[Publib] Brainstorming w. Cory Doctorow re: Digital Collections

[Michael Schofield]

 Oops. I forgot the subject.

-----Original Message-----
From: "Michael Schofield" <mschofield at neflin.org>
To: "PubLib Listserv" <publib at webjunction.org>
Date: Thu, 01 Oct 2009 18:56:29 -0400
Subject: [Publib] (no subject)

The f ollowing is a copy-and-paste (so, yes, the highlights are links; yes, 
they're dead ...) of a copy-and-paste from a post made initially in the 
forums associated with my Digital Libraries course at FSU. We have been 
attempting to wrap our heads around digital collections, complicated 
programs, and practical issues like cost and preservation. Anyway, you 
probably won't care at the tail-end when I blab about fiddling with the 
Greenstone Digital Library, but I think there may be stuff in the middle you 
might find interesting. So yeah, I shot Cory Doctorow (whoa) an email and we 
had a few back-and-forth emails that inspired the summary below. It was 
pretty encouraging, and it made me think about a simple and FREE digital 
supplement to our library's collection.
 
Brainstorming w. Cory Doctorow [re: Digital Collections]
October
1
 So I had the idea to supplement a display with a digital collection 
supplemented by novels licensed through Creative Commons, and on a 
whim–just to be honest: to see if it’d get through–I emailed Cory 
Doctorow (Little Brother / Down & Out in the Magic Kingdom [my thoughts] / 
I, Robot [etc ...]) to pick his brain for digitally likeminded authors, 
because I’d come out of the gooters (that’s google + gutters) with only 
the vast gutenburg.org-bible of lit in the public domain and fanfic.He wrote 
that none sprang to mind – said authors are still pretty rare, and YA 
publishers will probably bottleneck creative commons. “That said, I think 
it’d be pretty easy to find at least a back-catalog in ebook form donated 
by writers for use on library terminals only…,” — hmm, as through 
programs like Adobe Digital Editions, which requires the owner [say, the 
library] to manually authenticate the computers the files can be read on and 
printed from. The latter is the biggie – would authors let their ebooks be 
*printed*? Maybe – if for library programs only. Then Cory: “Hey, 
Michael! I wouldn’t want to use Adobe DRM (or any DRM!). I wasthinking 
more like, “Here’s a password-protected site that we ask you not to 
share access to …,” which made a lot of duhhh sense to me.The other day, 
I accessed my Greenstone Digital Library for the first time through SSH via 
PuTTY, which required a headache and a beer and an entirely new prompt 
vocabulary as a crash course. The biggest obstacle among poorly budgeted and 
highly politicized smalltowners [re: libraries] against a digital collection 
beyond the scare around a whole new system of cataloguing is its cost.I 
figure that if you could supplement a collection with works licensed in 
creative commons and those already in the public domain [the classics], then 
a library could build a pretty substantial (if modest) collection available 
through its website, racking-up the hit counter while sparing their savvy 
patrons the pain-in-the-neck of DRM.
Cory Doctorow is the best-selling author of Little Brother& loads more.
So I had the idea to complement a display with a digital collection 
supplemented by novels licensed through Creative Commons, and on a 
whim–just to be honest: to see if it’d get through–I emailed Cory 
Doctorow (Little Brother  / Down & Out in the Magic Kingdom [my thoughts] / 
I, Robot [etc ...]) to pick his brain for digitally likeminded authors, 
because I’d come out of the gooters (that’s google + gutters) with only 
the vast gutenburg.org-bible of lit-in-the-public-domain and fanfic.
He wrote that none sprang to mind – said authors are still pretty rare, 
and YA publishers will probably bottleneck creative commons.  ”That said, 
I think it’d be pretty easy to find at least a back-catalog in ebook form 
donated by writers for use on library terminals only…,” — huh, as 
through programs like Adobe Digital Editions, which requires the owner [say, 
the library] to manually authenticate the computers the files can be read on 
and printed from. The latter is the biggie – would authors let their 
ebooks be printed? Maybe – if for library programs only. Then, Cory: 
“Hey, Michael! I wouldn’t want to use Adobe DRM (or any DRM!). I 
wasthinking more like, “Here’s a password-protected site that we ask you 
not to share access to …,” which made a lot of duhhh sense to me….
The other day, I accessed my Greenstone Digital Library  for the first time 
through SSH via PuTTY, which required an entirely new prompt vocabulary as a 
crash course. The biggest obstacle among poorly budgeted and highly 
politicized smalltowners [re: libraries] against a digital collection beyond 
the scare around a whole new system of cataloguing is its cost.
I figure that if you could supplement a collection with works licensed under 
creative commons and those already in the public domain (the classics), then 
a library could build a pretty substantial (if modest) collection available 
through its website, racking-up the hit counter while sparing their savvy 
patrons the pain-in-the-neck of DRM.
Sometime over the next week I think I’ll start work collecting 
public-domain and CC YA oriented works to supplement the library programs 
with online analogues at the BL[ing]–”the Bradford County Public Library 
Youth & Teen Services 2.0″ that Could Use Some Color!–and at the end of 
my semester with Dr. P J[orgensen], when [if] I’ve my head around 
Greenstone, I’ll transfer the “collection” to the digital library I 
will have built through the University.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.webjunction.org/wjlists/publib/attachments/20091001/f105bbe4/attachment.htm>