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Alum Sues Cornell, Claiming Article in Library's Digital Archive Defames Him
In what could evolve into another legal hurdle for libraries the digital age, a Cornell alum has sued the university over a decades-old article now available in the university library's digital collections—and searchable on Internet. According to the Cornell Daily Sun, Kevin Vanginderen, a Cornell graduate and now a lawyer in California, filed a $1 million lawsuit against the University in San Diego County Superior Court in October, 2007, claiming libel, and raising potentially thorny questions about the resurgence of old information in the new world of digital archiving.
In court papers, Vanginderen claimed the trouble began when he googled his name and found that back issues of the Cornell Chronicle, owned by the university's press office had been digitally archived in the library and were now searchable online—including an article about his involvement in campus thefts. The Cornell Daily Sun reported that after Vangidneren's requests to have the article removed were not heeded, he filed suit, citing "the difference between having the article sit in the basement of a dusty library and being posted on the front door of the library." Cornell, meanwhile, counters that the article is not defamatory, and further, that the statute of limitations for defamation has run out because the article was published long ago and the online Chronicle archive—scans of the original editions held by the library—do not constitute republication.
The case, however, hints at deeper issues for libraries and publishers in their quest to digitize backfiles: could the desire to limit exposure to these kinds of lawsuits force librarians and university administrators to consider vetting the content they choose to digitize, chilling or possibly punching holes in digital archival efforts? "I think it will not slow the pace of digitization," Lolly Gasaway, associate dean for academic affairs and professor of law at the University of North Carolina, told the LJ Academic Newswire. "But libraries and other agencies that publish digital information may find themselves having to deal with requests to expunge certain records. My guess is that libraries won't do this in advance but only in response to a particular request."
Whether or not Vanginderen's particular case against Cornell has merit, old news in new digital forms is becoming a complex issue. In an August column, Clark Hoyt, public editor at the New York Times addressed the issue. In the age of "search engine optimization," the practice of getting your content higher up in search results to capture more web traffic, "long-buried information about people that is wrong, outdated or incomplete is getting unwelcome new life," he noted. "People are coming forward at the rate of roughly one a day to complain that they are being embarrassed, are worried about losing or not getting jobs, or may be losing customers because of the sudden prominence of old news articles that contain errors or were never followed up."
In his column, Hoyt noted one case where a person was arrested years ago on charges of fondling a child. Although that person denied the allegations and the charges were later dropped, the Times, he says, reported only the arrest, not "the disposition of the case," meaning that someone searching on that person's name may hit on the reported news of the charges in their search results but not vindication.
Most people with complaints, Hoyt acknowledges, want the offending articles expunged. While acknowledging that the Internet has created a new set of problems, the choices for solution, he noted, are equally troubling. Bob Steele, an ethicist at the Poynter Institute (St. Petersburg, FL) told Hoyt that removing material from archives is risky business. "There are consequences," Steele said of pulling content. "An absence of a piece of information could lead to rumor, falsehood, and inaccurate actions down the road by somebody because they can't find the record. The public would have every reason to say: 'What else is missing? What else is altered?'"
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British Study: "Google Generation" a Myth; Libraries Must Step Up
A new study commissioned by the British Library and JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee) says that the "Google Generation"—youth born or brought up in the Internet age—is not particularly web-literate, and their research traits—impatience in search and navigation and zero tolerance for any delay in satisfying their information needs—are becoming the norm for all age-groups. The lesson for libraries, according to the CIBER research team at University College London, is that they must step up significantly, "both raising awareness of this expensive and valuable content and making the interfaces much more standard and easier to use."
Ian Rowlands, the lead author of the report, Information Behaviour of the Researcher of the Future, said, "Libraries in general are not keeping up with the demands of students and researchers for services that are integrated and consistent with their wider Internet experience." Lynne Brindley, chief executive of the British Library, said, "Libraries have to accept that the future is now. At the British Library we have adopted the digital mindset and have seized many of the opportunities new technology offers to inspire our users to learn, discover and innovate."
The report offers several predictions for 2017 that likely also apply across the ocean to North American libraries. It foresees:
- A unified web culture, as national library services and provision will become far less meaningful ,
- The inexorable rise of the ebook, with print sales diminished sharply outside leisure markets
- More content explosions, as mass book digitization bears fruit
- Emerging forms of scholarship and publication, including pre-publication release and online peer review
- Virtual forms of publication in various formats
- The semantic web, in which computers become capable of analyzing all the data on the web, especially in areas like science
The report suggests that, as with the discussion about bibliographic control in the United States, libraries must never forget Google: "Given current levels of investment by the big corporate search engines, and static or declining library R&D budgets, it would seem that the only effective strategy is for tighter integration of library content with commercial search engines." Beyond that, further customization is necessary. "The main message of this report for research libraries is that the future is now, not ten years away," the report reads, adding "that they have no option but to understand and design systems around the actual behavior of today's virtual scholar."
The report also cites "a desperate need for a well-funded program of educational research and inquiry into the information and digital literacy skills of our young people. Emerging research findings from the U.S. points to the fact that these skills need to be inculcated during the formative years of childhood.... This will require concerted action between libraries, schools and parents."
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Researchers Suggest Rising Number of "Duplicate" Articles in Medline Database
As if there isn't enough information to sift through on the web, the journal Nature this week reported that as many as 200,000 of the 17 million articles in the Medline database could be duplicates, "either plagiarized or republished by the same author in different journals."
Using text-matching software, researchers Mounir Errami and Harold 'Skip' Garner at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center searched for "highly-similar abstracts" in a sample of 62,000 randomly-selected abstracts published since 1995, finding 421 possible duplicates. "In general, the duplication of scientific articles has largely been ignored by the gatekeepers of scientific information—the publishers and database curators," the authors note in their paper. "Very few journal editors attempt to systematically detect duplicates at the time of submission."
Medline indexes over 5000 journals published in the United States and more than 80 other countries worldwide. The authors suggest that "rising duplicate publication rates" is a global phenomenon possibly driven by a number of factors including "the explosion in the number of journals with online content, increasing opportunities for unethical copying, and a body of literature growing so fast that the risk of being detected seems to diminish." Paraphrasing Dickens, the authors say that "in the world of biomedical publications, 'it is the best of times, it is the worst of times.' Scientific productivity, as measured by scholarly publication rates, is at an all-time high. However, high-profile cases of scientific misconduct remind us that not all those publications are to be trusted."
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ALA Moves Cautiously on Graduated Dues
At the recent American Library Association (ALA) Midwinter Meeting, Marcia Boosinger, co-chair of the task force to examine a graduated dues structure for ALA as well as other possible dues structures, presented a final report calling for a six-part study plan, costing nearly $625,000, including a $210,000 study of trends in the profession. ALA leaders, however, decided to proceed more cautiously, instead approving a preliminary step, after the Council's Budget Analysis and Review Committee (BARC) cautioned against adopting any graduated dues structure without "strong evidence that [it] will increase revenue."
ALA will instead spend $45,000 to do a membership survey and, rather than commission and pay for its own trend study, will wait to see what emerges from a study now underway, The Future of Librarians in the Workforce—What will it look like?, funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services and led by José-Marie Griffiths, dean of the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
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MPAA Acknowledges "Human Error" in College Piracy Data
If you thought the astounding numbers the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) brought out for Congress during its 2007 campaign to crack down on campus networks seemed high, you were right. This week, MPAA officials acknowledged that a 2005 study it commissioned that attributed as much as 44 percent of the film industry's domestic losses to illegal downloading by college students was erroneously overstated. According to a report in the Associated Press, the MPAA said "human error" was at fault, and adjusted its estimate: it now says 15 percent of the movie industry's revenue loss is attributed to students pirating content over college networks. MPAA officials, however, insist that figure still justifies the sweeping legislative reforms it has pushed for. Educause VP Mark Luker, meanwhile, told reporters he thinks the 15 percent figure is still grossly inflated, estimating that three percent is a more reasonable estimate.
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Best Sellers in Music, June 2007–present, as compiled by YBP Library Services
(13 digit ISBNs in brackets)
- Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain
Sacks, Oliver
Alfred A Knopf
2007. ISBN 1400040817 9781400040810 $26.00
- Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century
Ross, Alex
Farrar, Straus & Giroux
2007. ISBN 0374249393 [9780374249397]. $30.00
- Visual Shock: A History of Art Controversies in American Culture
Kammen, Michael
Alfred A Knopf
2006. ISBN 1400041295 [9781400041299]. $35.00
- Robert Schumann: Life and Death of a Musician
Worthen, John
Yale University Press
2007. ISBN 0300111606 [9780300111606]. $40.00
- Thomas Eakins: Art, Medicine, and Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia
Werbel, Amy Beth
Yale University Press
2007. ISBN 0300116551 [9780300116557]. $55.00
- Images and Identity in Fifteenth-Century Florence
Rubin, Patricia
Yale University Press
2007. ISBN 0300123426 [9780300123425]. $60.00
- Coltrane: The Story of a Sound
Ratliff, Ben
Farrar, Straus & Giroux
2007. ISBN 0374126062 [9780374126063]. $24.00
- Graphic Design: A New History
Eskilson, Stephen J.
Yale University Press
2007. ISBN 0300120117 [9780300120110]. $65.00
- Bach's Cycle, Mozart's Arrow: An Essay on the Origins of Musical Modernity
Berger, Karol
University of California Press
2007. ISBN 0520250915 [9780520250918]. $39.95
- Monk's Music: Thelonious Monk and Jazz History in the Making
Solis, Gabriel
University of California Press
2008. ISBN 0520252004 [9780520252004]. $55.00
- End of Early Music: A Period Performer's History of Music for the Twenty-First Century
Haynes, Bruce
Oxford University Press
2007. ISBN 0195189876 [9780195189872]. $35.00
- Schoenberg's Musical Imagination
Cherlin, Michael
Cambridge University Press
2007. ISBN 0521851661 [9780521851664]. $96.00
- Gay Artists in Modern American Culture: An Imagined Conspiracy
Sherry, Michael S.
University of North Carolina Press
2007. ISBN 0807831212 [9780807831212]. $29.95
- Opera and Sovereignty: Transforming Myths in Eighteenth-Century Italy
Feldman, Martha
University of Chicago Press
2007. ISBN 0226241122 [9780226241128]. $55.00
- Understanding the Art of Sound Organization
Landy, Leigh
MIT Press
2007. ISBN 0262122928 [9780262122924]. $38.00
- W.A. Mozart
Trans. by Stewart Spencer
Abert, Hermann
Yale University Press
2007. ISBN 0300072236 [9780300072235]. $55.00
- Sibelius
Barnett, Andrew
Yale University Press
2007. ISBN 0300111592 [9780300111590]. $40.00
- Distinction and Denial: Race, Nation, and the Critical Construction of the African American Artist, 1920-1940
Calo, Mary Ann
University of Michigan Press
2007. ISBN 0472114689 [9780472114689]. $69.50
- Mirror of the World: A New History of Art
Bell, Julian
Thames & Hudson
2007. ISBN 0500238375 [9780500238370]. $45.00
- Music in the Galant Style
Gjerdingen, Robert O.
Oxford University Press
2007. ISBN 0195313712 [9780195313710]. $45.00
Library Journal Academic Newswire
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