LibraryPundit Word Cloud from Wordle

This is the current LibraryPundit word cloud at Wordle:

Karlsruhe Virtual Catalog KVK

We have added the KVK Karlsruhe Virtual Catalog (Karlsruher Virtueller Katalog) to our library links.

Librarian Steve Vander Ark, RDR Books, Warner Bros., J.K. Rowling and the Harry Potter Lexicon : Can the Online Material be Published as a Book?

Librarian Steve Vander Ark and his Harry Potter Lexicon is in the news, and how.

As written at UrbanWire:

"Steve Vander Ark, 46, a librarian for a K-8 school in Michigan and the resident director for the Caledonia Community Players, and published compiler of an encyclopaedia of Star Trek the Next Generation, is renowned throughout the Harry Potter Fandom online for creating The Harry Potter Lexicon - the first, and only complete online encyclopaedic companion to the Harry Potter books. Started in the year 2000, The Harry Potter Lexicon contains every single fact, feature, character and detail from the books in a systematic catalogue, and was recently awarded the third prestigious Fan Site Award [by Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling on her official site]. Steve is also an active speaker at Harry Potter-related academic symposiums held in America."

Read the rest here at UrbanWire.

RDR Books writes:

"HARRY POTTER LEXICON CASE UPDATE
New York Federal District Court Judge Robert Patterson has scheduled a trial for March 24, 25 and 26 in the matter of Warner Bros. Entertainment and J.K. Rowling v. RDR Books. The judge consolidated a previously scheduled injunction hearing with the trial. The plaintiffs want to block publication of librarian Steve Vander Ark's Harry Potter Lexicon. Here is the RDR Books statement on the case:

In this action, a distinguished and tremendously successful novelist demands the suppression of a reference guide to her works. J.K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter books, asserts that this reference guide infringes both her copyright in the seven Potter novels and her right to publish, at some unidentified point in the future, a reference guide of her own. In support of her position she appears to claim a monopoly on the right to publish literary reference guides, and other non-academic research, relating to her own fiction.

This is a right no court has ever recognized. It has little to recommend it. If accepted, it would dramatically extend the reach of copyright protection, and eliminate an entire genre of literary supplements: third party reference guides to fiction, which for centuries have helped readers better access, understand and enjoy literary works. By extension, it would threaten not just reference guides, but encyclopedias, glossaries, indexes, and other tools that provide useful information about copyrighted works. Ms. Rowling's intellectual property rights simply do not extend so far and, even if they did, she has not shown that the publication of this reference guide poses a sufficient threat of irreparable harm to justify an injunction. Her preliminary injunction motion should be denied.

Read RDR Books' Opposition Brief filed by our attorneys David Hammer, Lizbeth Hasse, Anthony Falzone, Julie Ahrens and Robert Handelsman. Also filed was expert witness testimony on the Harry Potter Lexicon by Professor Janet Sorenson of the English faculty at the University of California at Berkeley. Have a look at this exhibit, a thank you note from Scholastic Publication Potterologist and editor Cheryl Klein to Steve Vander Ark. All available background information on the Harry Potter Lexicon lawsuit is available here.

Media contacts for the Harry Potter Lexicon Case

One of the great intellectual property law cases of our time, a dramatic work with a platinum cast, has been underway for some time now in the trademark and copyright infringement action by Warner Bros. and J.K. Rowling against RDR Books, makers of an allegedly unauthorized Harry Potter Encyclopedia, who we here thus dub the Cyclopians.

Joe Nocera at the New York Times in A Tight Grip Can Choke Creativity wrote on February 9, 2008:

"On Friday, a lawyer named Anthony Falzone filed his side’s first big brief in the case of Warner Bros. Entertainment and J. K. Rowling v. RDR Books. Mr. Falzone is employed by Stanford Law School, where he heads up the Fair Use Project, which was founded several years ago by Lawrence Lessig, perhaps the law school’s best-known professor. Mr. Falzone and the other lawyers at the Fair Use Project are siding with the defendant, RDR Books, a small book publisher based in Muskegon, Mich. As you can see from the titans who have brought the suit, RDR Books needs all the legal firepower it can muster."

The Leaky Cauldron informs us that a trial date has now been set.

The Guardian writes on March 11, 2008:

"On one side: global-celebrity author JK Rowling. On the other: an amateur fan site devoted to the world's favourite boy wizard. At stake: the soul of Harry Potter."

We saw a vision of Hedwig bringing in the last issues of US Reports by mail the other day to deal with a case of mysterious first impression?
WHOO can be sure?



As The Guardian writes, all wizards of the legal powers convene:

"[O]n March 24 when a New York court considers the injunction that Rowling and Warner Brothers have taken out against a small, Michigan-based publisher, RDR Books, to prevent publication of the Harry Potter Lexicon, an A-Z guide to all things Hogwarts. It could also be a landmark case, because what is at stake is not just an author's right to control the publication of secondary works but also the right to publish in book form information that has been previously available on the web."

Keep your dragons at bay!

What does the law of superheros tell us about the rights of mere mortals?

Hat tip to CaryGEE.

Update with some links about the case found online:

From Stanford's Fair Use Project
Nice posting and lots of comments at Crooked Timber.
P2PNet and P2PNet-again
The Online Harry Potter Lexicon of the Challenged Book
The J.K. Rowling Official Site praising the online website
RDR Books
Steve Vander Ark at the UrbanWire
Library Journal where Rowling says the book is a "Harry Potter rip-off"
Beattie's Book Blog

Vista and Silverlight Deal between Microsoft and the Library of Congress

Slashdot via Cory Doctorow and Boing Boing and they via GCN.com with a hat tip to public.resource.org sound the alarm on the new deal between Microsoft and the Library of Congress on Vista and Silverlight.

It definitely looks like a win-win deal on both sides to us. The public wins too.

Open-Access Law Libraries

OK, we were surprised, but the link is courtesy of a hat tip to Instapundit, linking to TaxProf Blog writing on, of all things, open-access law libraries, with his own hat tip to David Lat and Above the Law on Some Cool New Research Tools (A'nd they're free, too!).

German Library Law, Library Science and Academic Publication in German : Bibliotheksrecht, Bibliothekswesen, Wissenschaftliches Publizieren

For those of our readers who speak or read German, Eric Steinhauer is a German librarian
(Dr. jur. Eric W. Steinhauer, Bibliotheksrat an der Bibliothek der Technischen Universität in Ilmenau/Thür : Librarian, Technical University of Ilmenau; Lecturer for Library Law, Bavarian Library School/Bavarian State Library in Munich, Germany )
who has two blogs, Bibliotheksrecht (Library Law) and Skriptorium, and a website Bibliotheksrecht und Bibliothekswesen focusing on library law, library science and academic publication.

Among his own publications is the presentation in English, "Digital library services and the amended copyright act in Germany", 20 November 2007, International Round Table "Digital Libraries and Copyright", Riga, Latvia.

Robert Darnton, Harvard Library Director, Outlines Harvard Arts & Sciences Faculty Adoption of Mandatory Opt-Out Open Access Academic Publication

The biggest academic news of the year is the adoption by the Harvard Faculty of Arts & Sciences of a mandatory "open access" opt-out policy regarding scholarly articles published by that faculty. Via The Chronicle of Higher Education, we are blogported to the Open Access News of Peter Suber as also to Robert Darnton, Director of the Harvard University Library, and his article at the Harvard Crimson, which outlined the new policy prior to the acceptance vote:

"Although this initiative is being submitted to the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, it concerns all the faculties of the University. All of them face the same problems. Harvard Medical School, for example, is working on ways to help its faculty members comply with the recent legislation by Congress mandating that all articles based on research funded by the National Institutes of Health be made openly accessible through PubMed Central, the database maintained by the National Library of Medicine.

The Harvard University Library will set up an Office for Scholarly Communication to make the open-access repository an instrument for access to research across all disciplines in the spirit of the “one-university” environment that the HOLLIS catalog now provides for holdings in all the libraries, more than 80 of them, throughout the University system. The Office for Scholarly Communication will also promote maximum cooperation by the faculty. Many repositories already exist in other universities, but they have failed to get a large proportion of faculty members to submit their articles. The deposit rate at the University of California is 14 percent, and it is much lower in most other places. By mandating copyright retention and by placing those rights in the hands of the institution running the repository, the motion will create the conditions for a high deposit rate.

What further sets Harvard’s proposal apart from the others is its opt-out provision. Whereas other repositories depend on faculty opting in by volunteering to provide digitized copies of their work, the Harvard system would have all faculty members grant a non-exclusive permission to the President and Fellows of Harvard to distribute their articles. The system would be collective but not coercive. Anyone who wanted to retain exclusive rights to her- or himself could do so by obtaining a waiver. Of course, those who cooperate with the system will also retain full rights to the publication of their work. By sharing those rights with Harvard, they sacrifice nothing; and they will have the collective weight of Harvard behind them if they resist a journal’s demand for exclusive rights. We have designed a legal memorandum called an author’s addendum to reinforce them in negotiations with commercial publishers."

Harvard thus becomes "the first university in the United States to mandate open access to its faculty members’ research publications".

This is the beginning of a revolution in academic publishing.

The text of the resolution presented to the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences was:

"On behalf of the Provost’s Committee on Scholarly Publishing, Professor S. Shieber will
move:

The Faculty of Arts and Sciences of Harvard University is committed to disseminating the fruits of its research and scholarship as widely as possible. In keeping with that commitment, the Faculty adopts the following policy: Each Faculty member grants to the President and Fellows of Harvard College permission to make available his or her scholarly articles and to exercise the copyright in those articles. In legal terms, the permission granted by each Faculty member is a nonexclusive, irrevocable, paid-up, worldwide license to exercise any and all rights under copyright relating to each of his or her scholarly articles, in any medium, and to authorize others to do the same, provided that the articles are not sold for a profit. The policy will apply to all scholarly articles written while the person is a member of the Faculty except for any articles completed before the adoption of this policy and any articles for which the Faculty member entered into an incompatible licensing or assignment agreement before the adoption of this policy. The Dean or the Dean’s designate will waive application of the policy for a particular article upon written request by a Faculty member explaining the need.

To assist the University in distributing the articles, each Faculty member will provide an electronic copy of the final version of the article at no charge to the appropriate representative of the Provost’s Office in an appropriate format (such as PDF) specified by the Provost’s Office. The Provost’s Office may make the article available to the public in an open-access repository.

The Office of the Dean will be responsible for interpreting this policy, resolving disputes concerning its interpretation and application, and recommending changes to the Faculty from time to time. The policy will be reviewed after three years and a report presented to the Faculty."

Inside Higher Ed writes inter alia:

"Harvard University’s arts and sciences faculty approved a plan on Tuesday that will post finished academic papers online free, unless scholars specifically decide to opt out of the open-access program. While other institutions have similar repositories for their faculty’s work, Harvard’s is unique for making online publication the default option.

The decision, which only affects the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, won’t necessarily disrupt exclusivity agreements with journals or upend the academic publishing industry, but it could send a signal that a standard bearer in higher education is seriously looking at alternative distribution models for its faculty’s scholarship. Already, various open-access movements are pressing for reforms (from modest to radical) to the current economic model, which depends on journals’ traditional gatekeeping function and their necessarily limited audiences but which has concerned many in the academic community worried about rising costs and the shift to digital media....

“This is a large and very important step for scholars throughout the country. It should be a very powerful message to the academic community that we want and should have more control over how our work is used and disseminated,” said Stuart M. Shieber, the James O. Welch Jr. and Virginia B. Welch Professor of Computer Science, who sponsored the bill before the faculty governance group.

In an op-ed published in The Harvard Crimson on Tuesday, the director of the university library, Robert Darnton, wrote: “In place of a closed, privileged, and costly system, it will help open up the world of learning to everyone who wants to learn ... ideas would flow freely in all directions.”"

We are very gratified at this development in the availability of academic publications, a problem about which we posted previously at some length on LawPundit.

Update: ars technica covers this development, via digg

Social Networks for Law Librarians and Law Libraries featured at LLRX

Social Networks for Law Librarians and Law Libraries, or How We Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love Friending by Meg Kribble and Debbie Ginsberg, published on January 19, 2008 at LLRX.

Internet Library of Law and Court Decisions

ILLCD, the Internet Library of Law and Court Decisions, by Martin Samson, "features extensive summaries of over 530 court decisions shaping the law of the web; providing facts, analysis and pertinent quotes from cases of interest to those who do business on the Internet and in New Media."

Law Librarians as Avatars in Second Life

We ran across this at California Lawyer Magazine, where they have a write-up (right column) about a librarian who is an avatar in Second Life.

Most Famous Library Resident and Super Bowl Winning New York Giants Head Coach Share Same Home Town

What does Tom Coughlin, head coach of the just victorious New York Giants Super Bowl championship football team, have in common with Steven Stanzak, also known as Bobst Boy, the most famous library resident of all time?

Both hail from Waterloo, New York, birthplace of Memorial Day.

CILIP & OCLC Executive Briefing on the Digital Library 17 April 2008

The European Union (EU) Digital Libraries Initiative shows us clearly that digital libraries and digitization are on the march, not just in the United States, and not just at Google.

In the UK, CILIP: the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals, informs us about an upcoming 17 April 2008 Exectuive Briefing on the Digital Library:

"CILIP is joining forces with OCLC, the world's largest library service and research organisation, to present an Executive Briefing on the Digital Library in London on 17 April 2008. It will focus on how digital media is impacting on UK libraries, and the challenges and opportunities this trend presents."

As we wrote previously at LawPundit:

"The bookless digital libraries of the future are already on their way. CNET's Stefanie Olsen wrot in ZDNET News on "The college library of tomorrow" that book digitization has been well under way for some time, but that the major problem in digitizing books is the law:

"Yet the biggest challenge to digitizing libraries are the concerns of publishers and intellectual property rights holders. Copyright laws have changed over time and can be different outside the United States. As a result, many book-digitization projects must entail copious amounts of time researching the rights of works and obtaining permissions."

Here again, sensible legislation concerning this inevitable development is lacking in the US Congress and elsewhere among the world's civilized nations."

Accordingly, anyone interested in digital libraries must also keep one eye on legal developments. LawPundit is a good place to start.

Technorati Tags law, ip, copyrights, copyright, libraries, library, digitization, digital library, digital libraries, CILIP, OCLC, European Union, EU, Digital Libraries Initiative.

A Document Reader Par Excellence : Docstoc Document Sharing, Downloads and Embedding in Blogs and Websites

Docstoc (beta) at docstoc.com, as reported by Frank Gruber, senior product manager of myAOL at AOL, at his blog Somewhat Frank, was launched on October 30, 2007 as a "a user generated community for sharing professional documents" which we think may become popular as people become aware of its potential.

Docstoc permits the sharing of documents of all descriptions (legal, business, financial, technology, educational and creative).

Docstoc's most important feature in our view is the ability it gives to embed documents on blog and website pages by means of shockwave-flash as a "flash include" so that the embedded document functions quasi like its own widget. As a sample of what Docstoc does, we have embedded below three documents from Docstoc.

The first is a "Patent Outline" by Jason Peterson, CEO of GoDigital Media Group & Symbolic Entertainment (use the slider to resize the text):



PATENT OUTLINE - Get more free documents at Docstoc
The second is a popular document, a Web Development Contract Agreement, as uploaded to Docstoc by Jason Nazar, CEO of Docstoc. Embedded documents can be customized by height and width, so that this is only one of many possible formats (we have made this format narrower and shorter than the one above - use the slider to resize the document):

Web Development Contract Agreement - Get more free documents at Docstoc.

As one can try by experimentation with the above document, embedded documents can be searched using the search box at the top of the document, the size of any viewed page can be changed within the quasi-widget format by a slider at the top of the page to a minimal decrease of 25% and a maximum increase of 250%, the pages to be viewed can be specifically selected by the page-selection box (or one can use the integrated slider button or scroll bar), and there is a print option and also a special button allowing the quasi-widget format to be converted to widescreen (full screen) presentation. Any page can be moved up, down, left or sideways with the hand icon enabled and the mouse arrow held down and moved (this only works if the document view has been resized, e.g. if you have made the document larger and want to look e.g. left and right at something). The search function highlights the found word or phrase and moves to that first found occurrence of that word or phrase - and in the case of multiple hits, pressing the magnifying glass button viz. icon takes you from one hit of the word or phrase sought to the next. Try those all out on the third document below, of which we are the authors (at the time of posting this document was not yet available, as it is a tough format to convert, so I hope it shows up soon):



Writing Origins : Pharaohs, Moderns and Dyslexics
Get more free documents at Docstoc

Document-finding menu options are provided at the Docstoc website, e.g. under the menu item "legal" to cover all docs, contracts, employment, family, forms, incorporations, IP, M&As, Real Estate and Wills and Trusts. Each of these is again subdivided into additional menus. IP for example offers a separate menu selection for copyright, international, license, other, patent, sole proprietorship, trade secrets, and trademark . Nevertheless, we found the subdivided menu attribution to be incomplete and we got much better results with the general Docstoc search box, e.g. our search for "Patent" also gave a completely different set of results than "Patents".

IMPORTANT: The documents which are shown upon selection of any menu item correspond to the item marked in the "master menu" selection in the left column of the Docstoc website, where documents as a whole are highlighted for selection either as most viewed, most downloaded, most commented, most recent, or highest rated.

There is also a "mouse over" feature so that documents can be viewed briefly and do not have to be opened.

Free registration at Docstoc enables the user to have a profiled account.

For enthusiasts, there is the Docstoc blog....

Tal Siach at Docstoc sent us the following information about Docstoc:

"Docstoc is a community of users sharing their professional documents, and we have thousands of legal and business documents that can be downloaded for free.

Here are some highlights about docstoc:

1) 55,000+ free legal forms, business documents, excel templates, free real estate forms, sample business plans.
2) Backed by the co-founders/investors of MySpace, Baidu, Mp3.com, and Lowwermybills.com.

3) Launched about three months ago and have 30,000+ registered members and are ranked by Alexa.com in the top 14,000 most visited sites.

4) Selected as one [of] the presenting companies and most promising start ups for the TechCrunch40 conference by www.TechCrunch.com. (Selected out of 700+ applying startups)

5) The premier online community for professional content

For additional information feel free to check out these links:

http://www.docstoc.com/Docs/287305/Short-Form-Press-Kit-for-Docstoc.com-and-Founder-CEO-Jason-Nazar

http://www.docstoc.com/docs/288844/How-to-Promote-Yourself-and-Your-Business-on-Docstoc

Bloggers have also found our embed feature very helpful - you can embed documents into your Blog after uploading them to docstoc. You can read more about it at our post here: http://blog.docstoc.com/embed-documents-on-docstoc-into-your-blog-or-webiste.html

I would also like to take this opportunity to invite you to take part in our community at docstoc.com and share your own documents on our site. Once submitted, you may place a link to your own personal website or service in order to use our platform to drive more traffic to you. Furthermore, your uploaded documents get indexed at the top of search engines like Google and Yahoo, so it provides you key visibility.

You can register here http://www.docstoc.com/login/ and can upload your documents by following this link http://www.docstoc.com/uploads/bulkupload.aspx".

Citation Machine by David Warlick & The Landmark Project

The Son of Citation Machine is a free citation machine (registration required) which produces citations in various styles (MLA, APA, TURABIAN, CHICAGO).

We tried it out on our book Stars Stones and Scholars : The Decipherment of the Megaliths (hardcover, softcover) and here are the results.

MLA: Kaulins, Andis. Stars Stones and Scholars : The Decipherment of the Megaliths. 1st. Victoria, BC, Canada: Trafford, 2003.

APA: Kaulins, A. (2003). Stars stones and scholars : The decipherment of the megaliths. Victoria, BC, Canada: Trafford Publishing.

TURABIAN: Kaulins, Andis. Stars Stones and Scholars : The Decipherment of the Megaliths. Victoria, BC, Canada: Trafford, 2003.

CHICAGO: Kaulins, Andis. Stars Stones and Scholars : The Decipherment of the Megaliths. 1st ed. Victoria, BC, Canada: Trafford, 2003.

Library Architecture : Library Design, Construction, Addition and Renovation

Whether institutions or communities are considering building a new library or adding to or renovating the library that already exists, library architecture and design are of primary importance. As written at the Whole Building Design Guide:

"... Internet access, electronic media, computer technology, and other forms of modern-day advancements have had a profound effect on the function and design of libraries. As a result, library design must take into account all of the issues that may affect its use in the future. Incorporating flexibility and adaptability in the design, planning, and construction of libraries is essential in order for the library to serve the immediate and future needs of its community."

Some of the most interesting library architectural projects that we have seen are designed by Clark Enersen Partners of Lincoln and Kansas City, who have been featured in American Libraries magazine for their Peru State College Library renovation. Take a look at their website under the menu heading Experience/Libraries to see some of their innovative library projects.

Library Journal has a nationwide Directory of Architects for libraries.

The Architecture Studies Library at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas libraries, has an Architecture and Building database compiled by Jeanne Brown, University of Nevada Las Vegas Architecture Studies Library, with a special section on Libraries and ... architecture, design, planning, landscaping and more.

The UC Berkeley Environmental Design Library has Library Design Resources which consist of a guide to the literature on the design of libraries, compiled by Susan Koskinen. The guide covers:

Search Terms to locate books & articles Dictionaries & Encyclopedias Finding Books search terms Indexes for Articles Journals - selected Research Guides Design Human Dimension / Ergonomics Post Occupancy Evaluation Projects / Sites Links

Libraries & Consumers Enjoy a Valuable Resource in Google Book Search

Google Book Search is developing into a very interesting information tool, also for librarians, because it provides a quick means for librarians and consumers to determine whether a book should be acquired or not, as one can quickly check out the general nature of the book layout, the table of contents, and index (if any) - which is important for library-acquired books, etc.

One example of the useful features integrated into Google Book Search is the ability to find one's own authored books in the Google Book Search database and/or to find books in which one's own name has been mentioned together with the ability to include books of choice into one's own personal library, here as an example, MyLibrary.

Google Book Search now shows numerous page selections from books but always leaves out a page or two here and there so that the entire book is not accessible, but it provides enough information for a potential buyer or researcher to determine whether the book is of value for purchase or research.

Take a look at the way Google Book Search presents our book Stars Stones and Scholars. We are very much in favor of this approach because it really is a great way for people to determine what books they should buy and is not much different than leafing through a book at a bookstore or book shop.

But there are some important and useful differences. For example, once one has selected a particular book, one can click the menu item "About this book" at the top of the right-hand column. The resulting page provides general library information about the book, including ISBN number and the general subject category to which a book is assigned, a list of key words and phrases in the book, a few selected pages (in the case of Stars Stones and Scholars, 3 pages with illustrations), a search box for entry of key words to be found, popular passages (it would be interesting to see the algorithm that is used to determine this), links to reviews of the book, references to the book from web pages, references to the book from other books, references to the book from scholarly works, links to related books, and a map of places mentioned in the book, followed by a selection of some of those places together with short excerpts from the book about them.

One problem that can arise in looking at some Google Book Search scans is that the text can be virtually too small to read. Internet Explorer 7 has a magnifying glass icon/button in the bottom right hand corner of the status line at the bottom of the IE browser page whereby the size of the page can be substantially increased, making even the smallest text readable. The Sandy Berger Blog points out this feature is also available in Opera and is a godsend in both Opera and IE for screen-bleary tired eyes. Our browser of choice, Firefox, up-to-now has not had such a feature, but Firefox 3.0b2 (beta 2) does integrate full page zoom, although Firefox 3.0 still needs substantial improvement before we will use it, especially since it knocks out the Google Toolbar, which is a capital error.