Michelle Miller Burns The Newberry Library, Chicago, has announced that Michelle Miller Burns will be vice president for development, effective October 23. Most recently, she served as the director of planned giving at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra Association (CSO. As vice president for development, Burns will oversee annual giving, major and planned gifts, corporate and foundation relations, special events, and development relations. She will also serve as a member of the president's cabinet.
Carol Gordon has been named associate professor at Rutgers' School of Communication, Information and Library Studies (SCILS) program in School Media. Gordon earned an MLIS from Western Michigan, and has served as director of libraries and information services at the Frankfurt International School, Germany, and participated in an exchange with the American School in London. Most recently she has served as head of the Pickering Educational Resources Library and as an associate professor in the School of Education at Boston University.
Kay Ann Cassell has been named assistant professor at Rutgers' SCILS. She was previously the associate director of collections and services for the Branch Libraries of the New York Public Library, where she supervised collection development and the development of programs and services for the 85 branches of the library. Her areas of specialization are reference service, collection development, and public librarianship.
Stewart Mohr has been appointed assistant professor at Rutgers' SCILS. He is currently completing his dissertation at SCILS, with a research focus in the areas of knowledge management as a communicative process and the enabling technologies that support those practices. He received his MLS from Rutgers in 1970 and MBA from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in 1976. His teaching areas include knowledge management, human information behavior, principles of searching, and competitive intelligence.
In Belgium, Google News Loses Case Over "Snippets"
For Google, another day, another legal ruling—this one potentially damaging to Google's efforts to crawl and index Belgian newspapers for Google News. After losing its initial bid to overturn a Belgian court ruling, Google has been barred from its familiar practice of showing "snippets" of newspaper articles it has indexed in Google News. The case was brought by Copiepresse, an agency that manages copyright for several European newspapers. The decision also required Google to post the recent decision on its Belgian web site, which Google briefly challenged in the face of a daily fine of € 500,000 ($640,900). Google did post the text of the ruling, but said it would appeal the case further. A Belgian court will hear that appeal in November. "We believe that Google News is entirely lawful and brings real benefits to publishers by driving web traffic and users to their sites," Google said in a statement. The case is one of many actions facing the company in Europe. It also faces a French lawsuit over aspects of Google Book Search and recently, in what turned out to be a piece of good legal news, a German copyright tribunal said a German publisher's case against Google Book Search was "unlikely to succeed."
The loss in Belgium seems to reflect a cultural as well as a legal divide. In the United States, newspaper and periodical publishers have been urging Google for some time to crawl and index their proprietary content, even content locked behind paywalls, eager to have their publications made widely accessible. Earlier this month, Google announced a plan, applauded by publishers, to crawl newspaper and aggregator databases and return results, including snippets. The plan was seen by publishers as a way to boost pay-per-view and archive revenues. Google officials in the United States said they were unable to comment specifically on the legal aspects of the case in Belgium, but said in a statement that the case "goes to the heart" of how search engines work. "Google News is no different than Google web search in this regard," Google said. "We only ever show the headlines and a bit of text. If people want to read the entire story they have to click through to the newspaper's web site. And if a newspaper does not want to be part of Google News we remove their content from our index. If publishers don't want their web sites to appear in search results, the robots.txt standard enables them to prevent automatically indexing of their content. It's nearly universally accepted and honored by all reputable search engines."
Make It the International Google Seven: Google Adds University of Madrid to Scan Plan
In other Google news this week, the company added a major new component to its ambitious library scan plan and dealt a public relations blow to some European critics by adding the Complutense University of Madrid Library to its list of Google Book Search partners. The library becomes the first Spanish-language library to join the Google Books Library Project. Unlike Google's partners in the United States, however, the library will only allow scanning of public domain works. Complutense University of Madrid has the largest university library in Spain. Carlos Berzosa, chancellor of the university, said his library's participation will enrich Book Search's multilingual collection of public domain works. In addition to Spanish texts, he noted, the university's collection also includes French, German, Latin, Italian, and English books.
After Victory in "John Doe" Librarians Case, ACLU Challenges New Patriot Act Gag Order Provision
They won the first battle, now they hope to win the war. After successfully releasing four Connecticut librarians from a Patriot Act gag order last year, the American Civil Liberties Union, along with the New York Civil Liberties Union and an unnamed Internet Service Provider silenced under an FBI gag order, have filed a new legal challenge to the reauthorized Patriot Act's National Security Letter (NSL) provision. In September 2004, Judge Victor Marrero struck down the NSL provision as unconstitutional, holding that "indefinite gag orders" imposed under the NSL law violate free speech rights protected by the First Amendment. The government appealed Marrero's ruling, but before the appeals court could rule, Congress amended the law in March 2006. The case is now back before Judge Marrero, where the ACLU will argue that the gag provision of the revised NSL statute remains unconstitutional. "By permitting the FBI to silence those with direct experience of the new laws," said ACLU lead counsel Jameel Jaffer, "Congress has denied the public any means of ensuring that the new surveillance authorities are being used appropriately and lawfully." The ACLU suggested that the government issues as many 30,000 NSLs every year.
The new challenge will rely heavily on the ACLU's successful efforts to lift the NSL gag order on the four members of the board of the Windsor, CT-based Library Connection consortium, including in-depth statements filed with the court as well as the release of new documents. In a declaration submitted to the court, "Doe" (now identified as George Christian) relates his NSL ordeal. "Congress was specifically debating whether to amend the NSL statute, the statute I believed was so constitutionally deficient that I was willing to file a federal lawsuit challenging it, but I was prohibited from contacting members of Congress and advocating for changes to law," Doe claimed. "The gag compelled me to systematically deceive my friends, family, and girlfriend," he added. "I did not like the feeling of being conscripted to be a secret informer for the government, especially because I have doubts about the legitimacy of the underlying investigation." The legal documents in the Connecticut NSL case were recently unsealed by the government and posted by the ACLU.
Pushback Begins: Ten Academic Officers Pen Letter Against FRPAA
Now that 125 university officials have expressed support for the Federal Research Public Access Act of 2006 (FRPAA), a counter-effort began this week with a letter against the bill, signed by ten academic officials. "Mandating a six-month public release of journal articles would have negative unintended consequences for the academic community," the letter reads. "The free posting of unedited author manuscripts by government agencies threatens the integrity of the scientific record, potentially undermines the publisher peer review process, and is not a smart use of funds that could be better used for research." The letter is signed by officials at institutions that, according to a press release, collectively make roughly $3 billion in annual research investments, including the University of Alabama at Birmingham School of Medicine (UAB), the University of Chicago, and the University of Tennessee.
In a statement, Robert Rich, Senior Vice President and Dean, University of Alabama at Birmingham School of Medicine, a signatory of the letter, also expressed concern that passage of the FRPAA "would damage the special relationship between scholarly societies and academic communities." Executive director of the American Physiological Society Martin Frank, a staunch opponent of the open access movement and founding member of "free access" proponents behind the DC Principles Coalition joined university officials in opposing the legislation. Frank said that the FRPAA's mandatory six-month release "may force some journals to shift to a publication model requiring authors to pay for their publications through their federal grants, diminishing funds available for research to benefit the public good."
At NCSU, Squatter Is Busted for Theft
North Carolina State University (NCSU) director of libraries Susan Nutter (LJ's 2005 Librarian of the Year) is well-known for her innovative programs, but it seems a local squatter implemented his own version of a library residency at NCSU's D.H. Hill Library outside of her purview. According to the local News & Observer, campus police are investigating Alvin Durand Clark for a mid-July library theft during which someone had broken a glass panel and made off with 30 iPods, a laptop, and some digital cameras. Clark was arrested last week by Durham police, who discovered he had some of NCSU's stolen goods as well as an "NCSU identification card with a picture of himself glued onto it." It turns out that in 2005, Clark was charged with trespassing after police discovered he'd actually moved in to the library, "sleeping on different floors of the building" to avoid staff suspicion, and keeping his clothes "hidden in ceiling tiles on the ninth floor during the day."
Best Sellers in African History, February 2006–present, as compiled by YBP Library Services
Trickster Travels: A Sixteenth-Century Muslim Between Worlds
Davis, Natalie Zemon
Hill & Wang
2006. ISBN 0809094347. $30.00
You Must Set Forth at Dawn: A Memoir
Soyinka, Wole
Random House
2006. ISBN 037550365x. $26.95
African Aids Epidemic: A History
Iliffe, John
Ohio University Press
2006. ISBN 0821416898. $24.95
First Human: The Race to Discover Our Earliest Ancestors
Gibbons, Ann
Doubleday
2006. ISBN 0385512260. $26.00
American Africans in Ghana: Black Expatriates and the Civil Rights Era
Gaines, Kevin Kelly
University of North Carolina Press
2006. ISBN 0807830089. $34.95
Family Matters: Feminist Concepts in African Philosophy of Culture
Nzegwu, Nkiru
State University of New York Press
2006. ISBN 0791467430. $86.50
Intimate Enemy: Images and Voices of the Rwandan Genocide
Lyons, Robert
Zone Books
2006. ISBN 1890951633. $37.95
French Colonialism Unmasked: The Vichy Years in French West Africa
Ginio, Ruth
University of Nebraska Press
2006. ISBN 0803222122. $65.00
Middle Passages: African American Journeys to Africa
Campbell, James T.
Penguin Books
2006. ISBN 1594200831. $29.95
Africa's Elusive Quest for Development
Houngnikpo, Mathurin C.
Palgrave Macmillan
2006. ISBN 1403971242. $65.00
Conspiracy to Murder: The Rwandan Genocide
Melvern, Linda
Verso
2006. ISBN 1844675424. $18.00
Revolution and Genocide in Ethiopia and Cambodia
Kissi, Edward
Lexington Books
2006. ISBN 0739106910. $70.00
Anti-Apartheid and the Emergence of a Global Civil Society
Thorn, Hakan
Palgrave Macmillan
2006. ISBN 1403939373. $74.95
Africa's Hidden Histories: Everyday Literacy and Making the Self
Ed. by Karin Barber
Indiana University Press
2006. ISBN 0253347297. $75.00
Empire in Africa: Angola and Its Neighbors
Birmingham, David
Center for International Studies
2006. ISBN 0896802485. $22.00
Political History of Zambia: From Colonial Rule to the Third Republic, 1890-2001
Phiri, B.J.
Africa World
2006. ISBN 1592213081. $29.95
Art and Architecture in Postcolonial Africa
Hess, Janet Berry
McFarland
2006. ISBN 0786420766. $39.95
Forgotten Frontier: Colonist and Khoisan on the Cape's Northern Frontier in the 18th Century
Penn, Nigel
Ohio University Press
2006. ISBN 0821416820. $24.95
Themes in West Africa's History
Ed. by Emmanuel Kwaku Akyeampong
Ohio University Press
2006. ISBN 0821416405. $49.95
Burning Hunger: One Family's Struggle Against Apartheid
Schuster, Lynda
Ohio University Press
2006. ISBN 0821416510. $49.95
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