If you support Obama (clearly the stronger candidate* when it comes to open access to information), check out the Librarians for Obama group and the my.barackobama.com action page to see how you can get involved in your hometown. There are only about 60 days left until the election.
*Note: the chart needs to be updated since Obama did compromise with his vote on FISA that supported telecom immunity.
Last February, a Senate hearing highlighted the sorry state of the Founding Fathers projects. While no one questioned the extremely high scholarly quality of the published volumes of papers that have been produced to date, the hearing noted the glacial production pace, high cost, and limited access to the finished products (which are expensive and bought by few libraries). The obvious question was whether technology could address the problem, and Congress ordered the Archivist of the US to report on the matter.
NARA’s report, “The Founders Online: Open Access to the Papers of the America’s Founding Era,” was sent to Congress in April, but it has received little notice or discussion. This is unfortunate because it is an important work on an important issue. There is much to admire in the report, but overall it demonstrates a fundamental failure to understand what open access means or how technology can make scholarship more productive. It seems more interested in protecting existing partnerships and editorial practices than in breaking new ground and fostering public access. Let’s hope that Congress recognizes how unsound the recommended approach is and pushes NARA to do more.
Detailed comments follow.
Nolo podcasts features Library Law at http://www.nolocast.com/?p=120
This is an outrage. An up-to-date, massive, clearly organized, extremely useful annotated Constitution compiled by the Congressional Research Service is not available to the public. You can view an old version at Cornell’s Legal Information Institute, showing just how tantalizingly useful the current version must be.
The Congressional Research Service (CRS) is a federal agency in the Library of Congress that provides objective non-partisan research and analysis for members and committees of Congress. Their memos and reports are phenomenal. I call them the "CliffsNotes" to current issues -- only much better. They’re written by CRS attorneys, economists, scientists, political scientists and others. They give a full rundown of an issue in a compact format. Because the reports are authored by federal employees, they are in the public domain. Some memos are confidential – that’s understandable. Members of Congress might ask for a memo analyzing the constitutionality of proposed legislation. After the memo, the bill may be revised, and a Congressperson may not want the early draft made public.
To get nonconfidential memos and reports, however, you must either get it directly from a member of Congress (apparently considered a “perk” for the members to be able to dole them out), purchase it from a private source, or get lucky and find a copy that someone posted online e.g. via opencrs.com. Unless you get it directly, you may end up with an older version; this is frustrating.
But more frustrating still is the outdated Constitution Annotated, officially known as The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation. It would be one thing if money to revise it has dried up – but in fact, it is under a comprehensive source, constantly revised at the CRS internal website. The Constitution Annotated goes through the Constitution, article by article and amendment by amendment, discussing each article and amendment’s history and analyzing, or at least mentioning, and just about every U.S. Supreme Court case that has interpreted it. It is a couple of thousand pages long. You can’t even ask a member of Congress for a copy. You can only buy an outdated version from the Government Printing Office (GPO). A revised edition is published every ten years (the most recent one is dated 2002), with a pocket part issued every two years.
Since taxpayers pay for preparation of the Constitution Annotated, we should be able to get the latest version that is on the CRS website and not have to wait for the biannual pocket part.
Update: Perhaps the Congressional Research Accessibility Act (seen on beSpacific.com) H.R. 2545 sponsored by Rep. Christopher Shays can be amended to include the Constitution Annotated. I'll send this off to his office.
In the shameless self-promotion category, my article on FOIA and how to reclaim information disappearing from government web sites, Let the People Know the Facts: Can Government Information Removed from the Internet be Reclaimed?, 98 Law Library Journal 7 (2006), which was originally posted on this blog as a draft in June 2005, has been awarded the Law Library Journal article of the year award by the American Association of Law Libraries.
By Raizel:
A recent editorial from Chip Ward, the former assistant director of the Salt Lake City Public Library, confronts the issue of homelessness in public libraries. He was also interviewed on Talk of the Nation.
This L.A. Times editorial confronts the multi-layered aspect of public libraries serving the homeless population -- library policies, equal access to information for all, substance abuse, lack of housing, mental illness, autonomy, and lack of appropriate social services.
If I was teaching a class on Libraries and the Law, Library Management, or Urban Librarianship, this editorial would definitely be on the syllabus!
Click below for Mary Minow's comment
As I suspected, it's much easier and more flexible. So if any of you are looking for new posts based on categories, you may not find them. Use the technorati tags at the bottom of a post instead. If it works like I think it will, I'll probably stop using categories altogether.
Update: It looks as if users who click on a technorati tag below will get everyone in the world's posts with those tags. That's useful, but it would be nice to have an option to limit it to this blog, the way flickr does. Well, there's always the search button in the blog...
From Raizel:
In the midst of many of the recent debates about copyright, including the YouTube/Viacom lawsuit, there has been a lack of discussion of two separate, but overlapping issues -- access to government publications and fair use.
The Pelosi / C-Span debate was a great example of how difficult it is to talk about the" public domain" and "fair use" effectively. House Speaker Pelosi posted a minute of herself talking about global warning at a Congressional hearing taken from a C-SPAN broadcast, and was subsequently sent a take-down notice. As Eric Goldman states "If our legislative leaders can't figure out what video they can recycle, how in the world can less-trained lay people do so?"
Government works created by the U.S. federal government are not protected by copyright; instead these works (with limited exceptions for materials withheld for security, export control, and policy reasons) are in the public domain. Therefore, when a private publisher repackages these works, they only have a copyright in what has been added, if the additions reach the copyright standards of originality and creativity, but not to the government work as a whole. And incorrect claims of copyright in government publications (and other public domain materials) are rampant.
William Patry, a copyright expert, states that
"any claim to copyright must meet the constitutional standard of originality, regardless if C-Span's cameras are used; it is not the equipment, but the creative choices using the equipment that matters" and"In the case of congressional hearings, one or two cameras shooting, without editing, falls far below the constitutional standard, and as a long time viewer of such hearings, I have yet to see one that I thought evidenced sufficient originality."
After protests, C-Span did change their copyright policy, allowing for greater use of all congressional hearings and press briefings, federal agency hearings, and presidential events at the White House. However, this was a policy change internal to one company, but unfortunately not a Congressionally-set policy for Congressional works or a legislative change clearly stating that the public is better served by having all publicly-released Congressional works available to the public (debates, reports, hearings, etc.).
Patry suggests "Congressional committees, or the House and Senate as a whole, could and should easily deal with the issue by precluding those who Congress permits to broadcast hearings from asserting copyright even if one to were to exist. These are important public events, and those who obtain special privileges to film or record them should be permitted to do so only on the condition the events remain in the public domain." (emphasis added)
By Congress not taking decisive action, limitations like C-Span's now former policy continue to limit how people are able to access government information. For example, the Congressional Research Service Reports, are in the public domain, yet the only comprehensive source are for-profits, with limited Reports available at a variety of different websites. For example, Copyright's "Fair Use" in Reproduction and Public Display Rights, an important (and in light of the difficulty in obtaining, ironic) report, is only available for a fee.
During the Pelosi/C-Span debate, a member of the public decided to "liberate" many of the Congressional hearings, posting many clips on the Internet Archive. Instead of being condemned as "copyright pirates" and lawbreakers, lumped in with mass-downloaders, those that those that make government information available and accessible should be commended.
See more after the jump for discussion about "fair use"
The Handbook on Copyright and Related Issues for Libraries (new - international perspective) is now available for download under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 License. It's written by Electronic Information For Libraries (eIFL.net), an independent foundation that focuses on libraries and electronic resources in developing countries. eIFL is an initiative of the Open Society Institute, part of the Soros Foundation network. The handbook is sponsored by the UNESCO Information for All Programme.
Minow take: The absolute best sections of the handbook, in my opinion, are the last three: trade agreements, international policymaking, and national policymaking. All focus directly on library impact. I always watch my students go weak in the knees when I discuss copyright and international trade agreements. This source hits the mark. It cuts right through to why and how these treaties work, and how they impact libraries and library users. It features international library statements and links to the most relevant source documents (without being overwhelming).
From the handbook: "We hope that you find the Handbook useful. If you do, please share, distribute, translate and build upon it! Teresa Hackett December 2006"
It's such a good start, someone should turn it into a wiki. That way library folks around the world can build on it (while keeping the frozen version intact, of course).
Hat tip to Jill Hurst-Wahl's Digitization 101 blog, and her student D. Harrison.
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The table of contents also includes:
The Relationship between Copyright and Contract Law: Electronic Resources and Library Consortia
Technological Protection Measures - the "triple lock"
Copyright, the Duration of Protection and the Public Domain
Orphaned works
Collective Rights Management
Public lending right
The Database Right - Europe's Experiment
Creative Commons: an "open content" licence
Open Access to Scholarly Communications
A documentary filmmaker just contacted me, looking for examples of libraries that have received govt requests to destroy information: For a documentary film on the nature of government secrecy and information, I am looking for copies of "withdraw and destroy" notifications. If you can help him, put a comment on this post and I will forward to him. Feel free to forward to other blogs/lists.
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