Library of Congress

There is an interesting live webcast of the Library of Congress sponsored meeting on the Economics and Organization of Bibliographic Data.

The meeting agenda is located here:

http://www.loc.gov/bibliographic-future/meetings/agenda-july9.html.

The link to the webcast is here:

http://www.loc.gov/today/cyberlc/live.html

This is a public fact finding meeting of the LC Sponsored Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control.

I thought some of you might be interested in this article that appeared yesterday in the Washington Post by our own Fran Berman and Jim Barksdale of Netscape fame.

Here is the link http://tinyurl.com/356ycy

In the last two-three years a huge amount has been written about tagging and folksonomies, much of it with the bright-eyed enthusiasm of those who haven't seen the present state of affairs in a broader light; but where is the fight-back from the formal classificationists, who hither-to ruled unchallenged in this area? Have such giants as the Library of Congress and the Dewey Decimal System fallen at the first hurdle?

Tagging is the assigning of arbitrary tags to content by amateurs (typically content creators, editors or readers) and folksonomies are systems built from the ground up using these tags. Tags have no formal meanings and there are no constraints placed upon them. Folksonomies are central to systems such as flickr, del.icio.us and the whole web 2.0 approach.

Formal classifications, such as the the Library of Congress and the Dewey Decimal System are rigorous systems in which trained individuals assign subject categories to content. Each category has a description and is long lived—categories don't change even when the words used to describe the topic in popular culture change. Thus the LoC still calls cars automobiles, because that's what they were called when they first entered the system.

In this 23 minute recording, we'll hear from Bill LeFurgy as he shares some thoughts on the Library of Congress and their National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP). 

We'll hear a bit about the digtial collections that the Library of Congress and its partners have assembled -- including polling data, coverage of elections and hurrican katrina on the web, and materials from 9/11 (see my interview with Roy Rosenzweig for more on that).  We'll also hit on data provenance, demand-side selection/archival, the concept of data provenance, and the role for extrensic motivation for contributing to archival repositories.  The Forbes article mentioned in this recording is available here.


This interview is provided courtesy of CNI and was recorded at their 2006 Spring Task Force Meeting.  The Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) is an organization dedicated to supporting the transformative promise of networked information technology for the advancement of scholarly communication and the enrichment of intellectual productivity.  You can learn more about CNI at their web site, http://www.cni.org

In this 27 minute recording, I sit down with Sayeed Choudhury, Associate Director for Library Digital Programs and Hodson Director of the Digital Knowledge Center at the Sheridan Libraries of Johns Hopkins University.  Among other things, we'll talk about robotic scanning of print materials, institutional repositories and digital preservation.


This interview is provided courtesy of CNI and was recorded at their 2005 Fall Task Force Meeting.  The Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) is an organization dedicated to supporting the transformative promise of networked information technology for the advancement of scholarly communication and the enrichment of intellectual productivity.  You can learn more about CNI at their web site, http://www.cni.org

Will activities of Amazoogle prompt ASCAP, BMI and SESAC get into microcontent?
Will there be a need for a performance license?  A mechanical license of parts of book content?  Should the authors/publishers be compensated via some mechanism like those provided in the music business?   Will that extend to other types of content?  Would the statutory rate be different for text content?  Would the Library of Congress set it?  How would that affect the re-use of content?  I guess it could mean that it would be easier to clear rights for content?

If we had that, how might it change how authors are renummerated for their content ... for the "performance of their work" inside these services?  Should they be?  Is a chapter of a book the same as a track on a record?  Is a thirty second clip the same as three paragraphs of a book?  Is a search result snippet a performance of a work?  Is it more like "phone book data" ?

It has been a while since my copyright law and music publishing classes, but these things really pique my interest.  I wish I had more time to explore them.  I also wonder if remixed web services might operate under these conditions one day too.  Fascinating stuff!