Coombs http://oclc.org/developer/news.html Tim Ribaric: Another hot take... This time about Library Holdings http://elibtronic.ca/197 at http://elibtronic.ca 2016-07-20T14:23:51+00:00

I came across another grad school Library use dilemma

read more
 tim ribaric http://elibtronic.ca LITA: Wearable Technology Resources http://litablog.org/?p=9331 2016-07-20T12:00:54+00:00
The world of wearable technology (WT) is fascinating, but a little overwhelming. Last month I attended the Digital Humanities Summer Institute where I completed a week-long course entitled "Palpability and Wearable Computing." We engaged in movement exercises, experimented with sensors, learned about haptics, and critiqued consumer wearables including the Fitbit, Spire, Leaf, and Athos. I expected to walk away with some light-up sneakers, but instead I left with lots of questions, inspiration, and resources.

What follows is a list of books, videos, and project tutorials that I've found most helpful in my exploration of wearable technology.

Textile Messages | Edited by Leah Buechley, Kylie Peppler, Michael Eisenberg, and Yasmin Kafai

Textile Messages is a great primer; it includes a little bit of history, lots of project ideas, and ample discussion of working with WT in the classroom. This is the most practical resource I've encountered for librarians of all types.

Textile Messages: Dispatches from the World of E-Textiles and Education

Garments of Paradise | Susan Elizabeth Ryan

The history of WT goes back longer than you'd think. Chapter 1 from Garments of Paradise will take you all the way from the pocket watch to the electric dress to Barbarella.

Atsuko Tanaka models the electric dress, 1956.

MAKE Presents

If you want to make your own wearables, then you'll need a basic understanding of electronics. MAKE magazine has a fantastic video series that will introduce you to Ohm's Law, oscilloscopes, and a whole slew of teeny tiny components.

Wired Magazine

If you're interested in consumer wearables, Wired will keep you up to date on all the latest gadgetry. Recent reviews include a temporary tattoo that measures UV exposure and Will.i.am's smart watch.

My UV Patch from L'Oreal is currently in development

Project Tutorials

One easy and inexpensive way to get started with WT is to create your own sensors. In class we created a stroke sensor made of felt and conductive thread. If you're working with a limited budget, Textile Messages has an entire chapter devoted to DIY sensors.

Adafruit is a treasure trove of project tutorials. Most of them are pretty advanced, but it's interesting to see how far you can go with DIY projects even if you're not ready to take them on yourself.

Sparkfun is a better option if you're interested in projects for beginners.

My first attempt at making a stroke sensor

What WT resources have you encountered?
 Leanne Mobley http://litablog.org pinboard: The Code4Lib Journal – Metadata Analytics, Visualization, and Optimization: Experiments in statistical analysis of the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) http://journal.code4lib.org/articles/11752 2016-07-19T22:12:07+00:00 RT @chrpr: Hey so I published a thing about visualization & predictive analytics of #DPLA metadata in the #code4lib journal. wragge https://pinboard.in/t:code4lib/ Mita Williams: The Observer or Seeing What You Mean https://librarian.aedileworks.com/?p=47 2016-07-19T20:43:42+00:00
If you are new to my writing, my talks and work tends to resemble an entanglement of ideas. Sometimes it all comes together in the end and sometimes I know that I've just overwhelmed my audience.

I'm trying to be better at reducing the sheer amount of information I give across in a single seating. So for this post, I'm going to tell you what I'm going to say briefly before I tell you what I'm going to say in a more meandering fashion.

In brief, libraries would do better to acknowledge the role of the observer in our work.

Now, true to my meandering style, we need to walk it back a bit before we can move forward. In fact, I'm going to ask you to look back at my last post ("The Library Without a Map") that was about how traditional libraries have library catalogues that do a poor job of modeling subject relationships and how non-traditional libraries such as The Prelinger Library have tried to improve discovery through their own means of organization.

One of the essays I linked to about The Prelinger was from a zine series called Situated Knowledges, Issue 3: The Prelinger Library. The zine series is the only one that I know of that's been named after a journal article:

Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective
 Donna Haraway
 Feminist Studies
 Vol. 14, No. 3 (Autumn, 1988), pp. 575-599
 Published by: Feminist Studies, Inc.
 DOI: 10.2307/3178066
 Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3178066
 Page Count: 25

I have to admit that I struggled with this paper but in the end I was glad to have worked through the struggle. To sum up the paper in one sentence: we need to resist the idea that there is exists 'god-like' vision of objectivity and remember that our vision and our knowledge is limited by location and situation. Or as Haraway puts it:

I want a feminist writing of the body that metaphorically emphasizes vision again, because we need to reclaim that sense to find our way through all the visualizing tricks and powers of modern sciences and technologies that have transformed the objectivity debates. We need to learn in our to name where we are and are not, in dimensions of mental and physical space we hardly know how to name. So, not so perversely, objectivity turns out to be about particular and specific embodiment and definitely not about the false vision promising transcendence of all limits and responsibility. The moral is simple: only partial perspective promises objective vision. All Western cultural narratives about objectivity are allegories of the ideologies governing the relations of what we call mind and body, distance and responsibility. Feminist objectivity is about limited location and situated knowledge, not about transcendence and splitting of subject and object. It allows us to become answerable for what we learn how to see.

I've been thinking a lot recently about the power of the observer recently.

On my other blog, The Magnetic North, I wrote about how a world-weariness brought on by watching tragedies unfold on social media has led me to spend more time with art. I go on to suggest that being better versed in observing art without the burden of taste might help us better navigate a world that shows us only what we chose to see and perhaps even bring about a more just world.

But on this blog, I want to direct your attention to a more librarian-focused reason to be concerned with the matter of the observer.

You see, after I published my last post about how our library catalogue and how it poorly handles subject headings, I received a recommended read from Trevor Owens:

@copystar @shannonmattern y'all read Murray & Tillett's "Cataloging Theory in Search of Graph Theory" https://t.co/30gr2TuKQR

— Trevor Owens (@tjowens) July 11, 2016

I found the paper super interesting. But among all the theory, I have to admit my favourite takeaways from the paper was that its model incorporates business rules as a means to capture an institution's particular point of view, restraints or reasons for interest. It is as if we are recognizing the constraints and situation of the observer who is describing a work:

 Following the scientific community's lead in striving to describe the physical universe through observations, we adapted the concept of an observation into the bibliographic universe and assert that cataloging is a process of making observations on resources. Human or computational observers following institutional business rules (i.e., the terms, facts, definitions, and action assertions that represent constraints on an enterprise and on the things of interest to the enterprise)5 create resource descriptions — accounts or representations of a person, object, or event being drawn on by a person, group, institution, and so on, in pursuit of its interests.

Given this definition, a person (or a computation) operating from a business rules–generated institutional or personal point of view, and executing specified procedures (or algorithms) to do so, is an integral component of a resource description process (see figure 1). This process involves identifying a resource's textual, graphical, acoustic, or other features and then classifying, making quality and fitness for purpose judgments, etc., on the resource. Knowing which institutional or individual points of view are being employed is essential when parties possessing multiple views on those resources describe cultural heritage resources. How multiple resource descriptions derived from multiple points of view are to be related to one another becomes a key theoretical issue with significant practical consequences.

Murray, R. J., & Tillett, B. B. (2011). Cataloging theory in search of graph theory and other ivory towers: Object: Cultural heritage resource description networks. Information Technology and Libraries, 30(4), 170-184.

I'll end this post with a video of the first episode of Ways of Seeing, a remarkable series four-part series about art from the BBC in 1972. It is some of the smartest TV I have ever seen and begins with the matter of the perspective and the observer:

The first episode is based on the ideas of Walter Benjamin's The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, which I must admit with some shame that I still have not read.

Art takes into account the observer.

I'm not sure that librarianship does.

But perhaps this observation is not sound. Perhaps it is limited by my particular situation and point of view.

 Mita Williams https://librarian.aedileworks.com District Dispatch: There's a reason why we complain http://www.districtdispatch.org/?p=17243 2016-07-19T20:39:43+00:00

Image from Pixabay

The Social Science Research Network (SSRN) could be called the "academic version" of user-generated content on the web. Scholars and academics generate content in the form of scholarly papers and post them on the SSRN for all to see, read, and comment on. Often, academics who post their forthcoming papers or "pre-prints" intend to eventually publish them in scholarly journals that research libraries and academic societies acquire. But in the meantime, academics want to quickly share their works in a pre-published form on the SSRN. It's a valuable and heavily used resource with over 682,100 scholarly working papers and forthcoming papers freely available.

After the scholarly publisher Elsevier acquired the SSRN in May, people thought, what the h***?! Many were inclined to think that Elsevier would develop a way to monetize SSRN because Elsevier does that sort of thing, they have a history. They sell journal subscriptions to academics at lunatic prices — their current profit margin more than 40% — by re-selling content produced by scholars who work at publicly funded higher education institutions. Then libraries have to find the money to purchase the journal…you know the story. (if not, see SPARC) Elsevier assured those concerned that SSRN would remain unchanged – specifically that "both existing and future SSRN content will be largely unaffected"

The Authors Alliance, whose members want to facilitate the "widespread access to works of authorship" and "disseminate knowledge," were particularly concerned because SSRN is one of the primary venues for sharing works of social science rapidly and freely. So they asked Elsevier to accept principles that acknowledged its willingness to accept open access preferences of scholars.

Well, they did not. Surprise!

Last week, several authors noted that their papers had been removed from SSRN by Elsevier without notice. Apparently Elsevier wants to remove all the papers whose copyright status is unclear. Ahh…come again? Elsevier is asking authors who have written an unpublished paper and have not transferred their copyright to submit documentation proving that they are the rights holder! What kind of world do we live in?

Now there is a movement by scholars and academics to drop SSRN. Luckily, a new pre-print archive is under development. It is called SocArXiv. Stay tuned to the District Dispatch for more information.

The post There's a reason why we complain appeared first on District Dispatch.
 Carrie Russell http://www.districtdispatch.org LibUX: The UX of VR http://libux.co/?p=1058 2016-07-19T17:12:09+00:00

Max Glenister has curated a list of resources about the user experience of virtual reality. These range from actual code to conceptual principles and broadly applicable truisms about immersion and design, like

 The last 40 years have seen the rise of the digital landscape; a two dimensional plane that abstracts familiar real-world concepts like writing, using a calendar, storing documents in folders into user interface elements (UI). This approach allows for a high level of information density and multitasking. The down-side is that new interaction models need to be learned and there is a higher cognitive load to decision making. Matt Sundstrom
 Immersive Design: Learning to Let Go of the Screen

The UX of VR by Max Glenister

The post The UX of VR appeared first on LibUX.
 Michael Schofield http://libux.co Code4Lib: Code4Lib Journal #33 http://code4lib.org/583 at http://code4lib.org 2016-07-19T15:32:07+00:00

Topic:

journal

Issue #33 of the Code4Lib Journal is now available:

Editorial Introduction – Summer Reading List, by Ron Peterson

Emflix – Gone Baby Gone, by Netanel Ganin

Introduction to Text Mining with R for Information Professionals, by Monica Maceli

Data for Decision Making: Tracking Your Library's Needs With TrackRef, by Michael Carlozzi

Are games a viable solution to crowdsourcing improvements to faulty OCR? – The Purposeful Gaming and BHL experience, by Max J. Seidman, Mary Flanagan, Trish Rose-Sandler and Mike Lichtenberg

From Digital Commons to OCLC: A Tailored Approach for Harvesting and Transforming ETD Metadata into High-Quality Records by Marielle Veve

Checking the identity of entities by machine algorithms: the next step to the Hungarian National Namespace, by Zsolt Bánki, Tibor Mészáros, Márton Németh and András Simon

Metadata Analytics, Visualization, and Optimization: Experiments in statistical analysis of the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), by Corey A. Harper

 wtd http://code4lib.org LITA: LITA Forum 2016 – Call for Library School Student Volunteers http://litablog.org/?p=9370 2016-07-19T15:28:06+00:00
2016 LITA Forum
 Ft Worth, Texas
 November 17-20, 2016

STUDENT REGISTRATION RATE AVAILABLE – 50% OFF REGISTRATION RATE — $180

The Library and Information Technology Association (LITA), a division of the American Library Association, is offering a discounted student registration rate for the 2016 LITA Forum. This offer is limited to graduate students enrolled in ALA-accredited programs. In exchange for the lower registration cost, these graduate students will be asked to assist the LITA organizers and Forum presenters with onsite operations. This is a great way to network and meet librarians active in the field.

The selected students will be expected to attend the full LITA Forum, Friday noon through Sunday noon. Attendance during the preconferences on Thursday afternoon and Friday morning is not required. While you will be assigned a variety of duties, you will be able to attend the Forum programs, which include 3 keynote sessions, over 50 concurrent sessions, and poster presentations, as well as many opportunities for social engagement.

The Forum will be held November 17-20, 2016 at the Omni Hotel in Fort Worth, Texas. The student rate is $180 – half the regular registration rate for LITA members. A real bargain, this rate includes a Friday night reception, continental breakfasts, and Saturday lunch.

For more information about the Forum, visit http://litaforum.org. We anticipate an attendance of 300 decision makers and implementers of new information technologies in libraries.

To apply to be a student volunteer, complete and submit this form by September 30, 2016.

http://goo.gl/forms/e6UeOsfqTW0hhsfu2

You will be asked to provide the following:
 1. Contact information, including email address and cell phone number
 2. Name of the school you are attending
 3. Statement of 150 words (or less) explaining why you want to attend the LITA National Forum

Those selected to be volunteers registered at the student rate will be notified no later than Friday, October 14, 2016.

Additional questions should be sent to Christine Peterson, email@example.com, or Mary Duffy, email@example.com
 Mark Beatty http://litablog.org Code4Lib Journal: Editorial Introduction – Summer Reading List http://journal.code4lib.org/?p=11859 2016-07-19T15:08:59+00:00 New additions for your summer reading list! Ron Peterson http://journal.code4lib.org Code4Lib Journal: Emflix – Gone Baby Gone http://journal.code4lib.org/?p=11762 2016-07-19T15:08:58+00:00 Enthusiasm is no replacement for experience. This article describes a tool developed at the Emerson College Library by an eager but overzealous cataloger. Attempting to enhance media-discovery in a familiar and intuitive way, he created a browseable and searchable Netflix-style interface. Though it may have been an interesting idea, many of the crucial steps that are involved in this kind of high-concept work were neglected. This article will explore and explain why the tool ultimately has not been maintained or updated, and what should have been done differently to ensure its legacy and continued use. Netanel Ganin http://journal.code4lib.org Code4Lib Journal: Introduction to Text Mining with R for Information Professionals http://journal.code4lib.org/?p=11626 2016-07-19T15:08:57+00:00 The 'tm: Text Mining Package' in the open source statistical software R has made text analysis techniques easily accessible to both novice and expert practitioners, providing useful ways of analyzing and understanding large, unstructured datasets. Such an approach can yield many benefits to information professionals, particularly those involved in text-heavy research projects. This article will discuss the functionality and possibilities of text mining, as well as the basic setup necessary for novice R users to employ the RStudio integrated development environment (IDE). Common use cases, such as analyzing a corpus of text documents or spreadsheet text data, will be covered, as well as the text mining tools for calculating term frequency, term correlations, clustering, creating wordclouds, and plotting. Monica Maceli http://journal.code4lib.org Code4Lib Journal: Data for Decision Making: Tracking Your Library's Needs With TrackRef http://journal.code4lib.org/?p=11740 2016-07-19T15:08:56+00:00 Library services must adapt to changing patron needs. These adaptations should be data-driven. This paper reports on the use of TrackRef, an open source and free web program for managing reference statistics. Michael Carlozzi http://journal.code4lib.org Code4Lib Journal: Are games a viable solution to crowdsourcing improvements to faulty OCR? – The Purposeful Gaming and BHL experience http://journal.code4lib.org/?p=11781 2016-07-19T15:08:55+00:00 The Missouri Botanical Garden and partners from Dartmouth, Harvard, the New York Botanical Garden, and Cornell recently wrapped up a project funded by IMLS called Purposeful Gaming and BHL: engaging the public in improving and enhancing access to digital texts (http://biodivlib.wikispaces.com/Purposeful+Gaming). The goals of the project were to significantly improve access to digital texts through the applicability of purposeful gaming for the completion of data enhancement tasks needed for content found within the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL). This article will share our approach in terms of game design choices and the use of algorithms for verifying the quality of inputs from players as well as challenges related to transcriptions and marketing. We will conclude by giving an answer to the question of whether games are a successful tool for analyzing and improving digital outputs from OCR and whether we recommend their uptake by libraries and other cultural heritage institutions. Max J. Seidman; Dr. Mary Flanagan;Trish Rose-Sandler; Mike Lichtenberg http://journal.code4lib.org Code4Lib Journal: From Digital Commons to OCLC: A Tailored Approach for Harvesting and Transforming ETD Metadata into High-Quality Records http://journal.code4lib.org/?p=11676 2016-07-19T15:08:54+00:00 The library literature contains many examples of automated and semi-automated approaches to harvest electronic theses and dissertations (ETD) metadata from institutional repositories (IR) to the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC). However, most of these approaches could not be implemented with the institutional repository software Digital Commons because of various reasons including proprietary schema incompatibilities and high level programming expertise requirements our institution did not want to pursue. Only one semi-automated approach was found in the library literature which met our requirements for implementation, and even though it catered to the particular needs of the DSpace IR, it could be implemented to other IR software if further customizations were applied. The following paper presents an extension of this semi-automated approach originally created by Deng and Reese, but customized and adapted to address the particular needs of the Digital Commons community and updated to integrate the latest Resource Description & Access (RDA) content standards for ETDs. Advantages and disadvantages of this workflow are discussed and presented as well. Marielle Veve http://journal.code4lib.org Code4Lib Journal: Checking the identity of entities by machine algorithms: the next step to the Hungarian National Namespace http://journal.code4lib.org/?p=11765 2016-07-19T15:08:53+00:00 The redundancy of entities coming from different sources caused problems during the building of the personal name authorities for the Petőfi Museum of Literature. It was a top priority to cleanse and unite classificatory records which have different data content but pertain to the same person without losing any data. As a first step in 2013, we found identities in approximately 80,000 name records so we merged the data content of these records. In the second phase a much more complicated algorithm had to be applied to show these identities. We cleansed the database by uniting approximately 36,000 records. The workflow for automatic detection of authority data tries to follow human intelligence. The database scripts normalize and examine about 20 kinds of data elements according to information about dates, localities, occupation and name variations. The result of creating pairs from the database authority records, as potential redundant elements, was a graph, which was condensed to a tree, by human efforts of the curators of the museum. With this, the limit of technological identification was reached. For further data cleansing human intelligence that can be assisted by computerized regular monitoring is needed, based upon the developed algorithm. As a result, the service containing about 620,000 authority name records will be an indispensable foundation to the establishment of the National Name Authorities. This article shows the work process of unification. Zsolt Bánki, Tibor Mészáros, Márton Németh, András Simon http://journal.code4lib.org Code4Lib Journal: Metadata Analytics, Visualization, and Optimization: Experiments in statistical analysis of the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) http://journal.code4lib.org/?p=11752 2016-07-19T15:08:52+00:00 This paper presents the concepts of metadata assessment and "quantification" and describes preliminary research results applying these concepts to metadata from the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA). The introductory sections provide a technical outline of data pre-processing, and propose visualization techniques that can help us understand metadata characteristics in a given context. Example visualizations are shown and discussed, leading up to the use of "metadata fingerprints" -- D3 Star Plots -- to summarize metadata characteristics across multiple fields for arbitrary groupings of resources. Fingerprints are shown comparing metadata characteristics for different DPLA "Hubs" and also for used versus not used resources based on Google Analytics "pageview" counts. The closing sections introduce the concept of metadata optimization and explore the use of machine learning techniques to optimize metadata in the context of large-scale metadata aggregators like DPLA. Various statistical models are used to predict whether a particular DPLA item is used based only on its metadata. The article concludes with a discussion of the broad potential for machine learning and data science in libraries, academic institutions, and cultural heritage. Corey A. Harper http://journal.code4lib.org David Rosenthal: More on Terms of Service tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4503292949532760618.post-6865123937346333942 2016-07-19T15:00:16+00:00 When Jefferson Bailey & I finished writing My Web Browser's Terms of Service I thought I was done with the topic, but two recent articles bought it back into focus. Below the fold are links, extracts and comments.

In Ticking all the boxes, The Economist writes about an interesting legal theory underpinning a rash of cases in New Jersey:

The suits seek to exploit the Truth-in-Consumer Contract, Warranty and Notice Act, enacted in New Jersey 35 years ago. This was intended to prevent companies that do business in the state from using contracts, notices or signs to limit consumer rights protected by law.
These suits:

generally include allegations that online terms violate consumers' rights to seek damages as protected by New Jersey law and fail to explain which provisions cover New Jersey. ... plaintiffs need not show injury or loss in order to sue but merely prove violation of the TCCWNA.
The risks to companies are significant:

the TCCWNA entitles each successful plaintiff to at least $100 in damages, plus fees to lawyers and so on. If a website has millions of visitors, the costs to a company could be staggering.
But they are balanced by longer-term risks to consumers:

A growing number of firms, emboldened by favourable Supreme Court rulings, have adopted clauses that limit class-action suits. Consumers are instead restricted to resolving disputes individually, in arbitration. The TCCWNA cases may inspire more firms to add such caveats. That might limit frivolous suits. But consumers with grave complaints would be unable to sue, either. In the end lawsuits over restrictive contracts may make them more restrictive still.
An example of this trend is Pokemon Go:

to play Pokemon Go, you have to accede to a binding arbitration clause, surrendering your right to sue and promising only to seek redress for any harms that the company visits upon you in a system of secretive, one-sided shadow courts paid for by corporations where class actions are not permitted and the house always wins. ... Pokemon joins a small but growing movement of online services that strip their customers of their legal rights as a condition of sale, including Google Fiber and Airbnb
It could be worse, in this case you can send an email:

within 30 days of creating your account, and include in the body "a clear declaration that you are opting out of the arbitration clause in the Pokémon Go terms of service."
In The Biggest Lie on the Internet: Ignoring the Privacy Policies and Terms of Service Policies of Social Networking Services, Jonathan Obar and Anne Oeldorf-Hirsch report on:

an empirical investigation of privacy policy (PP) and terms of service (TOS) policy reading behavior. An experimental survey (N=543) assessed the extent to which individuals ignore PP and TOS when joining a fictitious social networking site, NameDrop. Results reveal 74% skipped PP, selecting 'quick join.' For readers, average PP reading time was 73 seconds, and average TOS reading time was 51 seconds. Based on average adult reading speed (250-280 words per minute), PP should have taken 30 minutes to read, TOS 16 minutes.
Among the clauses that almost all experimental subjects missed were ones requiring:

data sharing with the NSA and employers, and .. providing a first-born child as payment
The thing is, consumers are probably being rational in ignoring the mandatory arbitration and the terms of service. Even with a class action, the terms of service are so stacked against the consumer that a win is highly unlikely, and if it happens the most the consumer can expect is a mountain of paperwork asking for proofs that they almost certainly don't possess, in order to stake a claim to the crumbs left over after the class action lawyers get paid.

A social network that started suing its members for the kinds of things everyone does would be out of business very quickly, so the details of the terms are pretty irrelevant compared to the social norms of the network. The privacy terms are perhaps more important, but if you care about privacy the last thing you should be doing is using a social network.

 David. (email@example.com) http://blog.dshr.org/ Eric Lease Morgan: How not to work during a sabbatical http://blogs.nd.edu/emorgan/?p=719 2016-07-19T14:43:16+00:00
 This presentation — given at Code4Lib Midwest (Chicago, July 14, 2016) — outlines the various software systems I wrote during my recent tenure as an adjunct faculty member at the University of Notre Dame. (This presentation is also available as a one-page PDF handout designed to be duplex printed and folded in half as if it were a booklet.)

How rare is rare? – In an effort to determine the "rarity" of items in the Catholic Portal, I programmatically searched WorldCat for specific items, counted the number of times it was held by libraries in the United States, and recorded the list of the holding libraries. Through the process I learned that most of the items in the Catholic Portal are "rare", but I also learned that "rarity" can be defined as the triangulation of scarcity, demand, and value. Thus the "rare" things may not be rare at all.

Image processing – By exploiting the features and functions of an open source library called OpenCV, I started exploring ways to evaluate images in the same way I have been evaluating texts. By counting & tabulating the pixels in an image it is possible to create ratios of colors, do facial recognition, or analyze geometric composition. Through these processes is may be possible to supplement art history and criticism. For example, one might be able to ask things like, "Show me all of the paintings from Picasso's Rose Period."

Library Of Congress Name Authorities – Given about 125,000 MARC authority records, I wrote an application that searched the Library Of Congress (LOC) Name Authority File, and updated the local authority records with LOC identifiers, thus making the local authority database more consistent. For items that needed disambiguation, I created a large set of simple button-based forms allowing librarians to choose the most correct name.

MARC record enrichment – Given about 500,000 MARC records describing ebooks, I wrote a program that found the richest OCLC record in WorldCat and then merged the found record with the local record. Ultimately the local records included more access points and thus proved to be more useful in a library catalog setting.

OAI-PMH processing – I finally got my brain around the process of harvesting & indexing OAI-PMH content into VUFind. Whoever wrote the original OAI-PMH applications for VUFind did a very good job, but there is a definite workflow to the process. Now that I understand the workflow it is relatively easy ingest metadata from things like ContentDM, but issues with the way Dublin Core is implement still make the process challenging.

EEBO/TCP – Given the most beautiful TEI mark-up I've ever seen, I have systematically harvested the Early English Books Online (EEBO) content from the Text Encoding Initiative (TCP) and done some broad & deep but also generic text analysis subsets of the collection. Readers are able to search the collection for items of interest, save the full text to their own space for analysis, and have a number of rudimentary reports done against the result. This process allows the reader to see the corpus from a "distance". Very similar work has been done against subsets of content from JSTOR as well as the HathiTrust.

VIAF Lookup – Given about 100,000 MARC authority records, I wrote a program to search VIAF for the most appropriate identifier and associate it with the given record. Through the process I learned two things: 1) how to exploit the VIAF API, and 2) how to exploit the Levenshtein algorithm. Using the later I was able to make automated and "intelligent" choices when it came to name disambiguation. In the end, I was able to accurately associate more than 80% of the authority names with VIAF identifiers.

 My tenure as an adjunct faculty member was very much akin to a one year education except for a fifty-five year old. I did many of the things college students do: go to class, attend sporting events, go on road trips, make friends, go to parties, go home for the holidays, write papers, give oral presentations, eat too much, drink too much, etc. Besides the software systems outlined above, I gave four or five professional presentations, attend & helped coordinate five or six professional meetings, taught an online, semester-long, graduate-level class of on the topic of XML, took many different classes (painting, sketching, dance, & language) many times, lived many months in Chicago, Philadelphia, and Rome, visited more than two dozen European cities, painted about fifty paintings, bound & filled about two dozen hand-made books, and took about three thousand photographs. The only thing I didn't do is take tests.
 Life of a Librarian Islandora: Islandora's Technical Lead: Daniel Lamb http://islandora.ca/41276 at http://islandora.ca 2016-07-18T22:07:03+00:00

Following on our earlier announcement, the Islandora Foundation would like to announce that Daniel Lamb will be our Technical Lead, starting August 1st. The Islandora Technical Lead is responsible for providing leadership, technical guidance, coordination, and support to the open source community in the interests of releasing ongoing enhancements and maintenance to Islandora.

Danny comes to us from discoverygarden, Inc, where he has spent the better part of four years working with Islandora. He is uniquely suited to taking on the role of Islandora's Technical Lead as both a long-time committer to the Islandora 7.x-1.x project and the primary architect of Islandora CLAW. He is also an experienced presenter and Islandora Camp instructor, an official Committer on both Islandora teams, and has long been a leader in the Islandora community. We did a Meet Your Developer interview with Danny back in 2014 if you want to learn more about his background and his approach to development.

 manez http://islandora.ca LITA: Transmission #7 – A Special Transmission http://litablog.org/?p=9368 2016-07-18T18:21:01+00:00

Hi, everyone! Due to technical challenges and delays, I am reopening the Begin Transmission survey and feedback form (below). Join the conversation! Thanks for your help.

Loading…
 Lindsay Cronk http://litablog.org LITA: Did you attend the recent ALA Annual 2016 conference in Orlando FL? http://litablog.org/?p=9364 2016-07-18T16:12:21+00:00
If so please complete our LITA conference programs survey evaluation at:

bit.ly/litaan16evals

We hope you had the best ALA Annual conference, and that attending useful, informative and fun LITA programs were an important part of your conference experience. If so please take a moment to complete our evaluation survey. Your responses are very important to your colleagues who are planning programming for next years ALA Annual, as well as LITA year round continuing education sessions.

To complete your survey it might also help to check back at the

Full schedule of LITA programs and meetings.

And recall other details at the LITA @ ALA Annual page.

Thank you and we hope to see you at the

LITA Forum in Fort Worth, TX, November 17-20, 2016
 Mark Beatty http://litablog.org Islandora: Islandora is Getting a Technical Lead http://islandora.ca/41275 at http://islandora.ca 2016-07-18T14:28:59+00:00

The Islandora Foundation could not be more pleased to announce that it will be hiring a Technical Lead to start in August, 2016. The Islandora Technical Lead is responsible for providing leadership, technical guidance, coordination, and support to the open source community in the interests of releasing ongoing enhancements and maintenance to Islandora. Together with the Project & Community Manager and Islandora's governing committees, the Technical Lead ensures that Islandora software fulfills the mission of the project and the needs of community members.

The Technical Lead creates an inclusive, welcoming, open team environment based on a meritocracy of committers, contributors, documentation specialists, technical trainers, and other volunteer resources. They strive to recruit new members to the team from the larger community of volunteers.

Hiring a Technical Lead has been a long-term goal of the Islandora Foundation since its launch in 2013, and we could not have gotten here without the support of our wonderful members, both institutions and individuals. While you may note that our membership funding has not quite reached the $160,000 minimum that we set as a goal, we have the opportunity to top up that funding with support from a grant for 2016/2017. We trust in our community to bring our membership funding up to close that gap over the next year so that the Islandora Foundation will remain sustainable going forward.

This is a huge step forward for the Islandora Foundation and the community that it serves. As we enter our fourth year as an independent non-profit, we look to that community for direction on where the project will go next. Adding a Technical Lead to our team will provide an invaluable resource to help achieve our goals, but the role of the Islandora community and the many wonderful volunteers within it will remain paramount. Islandora is for the community, by the community - just now with a Technical Lead for that community to work with.

 manez http://islandora.ca District Dispatch: Dear RNC and DNC: Libraries are essential to achieving national priorities http://www.districtdispatch.org/?p=17224 2016-07-18T14:14:37+00:00
Today, the Republican National Convention (RNC) kicks off in Cleveland, and the Democratic National Convention (DNC) begins next Monday in Philadelphia. In the latest installment of the Policy Revolution! initiative, ALA submitted comments to the Republican and Democratic Party Platform Committees. A party platform is a formal set of value statements and goals to guide the direction of a political party. Final discussion and ratification of the platforms will take place during the respective conventions.

ALA's submission is based on a large body of prior work. At the most fundamental level, such comments are informed by internal ALA policies, approved by ALA's Council. In terms of our work more specifically targeted to the national public policy arena, we completed the National Policy Agenda for Libraries in June 2015 to provide the strategic policy direction for libraries, under the auspices of a Library Advisory Committee that included a number of library community organizations in addition to ALA.

At this point in the process, the primary goal is to showcase how libraries contribute to the broad range of national goals of importance to the major political parties. Given the economic unease around the country, ALA comments highlighted the roles of libraries in advancing economic opportunity. The comments also address several issues that are prominent in the campaigns, such as national infrastructure, veterans, education and learning and others.

There will be some library presence at the conventions. In Cleveland, the Cuyahoga County (Ohio) Public Library will be streaming briefings organized by The Atlantic. In Philadelphia, Siobhan Reardon, President and Director, Free Library of Philadelphia, will serve on a panel on getting online and digital inclusion that will be keynoted by FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn.

Susan Hildreth, Tony Sarmiento and Alan Inouye (L-R) discuss the challenges and opportunities presented by the upcoming national elections.

OITP held a number of sessions at the 2016 ALA Annual Conference to provide briefings and obtain guidance from the ALA community for our future policy direction. In particular, we held one public panel session moderated by Mark Smith, Director, Texas State Library and Archives Commission with panelists Susan Hildreth, Executive Director, Peninsula (Calif.) Library System; Tony Sarmiento, Executive Director, Senior Service America; and me. Thanks to those who attended our session or one of our meetings and provided advice.

Of course, the political conventions only mark the beginning of the actual presidential campaigns, so there is much more work to be done in the months leading into the election, the transition to the next President and the first 100 days of the new Administration. We will be developing and disseminating much more information and honing in on specific recommendations. So here's a question for you: If you could say one (or two) things to the presidential candidates about the value of libraries to our respective communities, what would you highlight? We'd like to hear from you—via the comments option on District Dispatch or send email directly to me at email@example.com.

The post Dear RNC and DNC: Libraries are essential to achieving national priorities appeared first on District Dispatch.
 Alan Inouye http://www.districtdispatch.org LibUX: Create Once, Publish Everywhere http://libux.co/?p=992 2016-07-18T05:35:25+00:00
In 2014 I persuaded my library to build another website. No, it wasn't a redesign, no new entity from the ground up to replace what we have. This was another website — a second one.

Ours is a unique joint-use academic and public facility. Divide this library's users into its broadest audiences and there are still plenty to account for: faculty, undergraduate and graduate students (local, distant), alumni, the public – whatever that means.

Chunking the latter into one big patronbase isn't particularly useful, but the allocation of the homepage's real-estate constricted our ability to finely tune it. Our incentive to accommodate the academic community crowded out our ability to accommodate the audience who cared about events and entertainment – and this is precisely where our usability studies drew the line. Public cardholders appreciated but asked for more prominent access to new popular materials and programs, students and faculty were pretty clear about what they didn't want.

So, I talked colleagues into spinning-off a new website — different look and feel, tone, even domain — just for public library services, and they weren't shy about voicing concerns about increased workload involved with doubling-up and maintaining two sets of content, and whether this decision would, for example, obfuscate research services from the public or programming from the faculty. Content locked away in a silo is, after all, locked away in a silo. There's risk that a graduate student using the academic library website might not see that a favorite author is visiting when that event is only posted for the public.

Right. Big problem, but not one exactly unique to this project. Libraries have been suffering these pain points for years. Assuaging this grief is exactly the selling point for discovery layers. That "library website" that we refer to in the singular is more like an organism of microsites and applications: there is the catalog, a static homepage hosted by the institution or county, maybe a one-off Drupal site on a server the library controls, subject guides, an event management system, a room reservation system, and iPhone app. Silos are a library's present and future.

The increasing device complexity and capability of the web is and will continue to reinforce silos. As libraries approach their mobile moment, library websites that try to do too much will fail, whereas sites and apps that focus on doing just one thing well will succeed. It's this sentiment recommending developers consider breaking out functionality among multiple apps, that there is a point when an app can be too feature-rich.

The Kano model can illustrate that some features have a negative impact on customer satisfaction.

 Everything is designed. Few things are designed well. Brian Reed

Libraries are actually in a good position to benefit from this strategy. So much of the library web presence is already single-purposed that it wouldn't take much to retrofit. Rather than roll the catalog into the same template as the homepage, it can be embraced as a standalone web app with its own unique purpose-driven user interface. This isn't about going off-brand, but without the pressure of inheriting a mega-menu from the homepage, the library can be more judicious with the catalog's design. This makes sense for library services when patrons are task-driven. Time is better spent optimizing for engagement rather than making the sites identical.

Not to mention silos aren't inherently bad for discovery. Organizing web content in the way that news sites have sports sections is sound. Robots and crawlers have an easier time indexing content when there is a delineated path in which similar content is clustered and interlinked. The machines are cool with it. What makes discovery tricky for humans is that content on one site isn't usually available on another. If patrons visit the library with a task in mind — "I want to find something to read", "I need to renew my items", "I want to see events", or "I need to write a paper" — then there isn't much incentive to browse outside of that content silo.

Libraries can't depend on patrons just happening onto the event calendar after picking through the databases, nor can they depend on cramming everything on, or funneling everyone through, the front page. Getting found is going to get harder. If an institution has the ability and incentive to build an app, stakeholders want that option to be on the table without dramatically impacting workflow. Libraries will need to be able to grow, adapt, and iterate without having to fuss over content.

A copeing mechanism

I knew a standalone, public-themed, public-toned, public-specific library website would better resonate with, well, the public. If we were better able to fine-tune the content for the audience, patrons would be more likely to engage with library services for a longer time. This allows more opportunity to introduce new services, promote databases, maybe increase circulation.

At the same time, by relieving the pressure from just one homepage, the library can also better serve academic patrons. The opportunity to increase engagement all around won this gamble the stakeholder support it needed, but not if it dramatically strained workflow or blocked any potential content from any user. We needed to change how we approached content so that it was possible to share one item across all platforms, but at the same time prevent the need to micromanage which piece of content appeared where.

In 2009, Daniel Jacobson, Director of Application and Development for NPR wrote a series of posts on Programmable Web about the NPR API beginning with "C.O.P.E.: Create Once, Publish Everywhere." To meet the content demand for native apps on various platforms, microsites, including the NPR affiliate sites, the team wrote an API, which made it easier to fetch and repurpose media. This today is an important principle for addressing the challenges of a future-friendly web.

For most libraries it's not going to be realistic to control all the content from one system, yet consolidating what's possible will make it easier to manage over time. With some static pages on the institutional web server with limited control, we began migrating this old content in to a WordPress multisite, with which staff were already familiar.

There were specific types of content we intended to broadcast to the four corners: notifications and schedules, databases, events, reader's advisory in the form of lists and staff picks, guides, and instructional videos. If the library's success was determined by usage, turnout, and circulation, on the web that success very much depends on the ability to spotlight this content at the patron's point of engagement.

A content system as-is doesn't cut it. Popular content management systems like WordPress and Drupal are wonderful, but to meet libraries' unique and portable needs these need a little rigging. If an institution hopes to staff-source content and expect everyone to use the system, then tailoring the CMS to the needs and culture of the library is an important step.

Subject specialists were creating guides and videos. Librarians involved with programming (both academic and public) were creating events. Others maintained departmental info, policies, schedules.

To ensure consistent and good content from folks better suited to create it, it is unfair and counterproductive to present a system with too steep a learning curve. I admit to being naive and surprised to see how strange and unfamiliar WordPress could be for those who don't spend all day in it. De-jargoning the content system is no less important than de-jargoning the content.

Plus, these systems require tweaking to make content sufficiently modular. WordPress's default editor–title, tags and categories, a featured image, and a blank slate text box–doesn't fly for a content-type like an event, which requires start and end times, dates, all-day or multi-day options.

Moreover, the blank slate is intimidating.

Rigid content requirements and a blank-slate WYSIWYG don't scale. When demanding content is detail oriented enough to have instructions, the stock editor can be replaced with smaller custom fields, which like any form element can be required before the post can be published.

Here's an example: a self-hosted video actually requires multiple video formats to be cross-browser compatible and captions to be accessible. Publishing without captions violates accessibility guidelines, but without being able to ensure that the captions exists it is inevitable that at some point an inaccessible video will go live. Breaking the content editor into smaller, manageable chunks allows for fine control, checks and balances, and has the added opportunity to insert instructions at each step to streamline the process.

A cross-system, cross-department, controlled vocabulary is key. When we first started to think about sharing content between public and academic library websites, we knew that on some level all content would need to be filterable by either terms "public" or "academic." We're not going to publish something twice, so the public library website will have to know that it needs "public" content.

This was an addicting train of thought. We could go hog wild if new pages knew what kind of content to curate. What would it take then to create a page called "gardening" and make it a hub for all library content about the topic? It needs to be dynamic so it can stay current without micromanagement. It needs to populate itself with gardening book lists, staff-picks, upcoming "gardening" events, agricultural resources and databases – assuming the content exists. Isn't this just a subject search for "gardening"?

If a library can assign one or two taxonomies that could be applied to all sorts of disparate content, then the query a site makes for the API could match categories regardless of their content type. The taxonomy has to be controlled and enforced so that it is consistent, and when possible can be built right into the post editor. Using WordPress, custom taxonomies can be tied to multiple types without fuss.

register_taxonomy( 'your-taxonomy', // Add any content type her 'your-taxonomy' can be used array( 'databases', 'events', 'reviews', 'items', 'video' ); // other taxonomy options omitted for brevity array( /* options */ ); );

I created two taxonomies: "Library Audience," which lets us filter content for the type of patron–academic, public, teen, children and family, distance student, etc.–and "Subject" lets us filter by subject. The no-red-tape way to create a global "Subject" taxonomy was to just use the subjects that the library's electronic resources use, a standardized vocabulary overseen by a committee. In our specific case, database subjects actually boil down to a three-letter designation. So while users see "Business," the slug passed around behind the scenes is "zbu."

Here is what a query against our eventual API for "business" looked like:

https://example-library.org/api/get_content/?taxonomy=subjects&slug=zbu

Content is then liberated by an API. Content management systems like WordPress or Drupal already have an API of sorts: the RSS feed. Technically, any site can ingest the XML and republish whatever content is made available, but it won't include things added custom to the CMS. This isn't an uncommon need, so both WordPress and Drupal have REST APIs – which is a little beyond the scope of this writeup.

These enable the programmatic fetch and push of content from one platform into another.

In LibGuides — an increasingly capable library-specific content management system — our content creators can use HTML5 data attributes as hooks in the template that help determine the audience and type of content to grab. It creates a little empty placeholder, like an ad spot, to be populated by a relevant event (if any), book lists, relevant resources, past or upcoming workshops, and more.

At the time this article was originally written in summer 2014 it looked a little like

in which librarians decided what type of content (e.g., an event) went where on their page. For each placeholder, based off its parameters, a script builds and submits the API query string using jQuery:

$.getJSON( '//www.example-library.org/api/get_event/?taxonomy=audienc&slug=public&term=comics' ) .success( function( response ) { // do something });

We have since largely traded jQuery for Angular. When there is a placeholder it's a tad more agnostic

<ng-repeat="ad in ads"> {{ title }} {{ etc }} </ng-repeat>

but more often than not we just weasel it in there using attributes such as audience and type, which unless other specified will determine the values from the page.

Not random, but library events that make sense on the pages they appear.

Remember that just a few years ago many libraries rushed to create mobile sites but then struggled to maintain two sets of content, and the follow-up responsive web design is a long process involving a lot of stakeholders – many haven't gotten this far because of the red-tape. The landscape of the web will only get weirder. There are and will continue to be new markets, new corners of the internet where libraries will want to be.

Libraries that can C.O.P.E. will be able to grow, iterate, and evolve. Libraries that can't, won't.

The post Create Once, Publish Everywhere appeared first on LibUX.
 Michael Schofield http://libux.co Galen Charlton: Cats who reside in story https://galencharlton.com/blog/?p=1280 2016-07-17T22:54:34+00:00
The tragedy of keeping house with cats is that their lives are so short in comparison to our own.

On Friday, Marlene and I put Sophie to rest; today, LaZorra. Four years ago, we lost Erasmus; before that, Scheherazade and Jennyfur. At the moment, we have just one, Amelia. It was a relief that she got a clean bill of health on Saturday… but she is nonetheless sixteen years old. The inexorability of time weighs heavily on me today.

I have no belief that there is any continuation of thought or spirt or soul after the cessation of life; the only persistence I know of for our cats is in the realm of story. And it is not enough: I am not good enough with words to capture and pin down the moment of a cat sleeping and purring on my chest or how the limbs of our little feline family would knot and jumble together.

Words are not nothing, however, so I shall share some stories about the latest to depart.

LaZorra was named after the white "Z" on her back, as if some bravo had decided to mark her before she entered this world. LaZorra was a cat of great brain, while her brother Erasmus was not. We would joke that LaZorra had claimed not only her brain cells, but those of her daughters Sophia and Amelia. (Who were also Erasmsus' children; suffice it to say that I thought I had more time to spay LaZorra than was actually the case).

Although she was a young mother, LaZorra was a good one. Scheherazade was alive at the time and also proved to be a good auntie-cat.

Very early on, a pattern was set: Sophie would cuddle with her father Rasi; Mellie with her mother Zorrie. LaZorra would cuddle with me; as would Erasmus; per the transitive property, I ended up squished.

But really, it took only one cat to train me. For a while LaZorra had a toy that she would drag to me when she wanted me to play with her. I always did; morning, afternoon, evening, at 2 in the morning…

"NO!"

Well, that was Marlene reminding me that once I taught a cat that I could be trained to play with her at two a.m. that there would be no end of it—nor any rest for us—so I did not end up being perfectly accommodating.

But I came close. LaZorra knew that she was due love and affection; that her remit included unlimited interference with keyboards and screens. And in the end, assistance when she could no longer make even the slight jump to the kitchen chair.

When we lost Erasmus to cancer, Marlene and I were afraid that Sophie would inevitably follow. For her, Rasi was her sun, moon, and stars. We had Erasmus euthanized at home so that the others would know that unlike the many trips for chemo, that this time he was not coming back. Nonetheless, Sophie would often sit at the door, waiting for her daddy to come back home.

She never stopped doing that until we moved.

It was by brush and comb, little by little as she camped out on the back of the couch, that I showed her that humans might just possibly be good for something (though not as a substitute for her daddy-cat). It is such a little thing, but I hold it as one of my personal accomplishments that I helped her look outward again.

Eventually those little scritches on the back of the couch became her expected due: we learned that we were to pay the Sophie-toll every time we passed by her.

Both LaZorra and Sophie were full of personality—and thus, they were often the subjects of my "Dear Cat" tweets. I'll close with a few of them.

Butter to LaZorra was as mushrooms to hobbits:

Dear cat:

There is no butter left.
There was no butter.
Butter never exists.
Butter? What's that?
(May I eat breakfast in peace?)

Love,
G

— Galen Charlton (@gmcharlt) July 9, 2016

At times, she was a little too clever for her own good:

Dear cat:

Precision in eating the pill pocket around the pill is NOT a virtue.

Love,
Galen

— Galen Charlton (@gmcharlt) April 26, 2016

Sophie was the only cat I've known to like popping bubblewrap:

Dear cat:

Carry on, carry on. No need to stop popping that bubble-wrap on my account.

Er, why are you looking so guilty?

Love,

Galen

— Galen Charlton (@gmcharlt) March 20, 2016

Sophie apparently enjoyed the taste of cables:

Dear cat:

If you persist in chewing on that cable, I will be unable to post your picture on the internet, and that is just not allo

— Galen Charlton (@gmcharlt) November 1, 2015

LaZorra was the suitcase-inspector-in-chief:

Dear cat,

Out of the suitcase, please. It suffices for me to bring your legend to #alamw16; your fur is optional.

Love,
Galen

— Galen Charlton (@gmcharlt) January 7, 2016

And, of course, they could be counted on to help with computation:

Dear cat:

I'm not sure even Google can turn up useful results for the query "ssser xzssfcvvvd|{PO? (99999"

Love,

Galen#ActualTranscript

— Galen Charlton (@gmcharlt) December 9, 2014

They both departed this world with pieces of our hearts in their claws.
 Galen Charlton https://galencharlton.com/blog FOSS4Lib Recent Releases: VuFind Harvest - 2.1.0 https://foss4lib.org/node/%2A/5678 at https://foss4lib.org 2016-07-17T17:08:18+00:00
Last updated July 17, 2016. Created by Peter Murray on July 17, 2016.
 Log in to edit this page.

Package:

VuFind Harvest

Release Date:

Thursday, July 14, 2016

 Peter Murray https://foss4lib.org/node/%2A/releases FOSS4Lib Updated Packages: VuFind Harvest https://foss4lib.org/5677 at https://foss4lib.org 2016-07-17T17:07:26+00:00
Last updated July 17, 2016. Created by Peter Murray on July 17, 2016.
 Log in to edit this page.

VuFindHarvest contains OAI-PMH harvesting logic. This is part of the VuFind project (https://vufind.org) but may be used as a stand-alone tool or incorporated into other software dealing with metadata harvesting.

Package Type:

Metadata Manipulation

License:

GPLv2

Package Links

Releases

Releases for VuFind Harvest

 VuFind Harvest - 2.1.0

14-Jul-2016

Programming Language:

PHP

Open Hub Link:

https://www.openhub.net/p/vufindharvest

Open Hub Stats Widget:

 Peter Murray https://foss4lib.org/packages LibUX: 63% of web traffic originates from a smartphone http://libux.co/?p=1041 2016-07-17T00:49:13+00:00

More library users than not have a touch screen that connects to the Internet in their pocket. In the United States, 63% of web traffic originates from a smartphone. This number aligns with the Pew Research Center report most recently updated in October 2014, adding additional context by noting that as of last year more than "90% of American adults own a cell phone," 42% own a tablet. Of them, 34% "go online mostly using their phones, and not using some other device such as a desktop or laptop computer."

These trends hearken back to an industry prediction coined by Googler Luke Wroblewski called "the mobile moment." That is, the point at which mobile traffic to an organization's website eclipses traditional non-mobile traffic, such as from a desktop.

The pressure for libraries to make their websites mobile friendly increases from quarter to quarter as the upward trajectory makes itself more distinct.

2015 Q2 Mobile Overview Report

The post 63% of web traffic originates from a smartphone appeared first on LibUX.
 Michael Schofield http://libux.co LibUX: 21% of people start scrolling before the page finishes loading http://libux.co/?p=1036 2016-07-17T00:38:50+00:00
21% of people start scrolling before the page finishes loading. They might just scroll past the upcoming events or new resources at the top of the page that libraries are trying to promote. Whoops. Chalk that up to "above the fold" irony.

 2015 Q2 Mobile Overview Report

The post 21% of people start scrolling before the page finishes loading appeared first on LibUX.
 Michael Schofield http://libux.co LibUX: Average load time on mobile http://libux.co/?p=1025 2016-07-17T00:30:34+00:00
The average load time on mobile is about 4 seconds. Type of connection—3G, 4G, LTE, WiFi, or something else—isn't part of the report, but we know the majority of the devices are smartphones using Android or iOS. Okay, you could have guessed that. But the potential speed difference between 3G and WiFi is enormous, and we should be interested in how that breaks down. While overall web traffic from tablets makes up less than a third, the Adobe Digital Index 2014 U.S. Mobile Benchmark reported that 93% of this traffic is over WiFi, enough—I think—to skew MOVR's load time average. My gut feeling is that a four second load for mobile devices is optimistic if those devices aren't on WiFi but—I digress.

This is an important benchmark when considered with other data showing the importance of web page speed in terms of user behavior. For instance, the 2014 Radware Mobile State of the Union suggests that almost half of mobile users expect pages to load in just two seconds, and of them a whopping 40% will abandon a page taking longer than three. So, if the average mobile user is already in a perpetual state of uggggh come onnnnn then trying to connect to a slow library website or database isn't doing much for his or her opinion of us.

2015 Q2 Mobile Overview Report

The post Average load time on mobile appeared first on LibUX.
 Michael Schofield http://libux.co David Rosenthal: What is wrong with science? tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4503292949532760618.post-2154545328298540987 2016-07-16T22:31:42+00:00 This is a quick post to flag two articles well worth reading.

The 7 biggest problems facing science, according to 270 scientists by Julia Belluz, Brad Plumer, and Brian Resnick at Vox is an excellent overview of some of the most serious problems, with pointers to efforts to fix them. Their 7 are:

Academia has a huge money problem:

In the United States, academic researchers in the sciences generally cannot rely on university funding alone to pay for their salaries, assistants, and lab costs. Instead, they have to seek outside grants. "In many cases the expectations were and often still are that faculty should cover at least 75 percent of the salary on grants," writes John Chatham, ... Grants also usually expire after three or so years, which pushes scientists away from long-term projects. Yet as John Pooley ... points out, the biggest discoveries usually take decades to uncover and are unlikely to occur under short-term funding schemes.

Too many studies are poorly designed:

An estimated $200 billion — or the equivalent of 85 percent of global spending on research — is routinely wasted on poorly designed and redundant studies, according to meta-researchers who have analyzed inefficiencies in research. We know that as much as 30 percent of the most influential original medical research papers later turn out to be wrong or exaggerated.

Replicating results is crucial — and rare:

A 2015 study looked at 83 highly cited studies that claimed to feature effective psychiatric treatments. Only 16 had ever been successfully replicated. Another 16 were contradicted by follow-up attempts, and 11 were found to have substantially smaller effects the second time around. Meanwhile, nearly half of the studies (40) had never been subject to replication at all.

Peer review is broken:

numerous studies and systematic reviews have shown that peer review doesn't reliably prevent poor-quality science from being published.

Too much science is locked behind paywalls:

"Large, publicly owned publishing companies make huge profits off of scientists by publishing our science and then selling it back to the university libraries at a massive profit (which primarily benefits stockholders)," Corina Logan, an animal behavior researcher at the University of Cambridge, noted. "It is not in the best interest of the society, the scientists, the public, or the research." (In 2014, Elsevier reported a profit margin of nearly 40 percent and revenues close to $3 billion.)

Science is poorly communicated:

Science journalism is often full of exaggerated, conflicting, or outright misleading claims. If you ever want to see a perfect example of this, check out "Kill or Cure," a site where Paul Battley meticulously documents all the times the Daily Mail reported that various items — from antacids to yogurt — either cause cancer, prevent cancer, or sometimes do both.
...
Indeed, one review in BMJ found that one-third of university press releases contained either exaggerated claims of causation (when the study itself only suggested correlation), unwarranted implications about animal studies for people, or unfounded health advice.

Life as a young academic is incredibly stressful:

A 2015 study at the University of California Berkeley found that 47 percent of PhD students surveyed could be considered depressed

Amen to all of those. Gina Kolata at the New York Times limits So Many Research Scientists, So Few Openings as Professors to the over-production of Ph. D.s:

Dr. Larson and his colleagues calculated R0s for various science fields in academia. There, R0 is the average number of Ph.D.s that a tenure-track professor will graduate over the course of his or her career, with an R0 of one meaning each professor is replaced by one new Ph.D. The highest R0 is in environmental engineering, at 19.0. It is lower — 6.3 — in biological and medical sciences combined, but that still means that for every new Ph.D. who gets a tenure-track academic job, 5.3 will be shut out. In other words, Dr. Larson said, 84 percent of new Ph.D.s in biomedicine "should be pursuing other opportunities" — jobs in industry or elsewhere, for example, that are not meant to lead to a professorship.
Again, amen. A friend of mine spotted this problem years ago and has been making a business advising grad students and post-docs how to transition to "real work".

 David. (firstname.lastname@example.com) http://blog.dshr.org/ LibUX: If library programmers were given access to everything http://libux.co/?p=1018 2016-07-16T13:55:42+00:00

 I've lost the religion that I long held that if library programmers are finally given access to everything the world would be better. I think we're moving into a somewhat darker world where everything is in the cloud, things are locked down, and they're probably pretty good. Tim Spalding

The post If library programmers were given access to everything appeared first on LibUX.
 Michael Schofield http://libux.co District Dispatch: Congress leaves town with funding bills unfinished http://www.districtdispatch.org/?p=17217 2016-07-15T18:09:48+00:00
House Appropriations Bills include support for LSTA and Title IV, but defund IAL

The twelve FY 2017 appropriations bills continued to progress slowly in the House and Senate as Congress leaves today for a lengthy summer recess. This past week, the House Appropriations Committee marked up (approved) its contentious FY2017 Labor, Health and Human Services, Labor, Education, and Related Agencies Appropriations bill (commonly called "LHHS"), approving the bill 31-19 with the vote splitting along party lines. The Senate approved its version of LHHS last month by a decidedly bipartisan vote of 29-1.

Most important to ALA members, the LHHS funding bill in both chambers includes funding for several programs of significant importance to the library community: LSTA, IAL, and Title IV of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). While the House Committee bill provides increased support for two of our priorities, it also eliminates funding for another.

First, the good news. Both the House and Senate funding bills include increased funding for LSTA and its Grants to States program, rejecting the President's disappointing proposal to cut funding for both. LSTA Grants to States would receive $155.9 million in the House bill: a slight increase over FY 2016 ($155.7 million), though $240,000 less than what the Senate requested in May ($156.1 million). The President had requested only $154.8 million. Overall LSTA funding would be boosted in the House bill to $183.0 million. That compares with $183.3 in the Senate, $182.4 in the President's request, and $182.9 ultimately approved by Congress in FY 2016). ALA continues to oppose cuts to LSTA programs.

The House also made slight upward adjustments to three other LSTA programs from FY2016 levels. Native American Library Services grants would receive $4.1 million ($3.8 in Senate and $4.0 in FY2016); the National Leadership: Libraries program received $13.1 million ($13.4 million in Senate and $13.0 in FY 2016); and the Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian program received level funding at $10 million.

New this year is a block grant created with bipartisan support under Title IV of ESSA The "Student Support and Academic Enrichment Grants" (SSAEG will provide supplemental funding to help states and school districts underwrite a "well-rounded" educational experience for students, including STEM and arts programs. Best of all, libraries are expressly authorized to receive SSAEG funds. Although SSAEG was originally authorized in the ESSA at $1.65 billion, the President and Congress appear willing to fund the program at much lower levels. The President requested only $500 million while the Senate approved less at $300 million. The House approved a higher level of $1 billion but still below authorized levels for FY2017.

Next, the decidedly bad news is that House appropriators have proposed to eliminate all funding for school libraries through the Innovative Approaches to Literacy (IAL) program.. According to the House Committee's Report, "The Committee has chosen to focus resources on core formula-based education programs instead of narrowly-focused competitive grants such as this one." IAL received $27 million in FY2016, which was also the funding level requested by the President and supported in the Senate bill. One half of IAL funding is reserved for school libraries with the remaining open to any national non-profit by application.

Likely limiting its chances of passage, however, the House LHHS bill included a number of divisive policy riders addressing issues including highly controversial issues like family planning, NLRB joint employer standards, and "Obamacare". The bill also includes education-related policy riders addressing the "gainful employment" rule aimed at for-profit colleges, forthcoming teacher preparation rules, and the federal definition of a credit hour. All of the amendments introduced at the full Committee mark up to strike these riders or to restore cuts in education funding failed along party lines.

Congress will return from its recess in September, leaving them only a few weeks to adopt funding measures to keep the government open beyond the October 1 start of the Fiscal Year. That's unlikely, so Congress probably will be forced to enact a "Continuing Resolution," or CR, to fund the Government. Under CR rules the previous year's level of funding is maintained for most programs. Vigorous discussions on the Hill already have begun as to what the length of the CR can and should be. If a CR that extends into the new calendar year is adopted, the new President will be forced to negotiate government-wide spending levels with Congress soon after being sworn in, possibly even before key Cabinet and other budget-related positions are filled.

The post Congress leaves town with funding bills unfinished appeared first on District Dispatch.
 Kevin Maher http://www.districtdispatch.org Open Knowledge Foundation: Progress report: OpenTrials – linking clinical trial data http://blog.core.okfn.org/?p=20169 2016-07-15T16:59:09+00:00
Since last year Open Knowledge has been developing OpenTrials, an open, online database linking the publicly available data and documents on all clinical trials conducted – something that has been talked about for many years but never created. The project is funded by The Laura and John Arnold Foundation and directed by Dr. Ben Goldacre, an internationally known leader on clinical trial transparency. Having an open and freely re-usable database of the world's clinical trial data will increase discoverability, facilitate research, identify inconsistent data, enable audits on the availability and completeness of this information, support advocacy for better data, and drive standards around open data in evidence-based medicine.

The project is currently in its first phase (which runs until March 2017), where the focus is on building and populating the first prototype of the OpenTrials database, as well as raising awareness of the project in the community and getting user involvement and feedback. The progress that has been made so far was presented last month at the Evidence Live conference in Oxford, which brought together leaders across the world of Evidence Based Medicine, including researchers, doctors, and the pharmaceutical industry. This was an excellent opportunity to demonstrate the project and speak to both researchers who want to use the platform as well as people with a general enthusiasm for its impact on medicine.

Around 40 people attended our talk which explained why OpenTrials is an important infrastructure project for medicine, covered some of the technical aspects of the platform, details of what data we've imported so far, and lastly a quick demo.

If you're feeling impatient, here are the slides from the talk, or scroll down for a summary.

Ben Goldacre and Vitor Baptista present OpenTrials at Evidence Live 2016 (photo by benmeg / CC BY)

What we've imported into the OpenTrials database so far

331,999 deduplicated trials, collected from nine clinical trial registries:

ANZCTR 11,645

ClinicalTrials.gov 205,422

EU CTR 35,159

GSK 4,131

ISRCTN 14,256

Pfizer 1,567

Takeda 1,142

UMIN 20,557

WHO ICTRP 298,688

~22,000 research summaries from the Health Research Authority

~510,000 publications from PubMed (~24,000 linked with trials)

Current functionality

Basic search (by keyword)

Searching for trials with publications

Uploading missing data/documents for a particular trial

Showing trials with discrepancies (e.g. target sample size)

What we're importing next

Systematic Reviews from:

Epistemonikos (26 sources)

SRDR

Clinical Study Report Synopses (e.g. YODA)

Cochrane Schizophrenia data

FDA Drug Approval Packages – OpenTrialsFDA won $80,000 to develop prototype to unlock 'hidden' data in non-searchable PDFs

Feedback and get involved

If you attended the talk and have any questions or feedback, please email us. And generally if you're interested in contributing to OpenTrials, get in touch.

Want to get early access to the data and be a user tester? Sign up and we'll be in touch soon.

 Ben Meghreblian http://blog.okfn.org John Mark Ockerbloom: Mid-20th century newspapers: Minding the copyrights http://everybodyslibraries.com/?p=2682 2016-07-15T16:39:49+00:00
I was pleased to read last week that the National Digital Newspaper Program, which has sponsored the digitization of over 1 million historically significant newspaper pages , has announced that it has expanded its scope to include content published up to 1963, as long as public domain status can be established. I'm excited about this initiative, which will surface content of historic interest that's in many readers' living memory. I've advocated opening access to serials up to 1963 for a long time, and have worked on various efforts to surface information about serial copyright renewals (like this one), to make it easier to find public domain serial content that can be made freely readable online. (In the US, renewal became automatic for copyrights secured after 1963, making it difficult to republish most newspapers after that date. Up till then, though, there's a lot that can be put online.)

Copyright in contributions

Clearing copyright for newspapers after 1922 can be challenging, however. Relatively few newspapers renewed copyrights for entire issues– as I noted 10 years ago, none outside of New York City did before the end of World War II. But newspapers often aggregate lots of content from lots of sources, and determining the copyright status of those various pieces of content is necessary as well, as far as I can tell. While section 201(c) of copyright law normally gives copyright holders of a collective work, such as a magazine or newspaper, the right to republish contributions as part of that work, people digitizing a newspaper that didn't renew its own copyright aren't usually copyright holders for that newspaper. (I'm not a lawyer, though– if any legal experts want to argue that digitizing libraries get similar republication rights as the newspaper copyright holders, feel free to comment.)

Text contributions

As I mentioned in my last post, we at Penn are currently going through the Catalog of Copyright Entries to survey which periodicals have contributions with copyright renewals, and when those renewals started. (My previous post discussed this in the context of journals, but the survey covers newspapers as well.) Most of the contributions in the section we're surveying are text, and we've now comprehensively surveyed up to 1932. In the process, we've found a number of newspapers that had copyright-renewed text contributions, even when they did not have copyright-renewed issues. The renewed contributions are most commonly serialized fiction (which was more commonly run in newspapers decades ago than it is now). Occasionally we'll see a special nonfiction feature by a well-known author renewed. I have not yet seen any contribution renewals for straight news stories, though, and most newspapers published in the 1920s and early 1930s have not made any appearance in our renewal survey to date. I'll post an update if I see this pattern changing; but right now, if digitizers are uncertain about the status of a particular story or feature article in a newspaper, searching for its title and author in the Catalog of Copyright Entries should suffice to clear it.

Photographs and advertisements

Newspapers contain more than text, though. They also include photos, as well as other graphical elements, which often appear in advertisements. It turns out, however, that the renewal rate for images is very low, and the renewal rate for "commercial prints", which include advertisements, is even lower. There isn't yet a searchable text file or database for these types of copyright renewals (though I'm hoping one can online before long, with help from Distributed Proofreaders), and in any case, images typically don't have unambiguous titles one can use for searching. However, most news photographs were published just after they were taken, and therefore they have a known copyright year and specific years in which a renewal, if any, should have been filed. It's possible to go through the complete artwork and commercial prints of any given year, get an overview of all the renewed photos and ads that exist, and look for matches. (It's a little cumbersome, but doable, with page images of the Catalog of Copyright Entries; it will be easier once there are searchable, classified transcriptions of these pages.)

Fair use arguments may also be relevant. Even in the rare case where an advertisement was copyright-renewed, or includes copyright-renewed elements (like a copyrighted character), an ad in the context of an old newspaper largely serves an informative purpose, and presenting it there online doesn't typically take away from the market for that advertisement. As far as I can tell, what market exists for ads mostly involves relicensing them for new purposes such as nostalgia merchandise. For that matter, most licensed reuses of photographs I'm aware of involve the use of high-resolution original prints and negatives, not the lower-quality copies that appear on newsprint (and that could be made even lower-grade for purposes of free display in a noncommercial research collection, if necessary). I don't know if NDNP is planning to accommodate fair use arguments along with public domain documentation, but they're worth considering.

Syndicated and reprinted content: A thornier problem

Many newspapers contain not only original content, but also content that originated elsewhere. This type of content comes in many forms: wire-service stories and photos, ads, and syndicated cartoons and columns. I don't yet see much cause for concern about wire news stories; typically they originate in a specific newspaper, and would normally need to be renewed with reference to that newspaper. And at least as far as 1932, I haven't yet seen any straight news stories renewed. Likewise, I suspect wire photos and national ads can be cleared much like single-newspaper photos and ads can be.

But I think syndicated content may be more of a sticky issue. Syndicated comics and features grew increasingly popular in newspapers in the 20th century, and there's still a market for some content that goes back a long way. For instance, the first contribution renewal for the Elizabethan Star, dated September 8, 1930, is the very first Blondie comic strip. That strip soon became wildly popular, published by thousands of newspapers across the country. It still enjoys a robust market, with its official website noting it runs in over 2000 newspapers today. Moreover, its syndicator, King Features, also published weekly periodicals of its own, with issues as far back as 1933 renewed. (As far as I can tell, it published these for copyright purposes, as very few libraries have them, but according to WorldCat an issue "binds together one copy of each comic, puzzle, or column distributed by the syndicate in a given week". Renew that, and you renew everything in it.) King Features remains one of the largest syndicators in the world. Most major newspapers, then, include at least some copyrighted (and possibly still marketable) material at least as far back as the early 1930s.

Selective presentation of serial content

The most problematic content of these old newspapers from a copyright point of view, though, is probably the least interesting content from a researcher's point of view. Most people who want to look at a particular locale's newspaper want to see the local content: the news its journalists reported, the editorials it ran, the ads local businesses and readers bought. The material that came from elsewhere, and ran identically in hundreds of other newspapers, is of less research interest. Why not omit that, then, while still showing all the local content?

This should be feasible given current law and technology. We know from the Google and Hathitrust cases that fair use allows completely copyrighted volumes to be digitized and used for certain purposes like search, as long as users aren't generally shown the full text. And while projects like HathiTrust and Chronicling America now typically show all the pages they scan, commonly used digitized newspaper software can either highlight or blank out not only specific pages but even the specific sections of a page in which a particular article or image appears.

This gives us a path forward for providing access to newspapers up to 1963 (or whatever date the paper started being renewed in its entirety). Specifically, a library digitization project can digitize and index all the pages, but then only expose the portions of the issues it's comfortable showing given its copyright knowledge. It can summarize the parts it's omitting, so that other libraries (or other trusted collaborators) can research the parts it wasn't able to clear on its own. Sections could then be opened up as researchers across the Internet found evidence to clear up their status. Taken as a whole, it's a big job, but projects like the Copyright Review Management System show how distributed copyright clearance can be feasibly done at scale.

Moreover, if we can establish a workable clearance and selective display process for US newspapers, it will probably also work for most other serials published in the US. Most of them, whether magazines, scholarly journals, conference proceedings, newsletters, or trade publications, are no more complicated in their sources and structures than newspapers are, and they're often much simpler. So I look forward to seeing how this expansion in scope up to 1963 works out for the National Digital Newspaper Program. And I hope we can use their example and experience to open access to a wider variety of serials as well.

   John Mark Ockerbloom https://everybodyslibraries.com