Nine “Beta Sprint” Proposals To Be Featured at Digital Public Library of America Meeting
The steering committee for the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) announced today that it has invited the creators of nine project proposals to present their work at the DPLA’s upcoming plenary meeting, scheduled for October 21 in Washington, DC (which LJ will be attending and covering).
The proposals were submitted as part of the DPLA’s “beta sprint,” first announced in May, in which the committee asked for ideas to be submitted “that demonstrate how the DPLA might index and provide access to a wide range of broadly distributed content.”
The projects were selected out of 38 final submissions, and their authors include many familiar institutions from the library world—from the Library of Congress to HathiTrust to the Harvard Library Lab.
Here’s a list of the six main projects to be presented and their descriptions from the DPLA announcement:
Digital Collaboration for America’s National Collections: The Digital Collaboration demonstrates the ability of three disparate, major national institutions to work together through one unified search tool. Submitted by the National Archives, the Library of Congress, and the Smithsonian Institution.
DLF/DCC: DPLA Beta Sprint: The DLF/DCC Beta Sprint project serves as a search tool for the DCC’s collection of cultural and scientific heritage resources, presenting unique ways of organizing and presenting materials and metadata. Submitted by CLIR: Digital Library Federation and the University of Illinois – Urbana Champaign, School of Information, Science and Center for Informatics Research in Science and Scholarship.
extraMUROS: extraMUROS proposes to shape the Digital Public Library of America into a multimedia-library-without-walls through an open source, HTML5 platform. Submitted by metaLAB (at) Harvard, the Harvard Library Lab, and Media And Place (MAP) Productions.
Government Publications: Enhanced Access and Discovery through Open Linked Data and Crowdsourcing: The Committee on Institutional Cooperation (or CIC) has been leading a coordinated effort to digitize government documents. The project continues with an approximate target of digitizing a total of 1+ million print documents. Submitted by the University of Minnesota, the Committee on Institutional Cooperation, and HathiTrust.
Metadata Interoperability Services: Metadata Interoperability Services (MINT) is a web-based platform that enables the aggregation of rich and diverse cultural heritage content and metadata. Submitted by MINT at the National Technical University of Athens.
ShelfLife and LibraryCloud: ShelfLife is intended to provide users with a rich environment for exploring the combined content of the DPLA, discovering new works, and engaging more deeply with them via social interactions. LibraryCloud is the backend metadata server that supports ShelfLife. Submitted by the Harvard Library Innovation Lab and multiple partners. [See previous LJ coverage of these two projects here.]
The creators of three more projects (Bookworm from the Cultural Observatory at Harvard, the DPLA Collection Achievements & Profiles System from North Carolina State University Libraries, and WikiCite) will also be featured at the meeting, during an additional “lightning round” of presentations.
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Library Copyright Alliance Releases Statement on Authors Guild-HathiTrust Lawsuit
The Library Copyright Alliance, which includes the American Library Association, the Association of Research Libraries, and the Association of College & Research Libraries, released a statement [PDF] today on the copyright infringement lawsuit filed by the Authors Guild and others against the HathiTrust digital repository and five universities.
Here is the statement, in full:
We are deeply disappointed by the Authors Guild’s decision to file a lawsuit, Authors Guild, Inc. et al. v. HathiTrust et al., against HathiTrust and its research library partners. The case has no merit, and completely disregards the rights of libraries and their users under the law, especially fair use. The HathiTrust and its partners have assembled an unprecedented digital resource that will ensure secure, long-term preservation of nearly 10 million volumes held in member library collections. The majority of these works are not available commercially and will disappear completely if not for library stewardship. We applaud the modest steps HathiTrust and its partners have taken to foster those “orphan” works whose owners have abandoned them to library care. The HathiTrust adds significant value to library collections in support of teaching, research, and learning, while respecting the law. It is deplorable that eight authors and three special interest groups are trying to dismantle this invaluable resource out of a misplaced fear of the digital future. We are confident the court will not look kindly on this shortsighted and ill-conceived lawsuit. Authors Guild President Scott Turow wrote earlier this year, “I count myself as one of millions of Americans whose life simply would not be the same without the libraries that supported my learning.” It is a shame that the Authors Guild fails to understand what Mr. Turow expressed so well, the vital role that libraries play in our cultural ecosystem.
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Is Babar an Orphan?
The University of Michigan (UM) Library is currently researching whether digitized works it has stored in the HathiTrust digital repository are orphans—works that are in-copyright but for which rights holders cannot be found. (Several other university libraries, including those of the University of California, Duke, Emory, Cornell, and Johns Hopkins, joined the orphan works project recently.)
UM has posted an online list of the works it believes to be orphans so far. After 90 days, if no rights holders come forward, those works will be made fully accessible online to UM students and faculty. Many of the works on the list are obscure—a 1949 typographer’s desk manual, anyone?—but a few are quite familiar. Case in point: a 1933 English translation of French author Jean de Brunhoff’s The Story of Babar, the Little Elephant (1931).
Now, the fictional character of Babar—an elephant whose mother is tragically shot by a hunter—is an orphan. But the idea that the popular children’s book was an orphan as well struck me as odd. After all, de Brunhoff’s heir, his son Laurent, is very much alive—indeed, he authored the latest Babar book, Babar’s Celesteville Games, published only last month.
I contacted UM’s lead copyright officer, Melissa Levine, to ask why Babar was on the list. She said it was because researchers could find no current information for its 1933 publisher, H. Smith and R. Haas. (The book’s current U.S. publisher is Random House.) However, in light of the questions its inclusion has raised, Levine said the book would be pulled from the list for further research.
Whether The Story of Babar gets taken in at the orphanage or not remains to be seen, but the system that UM came up with—publicizing lists of suspected orphan works so rights holders can weigh in—appears to have another useful purpose: it effectively crowdsources the research beyond the rights holders themselves.
Indeed, any informed people with Internet connections can assist the project by contacting UM with relevant rights information. Who better to help than librarians?
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