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 | LC Response Endorses Working Group on Bibliographic Control
The Library of Congress (LC) has released its response to the Final Report, issued in January and known as “On the Record,” by the Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control, convened by LC. Not surprisingly, LC accepts and endorses the recommendations, following up by describing the library’s current thinking about specific items. However, it stressed, that response is not an implementation plan for a future web-centric world of cataloging that embraces such things as nonlibrary contributions and social tagging.
Deanna Marcum, associate librarian for library services, wrote that she turned to three sources for help in analyzing how LC should respond: the Management Team of LC’s Acquisitions and Bibliographic Access Directorate; an internal working group working on bibliographic control as part of the LC Library Services unit's strategic planning efforts; and Thomas Mann, “the LC reference librarian who has been most vocal in criticizing changes proposed.”
While Mann “continues to be skeptical of the need for implementing many of the proposed changes,” Marcum wrote, “the two groups I consulted give strong endorsement to the recommendations of the Working Group.... We are eager to work with colleagues nationally and internationally to achieve the vision that is so compellingly drawn in ‘On the Record.’”
Internal LC staff groups assigned priorities for implementing the recommendations, identified possible starting dates, and estimated costs. While Marcum did not include such information in her response, she stated, “I expect to make good use of the staff's projections as I work with all of the directors within Library Services to determine budgetary and staffing priorities for the next few years.”
Marcum noted that LC staff “is deeply committed to the principles of free and open access for all” and thus “eschewed even the hint that bibliographic data could be proprietary. They worried about small and often underfunded institutions that are unable to participate in the OCLC collaborative, and they wanted to provide safety mechanisms enabling these libraries to benefit from the bibliographic data generated by LC.” While staff recognizes LC’s historic role in providing high-quality, accessible bibliographic data, she wrote, they recognize that “LC must make a greater investment in new initiatives if it is to continue to play an important role,” notably with an effort to focus on LC’s “unique, previously uncataloged collections.”
For example, in response to a recommendation to reexamine the current economic model for data sharing in the networked environment, LC agreed with the recommendation to “convene a representative group consisting of libraries (large and small), vendors, and OCLC to address costs, barriers to change, and the value of potential gains.” In an acknowledgement that change is necessary, LC said that “frank discussion is needed to break the logjam caused by the existing economic model.”
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A Skeptic Inside LC: Reference Librarian Mann Criticizes Working Group, LC’s Response
In her response to the Working Group on Bibliographic Control’s final report, Deanna Marcum, associate librarian for library services at the Library of Congress (LC), acknowledged that LC reference librarian Thomas Mann remained a skeptic. Drawing on his response to the final report from March of this year, Mann told the LJ Academic Newswire (while stressing that his comments are his own and not that of his employer) that he is concerned that LC is “ignoring the very real and important differences between the research needs of scholars and those of ‘quick information’ seekers.”
Mann noted three main concerns “that the Working Group and LC are conspicuously not discussing.” First, he objects to LC’s apparent effort to transform Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) by, as stated in Marcum’s response, “increased use of automated assignment of subject heading strings and machine validation of strings, further simplification of practices, and exploration of using sophisticated search engine capabilities to take optimal advantage of LCSH.”
“De-coupling the strings," Mann warned, “would destroy the cross-reference system built up over a century by hundreds of professional catalogers; it would also destroy the browse-menus of headings with subdivisions, without which we lose systematic overviews of subjects; and it would sever the elaborate connections between LCSH and the LC Classification system, making it harder for catalogers to assign call numbers, and therefore less efficient for readers to browse shelves.”
Secondly, he’s skeptical about “removing LCSH from a separate OPAC environment into a conventional Web environment: Doing this would also destroy the cross-reference system, as Google, Amazon, or LibraryThing-type Web platforms cannot display cross-references (neither can Endeca); doing this would also destroy the browse-menus that provide the most systematic overviews of resources.... But making the provision of ‘something quickly’ the goal of bibliographic control is to radically change the very purpose of the profession, which has always been to provide systematic (rather than haphazard) access.” He charged that such a major change deserves more explicit justification and discussion.
Mann also retains skepticism about including “democratic tags, or subject terms from ‘anywhere in the supply chain’ within the same environment as LCSH, or within LCSH itself: Doing this would destroy uniform headings and the entire function of vocabulary control, which solves the very problems created by keyword indexing that is both uncontrolled and excessively granular.”
He said he proposed a compromise solution in his earlier paper, suggesting that “LC’s current successful project of jointly maintaining a controlled catalog for its photographs collection, linked to marvelous Web 2.0 inputs from Flickr, is very sensible; and if it works so well for photos, why not something similar for books? It gives us the best of both worlds. But neither the Working Group nor LC has responded to this proposal.
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| California Court Dismisses Cornell Grad’s Lawsuit Over Digitized Article
A federal judge this week dismissed a lawsuit filed by Cornell University graduate Kevin Vanginderen that claimed a recently digitized publication from 1983 contained an article that libeled him. In dismissing the suit, however, the judge did not address a key question of whether the digitized version of the article in question, made widely available when Cornell University Libraries digitized it and Google crawled it, constituted republication.
In rejecting the suit, Judge Barry Moskowitz wrote that the “truth is an absolute defense in any libel action,” and noted that, since the article in question was largely true, that Vanginderen could therefore not prevail on his libel claim. Cornell attorneys contended the digitization was not republication. In a sentence of the decision Moskowitz noted only that “the court does not reach the issue of whether Cornell republished the article when Cornell digitized it and made it accessible on the Internet.”
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.”
The verdict in the case, while a victory for Cornell, leaves a deeper question still unresolved for libraries and publishers in their quests 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? In August of 2008, Clark Hoyt, public editor at the New York Times addressed the issue, noting that 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.”
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| Second Circuit Declines Appeal of Rejected Tasini Settlement
The landmark New York Times v. Tasini case could make its way to the U.S. Supreme Court for a second time, this time in an attempt to salvage a settlement process—if not the exact settlement—struck down late last year by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. Parties involved noted recently that the full Second Circuit has declined to hear an appeal of the decision that rejected the suit’s settlement. That decision limits options to an appeal to the Supreme Court or a new settlement that would exclude a large number of writers with unregistered copyrights.
In December 2007, the Second Circuit voided a March 2005 settlement agreement between freelance writers and publishers hammered out following the landmark 2001 New York Times v. Tasini Supreme Court decision that found publishers violated freelancer’s copyrights by using their works in electronic databases without permission. In a 2-to-1 decision, the Second Circuit ruled that, under U.S. copyright law, although no registration is necessary to secure one’s copyright, registration is required to sue for damages. The Second Circuit held that the District Court was wrong to approve payments to writers with unregistered copyrights and thus nullified a deal in which publishers’ agreed to pay a minimum of $10 million and a maximum of $18 million to writers.
That decision represented another twist in what has become one of the defining copyright sagas of the Internet age. Oddly, no one had raised or argued for the issue the Second Circuit ultimately cited in rejecting the settlement agreement. The effect of the ruling, meanwhile, could be dramatic. One of the writers who appealed the suit, Irv Muchnick, explained to LJ Academic Newswire in an interview late last year that the court ruling essentially would both prevent unregistered writers in the suit from getting relief via a settlement, and prevent publishers from getting the “complete peace” they sought. Collaterally, Muchnick acknowledged, information users might lose out as freelance articles for which copyright was unregistered and in question disappeared from databases. “The [Second Circuit’s 2007 decision] is terribly inconvenient and inefficient for all parties concerned,” Muchnick told LJAN, “as well as for information consumers and for society.”
Although Muchnick vehemently opposes the settlement terms, and was part of group that appealed to have the deal quashed, he also strongly opposes the Second Circuit ruling that leaves unregistered writers with no standing to settle their Tasini claims through the class action.
With the Second Circuit’s denial of appeal, the clock is now ticking—appellants have until July 15 to file with the Supreme Court—and it remains unclear if any party will file, or whether a new settlement will be struck in the District Court that would follow the court’s guidelines and exclude those with unregistered copyrights, a prospect that, given the large number of unregistered writers in the settlement, would seem to offer little comfort to publishers. “Undoubtedly many [unregistered writers] would proceed to register and sue in separate individual and class actions,” Muchnick noted, meaning that even if the negotiated $10 to $18 million settlement goes forward with registered writers, publishers would still face “a potential wave of lawsuits even greater than they might have budgeted to handle.”
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Best Sellers in Medicine, October 2007–present, as compiled by YBP Library Services
(13-digit ISBNs in brackets)
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Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness
Lane, Christopher
Yale University Press
2007. ISBN 0300124465 [9780300124460]. $27.50
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In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto
Pollan, Michael
Penguin Books
2008. ISBN 1594201455 [9781594201455]. $21.95
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Challenges of an Aging Society: Ethical Dilemmas, Political Issues
Pruchno, Rachel
Johns Hopkins University
2007. ISBN 0801886481 [9780801886485]. $49.95
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Babies by Design: The Ethics of Genetic Choice
Green, Ronald Michael
Yale University Press
2007. ISBN 0300125461 [9780300125467]. $26.00
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Healthcare Fix: Universal Insurance for All Americans
Kotlikoff, Laurence J.
MIT Press
2007. ISBN 0262113147 [9780262113144]. $17.95
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Just Health: Meeting Health Needs Fairly
Daniels, Norman
Cambridge University Press
2008. ISBN 052187632x [9780521876322]. $80.00
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Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer
Brownlee, Shannon
Bloomsbury USA
2007. ISBN 1582345805 [9781582345802]. $25.95
-
Secret History of the War on Cancer
Davis, Devra
Basic Books
2007. ISBN 0465015662 [9780465015665]. $27.95
-
Taking Action, Saving Lives: Our Duties To Protect Environmental and Public Health
Shrader-Frechette, K.S.
Oxford University Press
2007. ISBN 019532546x [9780195325461]. $29.95
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Medically Assisted Death
Young, Robert
Cambridge University Press
2007. ISBN 0521880246 [9780521880244]. $90.00
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Deadly Companions: How Microbes Shaped Our History
Ed. by Dorothy H. Crawford
Oxford University Press
2007. ISBN 0192807196 [9780192807199]. $45.00
-
Twelve Diseases That Changed Our World
Sherman, Irwin W.
American Society for Microbiology
2007. ISBN 1555814662 [9781555814663]. $29.95
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Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease
Taubes, Gary
Alfred A Knopf
2007. ISBN 1400040787 [9781400040780]. $27.95
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Unnatural History: Breast Cancer and American Society
Aronowitz, Robert A.
Cambridge University Press
2007. ISBN 0521822491 [9780521822497]. $30.00
-
Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion Year History of the Human Body
Shubin, Neil
Pantheon
2008. ISBN 0375424474 [9780375424472]. $24.00
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Cure Within: A History of Mind-Body Medicine
Harrington, Anne
W. W. Norton
2008. ISBN 0393065634 [9780393065633]. $25.95
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Snake Oil Science: The Truth About Complementary and Alternative Medicine
Bausell, R. Barker
Oxford University Press
2007. ISBN 0195313682 [9780195313680]. $24.95
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Searching Eyes: Privacy, the State, and Disease Surveillance in America
Fairchild, Amy L.
University of California Press
2007. ISBN 0520252020 [9780520252028]. $50.00
-
Shock Therapy: A History of Electroconvulsive Treatment in Mental Illness
Shorter, Edward
Rutgers University
2007. ISBN 0813541697 [9780813541693]. $27.95
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Taking America Off Drugs: Why Behavioral Therapy Is More Effective for Treating ADHD, OCD, Depression, and Other Psychological Problems
Flora, Stephen Ray
State University of New York Press
2007. ISBN 0791471896 [9780791471890]. $53.50
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