Last week we wrote about how Norway had come up with a way to provide online access to all books in Norwegian, including the most recent ones, available to anyone in the country. Here, by contrast, is how not to do it, courtesy of publishers in the UK:
The use of Web blocks -- usually "for the children" -- is becoming depressingly common these days. So much so, that many people have probably come to accept them as a fact of online life. After all, the logic presumably goes, we can't do much about it, and anyway surely it's a good thing to try to filter out the bad stuff? Techdirt readers, of course, know otherwise, but for anyone who still thinks that well-intentioned blocking of "unsuitable" material is unproblematic, the following cautionary tale from the British blogger W.H. Forsyth may prove instructive:
One of the great tasks facing humanity today is digitizing the world's books and liberating the huge stores of knowledge they contain. The technology is there – scanners are now relatively fast and cheap – but the legal framework is struggling to keep up. That can be seen in the continuing uncertainty hovering over Google's massive book scanning project. It can also be observed in some recent digitization projects like Cambridge University's Digital Library:
There's considerable excitement about an announcement from the British Library and Google detailing a wonderful gift to the world:The British Library and Google today announced a partnership to digitise 250,000 out-of-copyright books from the Library’s collections. Opening up access to one of the greatest collections of books in the world, this demonstrates the Library’s commitment, as stated in its 2020 Vision, to increase access to anyone who wants to do research.
Selected by the British Library and digitised by Google, both organisations will work in partnership over the coming years to deliver this content free through Google Books (http://books.google.co.uk) and the British Library’s website (www.bl.uk). Google will cover all digitisation costs.
Isn't that just swell? Vast quantities of fascinating books in the public domain are being made "available to all", as the press release trumpets:This project will digitise a huge range of printed books, pamphlets and periodicals dated 1700 to 1870, the period that saw the French and Industrial Revolutions, The Battle of Trafalgar and the Crimean War, the invention of rail travel and of the telegraph, the beginning of UK income tax, and the end of slavery. It will include material in a variety of major European languages, and will focus on books that are not yet freely available in digital form online.
Freely available, too... But, er, exactly *how* freely available?Once digitised, these unique items will be available for full text search, download and reading through Google Books, as well as being searchable through the Library’s website and stored in perpetuity within the Library’s digital archive.
Fab, and....?Researchers, students and other users of the Library will be able to view historical items from anywhere in the world as well as copy, share and manipulate text for non-commercial purposes.
But hang on: these are materials that are in the public domain; public domain means that anyone can do anything with them - including commercial applications. So this condition of "non-commercial purposes" means one thing, and one thing only: although the texts themselves are public domain, the digitised texts are not (otherwise it would be impossible to impose the non-commercial clause).
In other words, far from helping to make knowledge freely accessible to all and sundry, the British Library is actually enclosing the knowledge commons that rightfully belongs to humankind as a whole, by claiming a new copyright term for the digitised versions. Call me ungrateful, but that's a gift I can do without.
Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca.
I thought I had plumbed the depths of the UK newspaper industry's stupidity when it came to digital. The idea that putting up paywalls in any way strengthens the readership, reputation and brand of a publication was so far off the mark that I thought it was not possible to go beyond it in sheer wrong-headedness.
I was wrong:The UK government is abandoning plans that would have compelled publishers of content behind “paywalls” to make that content available for free through Britain’s main libraries.
...
“The government is committed to delivering regulations that cover non-print content and therefore propose to develop the draft regulations to include only off-line content, and on-line content that can be obtained through a harvesting process.”
The fact that the government was bamboozled into believing that it was impossible to "harvest" online content behind paywalls shows how little it understands about technology: it would be trivial to allow external access through a VPN to the editing/versioning systems that newspaper journalists, subs and editors have access to internally. It would probably cost nothing - as in zero. The idea that it would require "£100K per annum per publisher" as some were suggesting, is absurd.
It's also disappointing to see the Guardian Media Group making idiotic statements like this:“A random patch work of snap shots will “plug the digital black hole” which the British Library (BL) states threatens the nation’s digital heritage ... it poses a real threat to our ability to safeguard our commercial interests. The threat arises from the BL itself.
If they really think "snapshots" are enough, they, too, have not understand the deep changes being wrought by the shift to digital, despite their relative success there compared to other even more benighted publishers. The whole point is that for the first time in history, we have the possibility of capturing everything, and finding unguessed-at connections between them at a later date. This is unique, invaluable data about not just newspapers but the world they purport to mirror that cannot ever be obtained from "snapshots."
This comment also confirms once more that copyright is a canker, eating away even at the heart of one of the few "serious" newspapers with a vaguely liberal attitude to re-use. The fact that the Guardian Media Group thinks that its "commercial interests" somehow outweigh the rights of posterity is a terrible comment on the state of media thinking in this country.
Bear in mind, that this is stuff that theoretically is supposed to enter the public domain after some (long) but finite period: so does that mean all the newspapers will be progressively releasing their files down the years? I think not - it will doubtless be "too expensive" again, and that presupposes that the newspapers are even still around, which I strongly doubt based on their current reading of and response to trends.
And this is the real tragedy. By refusing to allow Legal Deposit Libraries to do their job - to capture culture as it is made, and store it safely for the future - they are inevitably consigning themselves and their production to oblivion at some point, when they close their doors, or the servers crash and the backup copies can't be found or don't work. They are throwing away not just our past, but theirs too.
Update: seems the UK government hasn't swallowed the UK publishing industry's ridiculous claims. Let's hope it perseveres here.
Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca.
Yesterday, Computerworld UK carried an interesting report headed “British Library explores research technologies of the future”. Here's what it hopes to achieve:
On Open Enterprise blog.
In 2007 the British Library (BL) and the JISC funded The Google Generation Information Behaviour of the Researcher of the Future research (CIBER, 2008), which focused on how researchers of the future, ‘digital natives’ born after 1993, are likely to access and interact with digital resources in five to ten years’ time. The research reported overall that the information literacy of young people has not improved with wider access to technology.
To complement the findings of the Google Generation research, the BL and the JISC commissioned this three‐year research study Researchers of Tomorrow focusing on the information‐seeking and research behaviour of doctoral students born between 1982 – 1994, dubbed ‘Generation Y’.
There's lots of interesting stuff in the first report, but what really caught my attention was the following:The principles behind open access publishing and self‐archiving speak to the students’ desire for an all‐embracing, seamlessly accessible research information network in which restrictions on access do not constrain them. Similarly, many of the students favour open source technology applications (e.g. Linux, Mozilla) to support the way they want to work and organise their research, and are critical of the lack of technical support to open source applications in their own institutions.
However, as the report emphasises, students remain somewhat confused about what open access really is. This suggests fertile ground for a little more explanation by open access practitioners - the benefits of doing so could be considerable.
It's also rather ironic that one of those behind the report should be the British Library: as I've noted with sadness before, the BL is one of the leading opponents of openness in the academic world, choosing instead to push DRM and patented-encumbered Microsoft technologies for its holdings. It's probably too much to expect it to read the above sections and to understand that it is going in exactly the wrong direction as far as future researchers - its customers - are concerned...
Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca.
It has been a sad spectacle to see the British Library – without doubt once the greatest library in the world, and hence a powerful force for disseminating knowledge as widely as possible - become more and more enmeshed in locking down research in proprietary formats.
On Open Enterprise blog.
People are getting excited about the news that William Stukeley's Life of Newton is now available online, apple-falling tales inclusive. Just one problem: the super-duper groovy page-turning version only works with Microsoft technology - the same one that infects the British Library's holdings too.
It is really scandalous that world-famous and once-glorious bodies theoretically devoted to the spread of knowledge should be in cahoots with Microsoft to lock away that knowledge in proprietary technologies. Not so much apples falling as the mighty falling...
This is a national disgrace:New legal powers to allow the British Library to archive millions of websites are to be fast-tracked by ministers after the Guardian exposed long delays in introducing the measures.
The culture minister, Margaret Hodge, is pressing for the faster introduction of powers to allow six major libraries to copy every free website based in the UK as part of their efforts to record Britain's cultural, scientific and political history.
The Guardian reported in October that senior executives at the British Library and National Library of Scotland (NLS) were dismayed at the government's failure to implement the powers in the six years since they were established by an act of parliament in 2003.
The libraries warned that they had now lost millions of pages recording events such as the MPs' expenses scandal, the release of the Lockerbie bomber and the Iraq war, and would lose millions more, because they were not legally empowered to "harvest" these sites.
So, 20 years after Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the technology, and well over a decade after the Web became a mass medium, and the British Library *still* isn't archiving every Web site?
History - assuming we have one - will judge us harshly for this extraordinary UK failure to preserve the key decades of the quintessential technology of our age. It's like burning down a local digital version of the Library of Alexandria, all over again.
Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca.
Oh look, the British Library thinks it has passed a milestone:The British Library has added the 500,000th item to its long-term Digital Library System. The milestone item was a digitised copy of a newspaper originally published in 1864 and scanned as part of the Library's 19th Century British Library Newspapers project, which recently made more than 2 million pages of historic newspapers available online at http://newspapers.bl.uk/blcs/
In eight pages of densely-packed text, The Birmingham Daily Post dated Monday 19 December 1864 offers a vivid snapshot of life 145 years ago. Along with accounts of an 82-year-old man who died after falling out of bed and two men before the courts for bigamy, the paper also reports on President Lincoln recommending to the US congress the passing of a constitutional amendment to abolish slavery, and 'a number of the worst "roughs" of the town' who pelted churchgoers with snowballs after several inches of snow had fallen.
The digitised newspaper joins hundreds of thousands of other items including e-journals, digital sound recordings, born-digital material received through voluntary deposit arrangements with publishers andmore than 65,000 19th century digitised books. The Digital Library System within which these items are now stored has been developed by the British Library to enable long term storage of the digital material that forms an increasing proportion of the nation's intellectual output.
Fab stuff...except: To access the subscription-based articles in this database, you will need to first register as a user and then purchase either
* A 24-hour pass that provides you access to 100 articles over that period.
* A 7-day pass that provides you access to 200 articles over that period.
Cost? a 24-hour pass for £6.99 allowing you to view up to 100 articles, or a seven-day pass with 200 article views for £9.99
That is: digitising content that is out of copyright, in the public domain, and then making us pay through the nose - us as in muggins public, which has kept the British Library going for two centuries thanks to our taxes, in case you'd forgotten - for the privilege of viewing it online.
Thanks a bunch, BL, for locking up "an increasing proportion of the nation's intellectual output" behind a paywall, where few will ever see it: that's what spreading knowledge is all about, isn't it? Great work from a quondam great institution, more millstone than milestone...
Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca.
I knew the British Library was losing its way, but this is ridiculous:The British Library Business & IP Centre at St Pancras, London can help you start, run and grow your business.
And how might it do that?Intellectual property can help you protect your ideas and make money from them.
Our resources and workshops will guide you through the four types of intellectual property: patents, trade marks, registered designs and copyright.
This once-great institution used to be about opening up the world's knowledge for the benefit and enjoyment of all: today, it's about closing it down so that only those who can afford to pay get to see it.
What an utter disgrace.
Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca.
The largest single online collection of English news media from the 17th and 18th centuries, the Burney Collection, is now available free of charge for the first time to Higher and Further Education institutions and Research Councils across the UK.
The Burney Collection offers unique insights into two centuries of history through access to over 1,270 newsbooks, newspapers, pamphlets and a variety of other news materials published in England, Ireland and Scotland, plus papers from British colonies in Asia and the Americas.
Digitised through a partnership between the National Science Foundation and the British Library then developed and hosted online by Gale/Cengage Learning4, the digital version of the Burney Collection has been purchased in perpetuity by JISC Collections on behalf of the UK academic and research community at a national level, following an open and transparent procurement process.
Well, that's jolly great...but: given that these are *public* collections, and have been digitised with *public* money, is it really too much to ask if hoi polloi like me might be granted a little bit of access to this great stuff?
This kind of naive adulation is beginning to stick in my craw:The British Library is bringing some of the world's rarest books online, with the intent of giving as wide an audience as possible the most accurate experience of reading the real thing.
To that end, it is using a unique piece of software called Turning the Pages, designed to allow readers to look at rare books in a natural way. With Turning the Pages, users can read the books in their original format, almost exactly as they were intended to be read by their original audience.
Why? Well:
A new version, Turning the Pages 2.0™, runs on Microsoft Vista operating system (and on Windows XP with the .NET 3 framework). It will also run on other operating systems using the Microsoft Silverlight plugin.
So the BL's idea of progress is locking down books - you know, those old-fashioned things without DRM - with patent-encumbered technology. That's "giving as wide an audience as possible the most accurate experience of reading the real thing"? Only in the minds of rather dim librarians who understand nothing about the broader implications of the shiny technology they choose. Me, I call it a betrayal of everything the once-great BL stood for....
I've noted before that there's something rotten at the heart of the British Library, which insists on locking down knowledge in Microsoft's proprietary formats. Now NoOOXML starts to pull all the threads together:
the company Griffin Brown, of which the BRM convenor Alex Brown is the director, sent out a press release 13 March 08 celebrating the 10th anniversary of XML:
Recent moves by Microsoft to standardise its Office products around XML file formats merely confirms that most valuable business data in the future will be stored in XML. … Alex Brown is convenor of the ISO/IEC DIS 29500 Ballot Resolution Process, and has recently been elected to the panel to advise the British Library on how to handle digital submission of journal articles.
What's the betting those digital submissions end up in OOXML?
(Via Boycott Novell.)
This interesting report from the British Libary and JISC says that the "Google generation" - those born after 1993 - aren't so hot when it comes to Googling. But what really caught my eye was the following:Findings from Ofcom surveys reveal that both adults and children (aged 12-15) have very high levels of awareness and understanding of the basic principles of intellectual property. However, young people feel that copyright regimes are unfair and unjust and a big age gap is opening up. The implications for libraries and for the information industry of a collapse of respect for copyright is potentially very serious.
Oh yes, indeedy.
I've written a lot here and elsewhere about Microsoft's faux-open file format OOXML. I've also noted that there is an unhealthily close relationship between the BBC and Microsoft over the former's iPlayer and its chosen file formats. Now it seems that this kind of chummy lock-in is happening elsewhere, at the UK's National Archives and beyond.
The National Archive story is not new, but dates back to July of this year, when I first noted it. Here's what a Microsoftie said:The announcement we just made with the National Archives is trying to address the issue of digital conservation head-on. With billions of documents in the world wrapped up in proprietary document formats (from Microsoft and many many other vendors) we felt it was important to focus on how we can help the body in the UK which has the biggest headache and do what we can to assist them in:
* Migrating documents to the latest Office format (Open XML) via our document conversion tools to ensure they can be accessed by the public in the future
Since then, people have started taking notice, to the extent that there is now an e-petition all us Brits can sign asking that nice Mr Brown to use ODF instead of OOXML for the National Archives (but don't hold your breath.)
However, I've just noticed that the Microsoftie quoted above mentions this little factette:Well, we've actually been working with The British Library and The National Archive for about 18 months now on digital preservation with some other European organisations as members of an EU project called Planets.
And as far as the latter is concerned:
The Planets consortium brings together the unique experience required to research, develop, deliver and productise practical digital preservation solutions. Coordinated by the British Library
The British Library, you may recall, is also in cahoots with Microsoft when it comes to locking up our digital heritage. Some now we have the prospect of the OOXML cancer spreading to other institutions, and large chunks of European culture being locked up in proprietary formats.
This is getting serious. It's obviously time to call in the heavy mob: the Open Source Consortium....
How rich is this?The growing problem of accessing old digital file formats is a "ticking time bomb", the chief executive of the UK National Archives has warned.
Natalie Ceeney said society faced the possibility of "losing years of critical knowledge" because modern PCs could not always open old file formats.
She was speaking at the launch of a partnership with Microsoft to ensure the Archives could read old formats.
Microsoft's UK head Gordon Frazer warned of a looming "digital dark age".
Er, yes, which Microsoft created.Adam Farquhar, head of e-architecture at the British Library, praised Microsoft for its adoption of more open standards.
He said: "Microsoft has taken tremendous strides forward in addressing this problem. There has been a sea change in attitude."
Pity its new-found love of "openness" doesn't extend to embracing the one truly open and independent file format standard, ODF...
It would have been more appropriate had this come out on April 1st:If you agree that Open XML should be approved as an ISO standard please sign this petition, which we will send to the Chairman of the British Standards Institute to demonstrate broad support for this initiative in the UK.
Yours faithfully,
Nick McGrath
Director of Platform Strategy
Microsoft Ltd
This is basically trying to strong-arm the BSI into supporting Microsoft's pseudo-standard by soliciting the public's help through the following statements:
• Ecma Open XML was developed through the collaborative efforts of leading companies such as Apple, Barclays Capital, BP, The British Library, Essilor, Intel, Microsoft, NextPage, Novell, Statoil, Toshiba and the US Library of Congress.
• Ecma Open XML is backward compatible with billions of archived documents held by the private and public sectors.
• Any company can freely implement and develop innovative products using Ecma Open XML
• Ecma Open XML enables interoperability, accommodates multiple languages and cultures, and supports technologies that enable people with disabilities to use computing devices.
So, let's just take a look at some of these, shall we?
First, note that Microsoft Open XML has suddenly morphed into that terribly neutral and official-looking Ecma Open XML: who could possibly have anything against that?• Ecma Open XML was developed through the collaborative efforts of leading companies such as Apple, Barclays Capital, BP, The British Library, Essilor, Intel, Microsoft, NextPage, Novell, Statoil, Toshiba and the US Library of Congress.
It would be interesting to see what proportion of the code these contributed. I'd bet it was something like 99.99% Microsoft's work. This was why it was foolish for institutions like the British Library to lend their name: it was bound to be hijacked in this way.• Ecma Open XML is backward compatible with billions of archived documents held by the private and public sectors.
Sorry, Nick, that's a bug, not a feature: backward compatibility has led to elephantiasis in the documentation - all 6000 pages of it - which makes it effectively unusable for anyone except Microsoft. What a coincidence.• Any company can freely implement and develop innovative products using Ecma Open XML
See the previous comment. And oh yes, we know that Microsoft really loves to share its proprietary standards: just ask the European Commission, or Novell, for example.
• Ecma Open XML enables interoperability, accommodates multiple languages and cultures, and supports technologies that enable people with disabilities to use computing devices.
Er, interoperability with what - itself? There will never be a full independent implementation of Microsoft's file format (see above, again). Or perhaps Nick was thinking of interoperability with other XML-based office standards: unfortunately, the way those 6000 pages define Microsoft's format, true interoperability seems a merely theoretical prospect. And note the cunning last line - "supports technologies that enable people with disabilities to use computing devices" - which implies that this is something special. That was true in the past, but things move on, Nick, and ODF offers it too, now.
Given the fact that the company emphasises how keen it is to respond to users' wishes, what I want to know is why there isn't somewhere where we can petition Microsoft to drop its format entirely, and simply switch to the real open office standard, OpenDocument Format, which more and more governments and companies are supporting.
Now that's something I'd sit up and beg for. (Via The Reg.)
As I feared, the close relationship between the British Library and Microsoft has led the former to start producing online exhibits locked into the latter's proprietary products:Turning the Pages 2.0™ allows you to 'virtually' turn the pages of our most precious books. You can magnify details, read or listen to expert commentary on each page, and store or share your own notes.
Turning the Pages 2.0™ runs with Internet Explorer on Windows Vista or Windows XP SP2 with .NET Framework version 3, on a broadband connection. We have detected that you do not have the necessary software. You may also need to check that your hardware meets the 'Vista Premium Ready' specification.
So instead of opening up access to knowledge, the British Library is now foisting Microsoft's closed source on its visitors. A sad day for a once-great institution. (Via The Reg.)
Posts
All Comments
To the extent possible under law,
glyn moody
has waived all copyright and related or neighbouring rights to
this work.
This work is published from:
United Kingdom.
