Ramblings on Librarianship, Technology, and Academia

5/9/08 02:40 pm - coffee cans, government documents, and technology

Clearing out old tabs, I find this great post by free_govt_info, "New Best. Title. Ever" really exemplifies two points which are so strange about copy-blocked PDFs. This post showcases a government publication for which the PDF was released so that the text could not be copied out or the images extracted. First of all, this copy protection was completely legally unnecessary; the PDF was of a public domain government document, so it was crippled for no reason whatsoever. And more humorously, as you can see if you look at the various ETAs in the post, the electronic limitations of the PDF don't even work! It's very easy for anyone with technical know-how to break the protections on any PDF that's readable by the user, and without violating any provisions of the DMCA, either. As long as you can view it, you can copy and print it -- but you have to know how. So this government document, public domain and owned by the citizenry, was ineffectively and unnecessarily crippled. What's up with that?

Of course, this post is only made better by the fact that the government document in question, now available as an open PDF on the FGI post, is entitled "Hills Bros. Coffee Can Chronology: Field Guide. Awesome.

• Leave a comment

3/12/08 03:52 pm - mostly links, a few thoughts. Lawrence Lessig, librarything, Major league baseball, Stephen Colbert

Some library, book, archives, records, baseball fandom, and government information musings and links just so I can clear the tabs out of my browser again: ( Cut to save your screen real estate )

• Leave a comment

2/22/08 02:40 pm - many links

The only way to get all these tabs out of my browser is to actually post some links.

This is one I've been saying for awhile "somebody has got to be working on this". Omeka is creating a free platform to help people create curated digital exhibits. The next thing that needs to happen is a hosted service -- not CONTENTdm style hosted service, but a real hosted curation service including preservation planning.

Republicans utterly refuse to compromise on telecom immunity, while the president insists that anyone who doesn't grant immunity to the telecommunications companies want the terrorists to win.

Why students want simplicity and why it fails them when it comes to research is a good introduction to the idea that the skills learned in googling for facts are not actually going to serve a student who needs to learn how to do complex research. Sometimes we need to adapt to user-perceived needs, but sometimes, as academic or school librarians, our job is to teach our patrons. The trick lies in choosing the right balance.

It doesn't do us much good to have an independent, bipartisan Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board if the President can make it vanish simply by not appointing any members.

The MPAA's numbers about the effect of campus music piracy were vastly overblown. Only about 15% of their losses were due to campus downloading, and only about 3% probably came from on campus networks, but the record companies and Congress are bullying the universities to police anyway.

These pictures are very beautiful and very, very sad. "It will rise from ashes" is a blog post and accompanying Flickr set of images from an abandoned Detroit school system book depository. Trees growing from the soil created by burned then rained upon books; it's a kind of renewal, but renewal not from the typical post-apocalyptic vision of a rich industrial culture, but renewal from... well, I don't want to be too horribly melodramatic and say shattered potentials, so I don't know how to finish the sentence.

• 6 comments
• Leave a comment

2/8/07 02:43 pm - linkage, mostly government information related

Here's another great one from free_govt_info: "Expect more from ExpectMore.gov". ExpectMore.gov provides performance reports on man government programs. If you want to be depressed, check out the list of programs marked as "ineffective", which includes programs such as Amtrak:



If it's not obvious, I vote for #1.

Anyway, the search engine is non-existent, but the transparency (we have a moderately effective "Geothermal Technology" program? An adequate "CDC: Sexually Transmitted Diseases and Tuberculosis" program? Only four DoE programs ranked "effective"? Who knew?) is truly awesome.

If you're not reading free_govt_info, consider it. A few days ago they linked to The American Presidency Project's database of all presdential signing statements. Did you know that George Bush, Sr. felt that "To provide for the minting of commemorativecoins to support the 1996 Atlanta Centennial Olympic Games and theprograms of the United States Olympic Committee, to reauthorize andreform the United States Mint, and for other purposes" impinged on his constitutional authority?

---

In other linkage, from openaccess_rss, a hilarious and apt analogy to the current academic publishing model:



It goes on, getting more painful with every line.

And in incredibly depressing news, judges have been citing Wikipedia in verdicts. Copiously.

• Leave a comment

1/16/07 02:30 pm - library links

A few links from today:

Bad government:

• Free Government Information (free_govt_info) has a fairly depressing story on some of the problems inherent in e-government, specifically how grants.gov disenfranchises small institutions.
  
• A teacher is convicted of four counts of injury to a minor after a spyware-infested computer in her classroom starts a porn hydra, and potentially faces up to 40 years in prison. The school's filter had an expired license, and even though a computer expert testified that the spyware came from a hairstyling site, and the prosecution didn't have the computer checked for spyware, the prosecutor convinced the jury that the teacher was actively searching for porn.
  
• This one's a little older: FCC Releases, Withholds Ownership Documents.
  

Bad responses to bad government:

• On the other side of the Big Brother coin, I don't see how wikileaks can possibly work. It seems to me that it would be filled with fraudulent unverifiable documents almost immediately. It's a nice idea, though. (Also, they have to stop using the word "Wikipedia".)
  

To balance this all out, a good government link from Free Government Information: The Consumer Action Website, a handy resource provided by the feds.

• 6 comments
• Leave a comment