National Archives Reticent About Broadening Mission
National Archives Reticent About Broadening Mission, by Dan Friedman, CongressDaily, Jun. 2, 2008. [subscription required]. Update: NOW AVAILABLE from NextGov WITHOUT SUBSCRIPTION: http://www.nextgov.com/nextgov/ng_20080602_6498.php The National Archives (NARA) is being put in an awkward position. Viewed as nonpartisan and professional, it is being tasked by Congress with new enforcement duties. Late last year, a new law passed that set up an "Office of Government Information Services" within the NARA to help set federal Freedom of Information Act policy. Another bill that is expected to pass the House would give NARA a new role requiring NARA to monitor White House e-mail archiving. This would change NARA's role from that of passively receiving records to actively monitoring and enforcing rules. National Archives Inspector General Paul Brachfeld said that "NARA traditionally has not viewed itself as an enforcement entity but rather one that focuses upon collegiality and relationships." From the article:
Chafing at Bush administration secrecy, congressional Democrats are handing the National Archives and Records Administration new jobs promoting government transparency. Officials at the records agency appear to be balking at taking on unfunded mandates beyond their traditional role. If Congress wants the Archives to become open-government cops, archivists may prefer to remain librarians. "They have always had a narrow view of their mandate and have never been particularly inclined to seek any expansion," said Patrice McDermott of OpentheGovernment.org, a coalition of groups urging government transparency. "They see their mission as providing access to historical records. They see [overseeing] contemporaneous records as a shift."Continue reading
Happy 100th birthday First Sale Doctrine!!
100 years ago today (June 1, 1908) the [w:First-sale doctrine] was established in the US Supreme Court case Bobbs-Merrill v. Straus, and became codified into the Copyright Act of 1976 (17 U.S.C. § 109). First sale doctrine -- which allows the purchaser of a copyrighted work to sell or give away that work without permission once it has been obtained -- is the pillar and copyright protection upon which libraries have been able to build their collections and services to their communities. Ironically, today libraries find themselves in an untenable situation. The First Sale Doctrine continues to move toward the margins as more and more information goes digital. Much of this content is not protected by first sale because libraries license access from vendors. Perhaps that's why Ross Dawson, on his extinction timeline, has libraries going extinct in 2019, a year before copyright itself. Or maybe Slate's slideshow "borrowed time" is closer to being right when they describe the future of libraries as a "mutating role as urban hangout, meeting place, and arbiter of information, the public library seems far from spent." I'm hopeful about the future of libraries, but think that librarians need to be more conscious and proactive about digital content, to negotiate licenses with vendors that allow for perpetual access -- if not actually being able to host digital content on their own servers -- as well as libraries being able to share their content with other libraries (aka interlibrary loan) and "shelve" or repurpose their digital content in ways that serve their local communities. Only if digital content has the same first sale protection as paper content will libraries continue to serve their traditional (and critical) role as cultural repositories. [Thanks for the heads-up Everybody's Libraries!] Continue reading
Lunchtime Listen: Lessig on Change-Congress
Here is a super way to spend your next free lunch hour: watch and listen to Lawrence Lessig give one of his fantastic presentations:
- Changing Congress: Lessons Learned by a Copyright Activist, Lawrence Lessig. 4/2/2008, UCSB. [streaming video, about 1 hour].
He talks about history, politics, technology, copyright, and much more.
When Lessig found that he could not get reasonable changes to copyright law (even the late, eminent economist Milton Friedman said that the importance of stopping excessive copyright extensions was a "no brainer"), he realized there were bigger problems to confront. If Congress can't make the right decision when the problems are easy, how will it make the right decisions when the problems are difficult?
Lessig's new organization is Change-Congress. It is attempting to build tools that will help citizens ("in our pajamas," as Lessig says) create basic reforms in how our government functions. The Change-Congress home page features an interactive map created with data from the Federal Elections Commission and GovTrack.us and Google maps. The goal of the organization is to create tools that both candidates and citizens can use to pledge their support for basic changes to reduce the distorting influence of money in Washington.
Lessig is a professor at Stanford Law School, the founder of Creative Commons and the author of three very important books: Code, The Future of Ideas, and Free culture : how big media uses technology and the law to lock down culture and control creativity.
There are more videos from Change-Congress at: change-congress.blip.tv
If this is the first time you've seen one of Lessig's presentations, you are in for a treat. A colleague of mine called it "mesmerizing." There is a bit more about Lessig's presentation style in an analysis of it by Chris Tunnell on Lessig's blog: A physicist on the "Lessig style", by Chris Tunnell, April 28, 2008.
Continue readingThe Open Source Center (formerly FBIS) is closed to you
Open Source Center Keeps Public in the Dark by Steven Aftergood, Secrecy News, May 19, 2008. Steven Aftergood reports that Federal Government website, Open Source Center, the successor to the Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) 'has imposed some rather ferocious controls on its unclassified products in order to shield them from public access. Even when its publications are not copyrighted, they are to be “treated as copyrighted” and in any case they “must not be disseminated to the public.”' Continue reading
Help get CRS reports online
OpenCRS has posted another list of "fugitive" Congressional Research Service reports -- reports that are not yet openly available and online. They ask for your help by requesting them from your members of Congress and then uploading them to the OpenCRS. Check out the list and request one that matches the needs of your own library and upload it today! There is even a facebook group for OpenCRS. Continue reading