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Happy Public Domain Day!
This is my first post of 2008 and I wanted to wish everyone a happy public domain day! Yes that's right, besides being a day of football, resolutions, hangovers, Korean Duk-Gook (tastes just as good with veggie broth!), it's the day when the works of authors who died in 1957 (for life +50 copyright countries) or those that died in 1937 (in the life+70 countries) -- see this article for a list of countries and their copyright lengths -- go into the public domain for our collective ownership and use.
To ring in the day, John Mark Ockerbloom, Everybody's Librarian, has donated the copyrights of his 1993 Web sites to the public domain in honor of the 14 year initial term of copyright specified in the Statute of Anne and the US's first copyright law. And Wallace McLean over at CopyrightWatch.ca has a nice list of authors whose works are rolling into the public domain.
[Thanks BoingBoing!]
Continue readingBookmobile day 8&9: Resemblance
Day 8&9: We left Red Bluff yesterday and we are now in Arcata gearing up for tomorrow's stop at the Humboldt County Library in Eureka, CA.
Our time in Red Bluff reminded us the resemblance between our physical and our knowledge landscape. Red Bluff is a town of 10,000+ people but houses and businesses are so spread out that everyone drives their car (actually it was mostly trucks and SUVs which probably accounts at least in part for the poor air quality) which creates a feeling of disconnect from the community. We didn't see any active public places (parks, squares etc) where community members were getting together and sharing their space in common.We are witnessing the shrinking of public spaces where culture and community emerge. This is mirrored in the erosion of the public domain. As knowledge/information has become more and more hyper-commodified, the idea of public ownership of culture drifts into the fog of history. This bookmobile has been a great opportunity to remind ourselves and those we talk to about the importance of the public domain in the creation of culture and community.
In reaching the crest of our journey, we will have a busy few days coming up including being part of Oysters and Ale festival, a WiFi fundraiser for Humboldt County Library at the Eureka Marina on Friday. We've been ready for all kinds of technical difficulties and have backup plans for all contingencies *except* for our wheels. And wouldn't you know it, we've run into a blocked radiator in the bookmobile. No way around it but to get it in the shop for repair now! So far the bookmobile has been good to us so we are very hopeful. We will keep you posted.
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Estimates and observations about govdocs in Google Books
Julia Tryon, Government Documents Librarian of the Phillips Memorial Library at Providence College posted some interesting information about the intersection of Federal Publications and Google Books to govdoc-l this week. She is quoted here with permisssion:
My director has asked me to discover what I may about the amount of documents available in Google's digital projects. I've been looking at Google, partners' websites, articles, blogs, etc. I have found a lot of chit-chat but very little substantive information. Maybe I am just not looking for it the right way or in the right places.
It seems that there is a blackout on reporting statistics for these projects. Google and most of the partners give no statistical data at all. Stanford did have a page with statistics that was buried on their project's website but the information had not been updated since 2004.
To figure out the statistics on my own, I have tried searching Google Books, Stanford, and University of Michigan; but there is no way to limit a search to government documents. On Google I was able to search by publisher and, using various abbreviations for GPO that are used in
the publisher field, I came up with 187,522 (GPO-141,600; Gov't-2322; Government Printing Office-43,600). The university catalogs did not allow me to search by publisher.
When looking at the search results in Google for publisher field has GPO, I found 141,600 items, only 82,487 of which were available in the full view. And although it is nice to think that we have the full text for 82,487 documents, not all of them can be used. I randomly picked a title to see how it looked and chose the Statistical Abstract for 1954. The pages were clear enough to read easily but on every even numbered page part of the right hand column was chopped off.
Have you done your own study/poking around/etc with Google Books and Federal Documents? Share your findings with us!
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Freedom and Information: Assessing Publicly Available Data Regarding U.S. Transportation Infrastructure Security
Assessing Publicly Available Data From RAND website:
How much data regarding U.S. anti- and counterterrorism systems, countermeasures, and defenses is publicly available and how easily could it be found by individuals seeking to harm U.S. domestic interests? The authors developed a framework to guide assessments of the availability of such information for planning attacks on the U.S. air, rail, and sea transportation infrastructure, and applied the framework in an information-gathering exercise that used several attack scenarios. Overall, the framework was useful for assessing what kind of information would be easy or hard for potential attackers to find. For each of the attack scenarios, a team of “attackers†was unable to locate some of the information that a terrorist planner would need to gauge the likely success of a potential attack. The authors recommend that procedures for securing sensitive information be evaluated regularly and that information that can be obtained from easily accessible, off-site public information sources be included in vulnerability assessments.Continue reading
James’ link dump of the day!
I have a bunch of tabs open of boingboing posts that I want to share, but it's been such a hectic day (I invited Rick Falkvinge of the Swedish Pirate party to give a talk today at my library!) so I think I'll just list them and let you all sort them out.
- Peer to Patent: keeping the Patent Office honest with community review
- Amazon will distribute the US National Archive on DVD
- NY Public Library giving away free public domain books-on-demand
- Pirate Party founder at Stanford (I'll post the video soon. W00t!)
- Bruce Schneier interviews TSA head Kip Hawley
- Data mining prompted fight over NSA domestic spying program (here's a login-free link to the NYT article)
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