DLF members have expressed a strong interest in figuring out how digital libraries can participate in, and contribute to, virtual immersive environments like Second Life. I've strongly encouraged this exploration, and this year we will be funding a small initiative to develop a foray into one possible reinvention of the library.

This is an internal effort, modest in aims and similarly scaled in resources. But regardless of its size, we see this as a community effort. As über:virtual-patriot, I've required that a proposal be written prior to release of DLF funds to generate shared agreement about what we all want to try to accomplish.

Speaking for myself and the able crew of contributors (which is fast growing beyond my count of attached digits), we welcome feedback on this proposal, and I'd like to solicit comments from readers. Looking over the below - the proposal in draft form - tell us what works, what doesn't, what we should add or subtract, and generally how we might make it better. I've left out the budget because it is unnecessary detail (it's around $10K for those of you who are curious) and the timeline, which is obviously subject to flux.

(N.B.: I want to note that although I wish I could lay claim to drafting the proposal, which I think is already wonderfully eloquent, I cannot; primary authorship rests with the contributors defined by the suggested governing board, but it truly includes the contributions of many - and hopefully, many more).

DLF In Second Life: A Proposal
May 29, 2007

Overview
The Digital Library Federation is an organization that promotes and supports a collaborative approach to defining and realizing the full potential of digital libraries, and the role of libraries and librarians in the future. To further this goal, we propose a structured exploration of Second Life, and the issues and opportunities presented by a virtual environment in the context of digital libraries and their roles in scholarship and publishing.

Objectives
Virtual environments present a completely new paradigm for information creation and interaction. As simulated, three dimensional spaces (four dimensional, counting time) built and populated by their own users enable people to create new types of content, and then deliver and interact with it (and each other) in new ways. As the most successful current virtual environment in terms of adoption and growth, Second Life may represent a revolutionary breakthrough for digital libraries as they seek more powerful and flexible ways for scholars and people to use information.

But our collective understanding of Second Life and its possibilities, limitations and implications for the future is incomplete. The environment continues to evolve rapidly. And while some digital libraries have begun to experiment in the space, serious exploration by a large number of libraries has yet to occur. Most of the current presentations and uses of information in Second Life mimic present digital library activities. Richer experiences in a virtual world are likely possible and must be further explored. Similarly, digital library building and development opportunities in a virtual world are markedly different, and more expansive, than in our real world, and must also be further explored.

Accordingly, this initiative proposes a coordinated investigation into Second Life by the digital library community, as a community. The proposal has three main objectives:

1. To establish a social framework within Second Life that will foster engagement by DLF’s member institutions with each other; with their faculty, students, and staff; with other Second Life libraries and like participants; and with the Second Life community as a whole;
   
2. To conduct experimentation on the form, substance, processes and social order of digital scholarship by leveraging the inherent properties of a virtual world to create new tools and environments rapidly and at low cost; and
   
3. To apply the standards and best practices of library and information science in a serious analysis of Second Life as a living, evolving information environment. In a platform originally predicated on a gaming environment that has since grown organically, its underlying information design and infrastructure has not yet evolved to robustly support functions and characteristics such as search, preservation, and provenance.

To support each objective, we suggest a set of goals, along with an associated timeframe.

Social Framework
To build a social framework, we propose the following activities. These will help introduce Second Life to DLF members who have yet to experiment with it while allowing those DLF members already involved in Second Life to connect, share knowledge with others, and collaboratively improve both their institutional spaces and the DLF space. Finally, but of critical interest, they will increase community building within DLF and help introduce DLF members to the community support features of Second Life, providing a space for collaboration, distributed research, and resource sharing.

• Create an open mailing list for DLF members interested in Second Life
  
• Provide regular updates on progress to all DLF members via the DLF-announce list and a public blog
  
• Offer structured, personalized support for avatar creation and acclimation for DLF members (including remote support provided via email, telephone, Skype and/or IM, as well as hands on sessions at future Forums)
  
• Conduct regular events in the DLF space (parties, poster sessions, lectures, etc.) in cooperation with other organizations within Second Life
  
• Provide open space for DLF members to experiment with building and collaboration
• Announce and conduct a grand opening of DLF’s Second Life presence in conjunction with the 2007 Fall Forum to show progress to date and future plans
  
• Present DLF workshops, session presentations, and Birds of a Feather sessions at DLF Forums
  

Research and Experimental Development
In order to test the potential of a virtual environment to redefine the substance and format of digital libraries, we propose a small set of collaborative development and building activities in Second Life. It is assumed that the main thrust of DLF development and building activities will be around radical experimentation and pushing the boundaries of the possible, rather than building permanent collections or simply creating replicas of existing buildings. The following set of initiatives, chosen to test the various attributes of Second Life, are a proposed starting point; the actual breadth and depth of building and development activity will be determined by (and contingent on) the extent of DLF community engagement that evolves over the course of the entire Second Life exercise. Each building/development effort would be taken to the prototype stage (i.e., usable but not necessarily polished), so that we can determine their success and relevance, and evaluate the more compelling aspects of the world.

• Purchase an island for DLF in Second Life. Initially this island will be located adjacent to the InfoIsland archipelago, to foster ties to the already strong community of in-world librarians there.
  
• Maintain connections with Info Island, NMC, and Sloodle, as well as developing a relationship with Linden Lab. They might possibly provide advice, but rather more importantly, we need to ensure enough participation with the SL community to obtain updates on developments pertaining to the essential mechanics of the world.
  
• Build an initial collection of Americana resources (assembled by the diverse members of DLF), to demonstrate federation, explore possible tie-ins to the DLF Aquifer initiative, and identify tools that might be developed for collection building & delivery.
  

Extend the Americana collection by creating a progressive display over time of American Social History with role-playing, interaction, and a series of staged time periods ranging from early to the present, using appropriate and compelling digital library collections.

• Create a general system for easily storing metadata for objects, providing search, and coordinating tagging and related activities
  
• Explore the possibility of building other in-world library resources
  
• Experiment with applying preservation tools to in-world objects and islands
  

Standards and Best Practices
We will research and circulate documented analysis on each of the following topics, in order to further both DLF and community-at-large knowledge in each of these areas. These papers can be posted to various sites to provide a service to others interested in Second Life development, as well as made available through Second Life.

• Metadata creation, storage, search, and moderation
  
• Improved general search and discovery
  
• Preservation possibilities in Second Life (in coordination with Jerome McDonough’s [@UIUC] game preservation group and any other related efforts, focused on the preservation of SL, including a possible introduction of a "Creative Commons"-like license for third party preservation of in world content, and a way to tag objects with it) (curious: have there been any discussions to date by anyone in the library/cultural/research community with CC about the feasibility of extending CC into virtual domains?)
  
• Best practices for building library spaces and services in Second Life
  
• Annotated bibliography on best practices for teaching and research in Hi-Ed SL
  
• Any other subjects that present themselves during the investigation
  

Governance
The maintenance and oversight of DLF Island will be performed by the DLF Second Life committee, initially comprising (but hopefully soon growing):

• Rachel Gollub (co-chair, project manager)
  
• Tom Cramer (co-chair)
  
• Colleen Cahill
  
• Tim DiLauro
  
• Geneva Henry
  
• Anthony Smith
  

Conclusion
The initiatives listed above define an open but focused approach to investigating Second Life. The panelists from the DLF Spring '07 Forum have volunteered to consult and share resources, and a small committee has formed to carry out these plans. Additional resources, in the form of a student or intern, would be helpful in meeting the goals listed, since all work is likely to be volunteer effort. Expenses are expected to include teaching sessions in real life to introduce DLF members to Second Life, periodic face-to-face meetings of the participants to provide accessibility to new members (though most meetings will occur in Second Life), and the cost of purchasing and maintaining an island. The result will be a set of documents and projects exploring the possibilities inherent in a three-dimensional community-centered system, a network of DLF members with a deeper understanding of how libraries and their services may translate to different environments, and closer collaboration and ties within the DLF community as a whole.

This may not be meaningful unless you are in the library world, but I just sent out this invitation to the DLF community; we are not confined to DLF institutions for member nominations in the work group. Although we are not presently accepting vendors, we will be soliticing their perspectives. Thus -

There is considerable ferment these days in the library community about the shortcomings of the current generation of OPAC systems. A number of libraries are investigating replacement discovery systems divorced from their Integrated Library Systems (ILS), and a few have already implemented alternatives. Replacing an integrated OPAC with an external generalized discovery system raises some difficulties, however, as OPACs provide functions beyond simple bibliographic discovery. Among the areas of difficulty are:

• Handling/displaying complex non-bibliographic library data, such as detailed serial holdings;
• Providing access to highly volatile ILS transaction data, such as circulation status;
• Supporting ILS-specific patron functions, such as renewing charged-out books;
• Supporting institution-specific functions, such as requesting the delivery of books from a remote storage facility.

The inability to provide such popular functions will inhibit the freedom of libraries to use alternative (frequently more modern) discovery platforms for their catalogs.

From the standpoint of libraries it would be ideal to be able to mix-and-match ILS and discovery platforms to suit local needs. To create such a rich environment the library and vendor community will need agreement on the specific technical details of how discovery and ILS systems are to integrate.

DLF is planning to establish a Task Group to analyze the issues involved in integrating ILS and discovery systems, and to create a technical proposal for how such integration should be accomplished. We are now seeking nominations of knowledgeable people to serve on the Task Group. Candidates should have analytic skills, be familiar with ILS and discovery systems, and, ideally, have some experience in systems interoperation. We hope to create a group that has a balance of experience with a variety of specific ILS and discovery systems. We encourage both self-nomination and the nomination of people from the community you believe can contribute to this important effort.

Because we believe the need to regularize interoperation is immediate, we are hoping to name this Task Group within the next several weeks, and that its work can be completed by the end of the calendar year. We expect most of the work of the group to be carried out through telephone and electronic means, although one or two face-to-face meetings may be needed. I have also asked a few experienced people to serve as advisors for the Task Group, to offer help and advice if needed.

Nominations should be sent to me at [ peter at diglib dot org ] by June 8.

Afternoon

// Margaret Drain, WGBH. Recruited 200 Native Americans and provided them phones with video recording and editing capability. Heard Musuem (Phoenix) is their partner. We Shall Remain (American Experience) will post the films online. Using the phones, films can be transmitted from cell phone to cell phone. Smithsonian is also a participant.

NOVA’s Car of the Future. How can today’s drivers transition to a new breed of vehicle. Shows a clip from the video. Stars Click and Clack. Open production. WGBH put up a draft script, list of potential interviewees. Audience suggested changes, questions for the interviewees, and so forth. High participation from academics. Also received input from people who have contributed their own car of the future concepts. Video and transcripts will be available for streaming, not unfortunately for open content. Interviewees are reluctant to provide mix/mash rights.

Teachers’s Domain website provides multimedia resources for classroom use. Some, not all, resources can be remixed. Received funding from Hewlett to facilitate clearances. Four different levels of usage.

Adoption Families. Isn’t in production yet; it will start online and will then move to production for television. Selecting three families who will be given video cameras, who will record their experiences with the adoption process. The audience can contribute their comments, advice, and commentary. A 90-minute broadcast will be produced for broadcast sometime in 2008.

// Thomas Lucas, Independent Producer. Makes science films. Been working at the Advanced Visualization Lab at NCSA. Numerical models, e.g., fluid dynamics, etc. Showing advanced visualizations on tornadoes and science-museum based stellar life-cycle demonstrations.

// Curtis Wong, Microsoft Research. Works at a program called "Next Media." What does showing “more” mean in video? Traditionally meant more – longer – video. Used to work at Voyager; moved to Continuum, for enriched CD media creation. These were layered architectures. Story: Context: Information from top to bottom. Demonstrating a Corbis Leonardo da Vinci creation. Fascinating and innovative uses of interface – e.g. a sliding translation window that is relocatable by the user. (The Codex is unique and owned by William Gates III.)

Various other experiements, e.g., with an American Experience project. Used Closed Caption text to drive linkages down to enriching layers.

Evolution to a layered contextual narrative. An ability to explore deeper information. Web/network based production provides a richness of interaction, e.g., manipulation of PoV, that are not accessible to traditional broadcast media.

Demonstration of World Wide Telescope, an interactive sky browser, expected to be released in the Fall.

Q: Is there something in between user-generated and high value production content? A: Example is Frontline’s Rough Cuts – low cost production with high quality appearance. Increasingly easy, but expectations continue to rise.

Q: What about performance art, and can more high quality PBS production be made generally available to universities, particularly for students? A: Rights clearances sometimes have to be triaged – e.g., broadcast and A/V distribution use (at libraries and educational institutions) might become available, but home distribution clearance costs might be too high. Eyes on the Prize is a famous example. Q: Could distribution be made more available to students for online access? A: Possibly. Generally, rights vs. fees is a difficult fulcrum. A: Performance art is particularly difficult to negotiate. A: Increasing support for distribution and wider access will likely require legistlative action.

// Obie Greenberg, YouTube and Education. Responsible for partnerships with higher ed and cultural institutions. YouTube (YT) is already used heavily for education. Evolved beyond pure entertainment. UC Berkeley has extensive offerings on Google Video. Google Video is an aggregator; YT is a service. Viewership is in the hundreds of millions per day; uploads in the hundreds of thousands. (Displayed numbers date from 9/2006 and are obviously greater). Long form video is possible, but viewership drops quickly with duration. Possible branding options available for content partners. Can sequence videos on Playlist. Can create subchannels. YT’s How-to/DIY channel is the closest thing to an education channel presently – obviously user contributed content. Partners also get promotion for right-bar content. YT is new, and so there a chance to help invent what the space becomes.

// Stacey Seltzer, Joost. SVP for Content Acquisition. Introduction to founders (Kazaa and Skype). Skype has 181 million registered users. Joost is a downloadable software client, with a closed network (no user contributed video, currently). Demonstrating a National Geographic video. People can create widgets to interact with content. Could be used by students in a classroom to share notes and observations amongst themselves and with the instructor. Building capacity for ratings, etc. Scalable and sizable display window. Editorial, algorithmic means for discovery. Joost is early stage, but is working with some NGOs such as Witness. Joost is based solely on an advertising model for revenue, with insertion points placed within the content, worked out with the contributors.

Q: What are the requirements to run Joost? A: Any relatively modern computer (within two years). Joost uses fairly low transmission rate (380 kbps). Uses H.264. Q: What is an acceptable content partner? A: In part, compliance with rights clearances and policies.

// Andrea Kalas, British Film Institute. Co-produces features with the BBC for wider release. (BFI is not a distribution platform, one reason they co-produce with BBC.) One example of their collaboration: Mitchell and Kenyon were two portrait photographers in Blackburn, UK. They possessed early moving image equipment, and recorded scenes of ordinary people in everyday situations. Over 800 non fiction titles from 1900-1913, on original nitrate negatives. Filmed where they might have big casual audiences, such as factory gates, faires, fires, and so forth who would then later pay to see themselves on screen. In exceptional condition, with few scratches and little damage. It is amazing to see contemporaneous Edwardian England. Reels were nearly thrown out, when they discovered in a coal cellar of a house being torn down.

Another of BFI's restoration projects is The Open Road: Claude Friese-Greene utilized an early color process known as Biocolour, or Kinemascope (there were conflicting rights claims).

Video, Education, Open Content

Morning Sessions -

// Cathy Casserly from the Hewlett Foundation is speaking. World is changing, how are our institutions keeping pace? Education is not absorbing and adapting technology as quickly as the external world. Participatory media has not been integrated into the classroom. Many institutions are investing in open educational content – how do we make it more available? How do people find the educational “gems” that would facilitate their activities. Working with Google. Archive will be created with CC Learn, compiling a database of open URLs. Want 10,000 within two months, creating an Open Educational Resources search. Inviting people to populate the database.

// Peter Kaufman from Columbia is now speaking. Discussing how much video content of only general interest is available on the Internet. Five points:

1. Demand for online video has exploded. BitTorrent is the number one format on the internet. Largest video streaming sites stream 7 billion sites a month.
2. Opportunities to produce video are exploding. What used to only be easy for text, is now easy for video. Quoting Lessig, text is the Latin of our age; video is the new currency for communication. Perhaps almost half of all video online is user produced. The democratization of distribution is underway.
3. Moving image archives are digitizing.
4. Personal storage, portability are exploding. The vision of the iPod as portable Library.
5. Laws and economics are changing.

Shows a video of a neuro-biologist speaking about the impact of a visualization of Alzheimer’s on nerve networks.

// Peter Brantley, DLF. [Presentation in PPT]

// Murray Weston, British Film & Video Council. Promote production distribution of use in UK Higher Education. Non-profit organization, funded by JISC and others. More than 230 member institutions. Also undertake R&D. What are “moving images” used for? As instrument – for illustration. Enrichment – diverse or contrasting views. Primary or secondary record – capable of use in research and scholarship, or cultural record. Science – time-based recording. Live communication – for collaboration. Creative medium – informing and entertaining.

Problems – no statutory deposit. No unified national catalogue. Poor research access. No ILL. No fair use [fair dealing] (yet). No culture of reference or review. No integration with text sources. Poor teaching training for use of video.

Importance of context and provenance. E.g. discussion in UK of memo released on lead-up to the Iraq war. Video has poor linkages to other resources. Metadata is terribly poor, so creating a skein of content is very difficult.

Teachers and students want what they have already achieved for textual resources.

Working on digitizing newsfilm – site is BUFVC “newsfilm online”. ITN permitted them full access to their archive. Searchable repository.

Also, film and sound online available through authentication via Athens, for all UK higher education. Using progressive download in at least two formats. And 7.8 million records of UK TV and radio. Recording 44,000 hours p.a. of UK television. TRILT: Television and Radio Index for Learning and Teaching.

Murray Weston carries 5 million pounds of personal indemnity insurance to protect against judgments relating to rights suits.

Most stare the rights monster in the face. Increasing sense that content creators are interested in dialogues. Paid $100/hr (??) as token payment for perpetual access. There is a growing understanding of educational needs. Formal reviews are working to clarify exceptions. New licensing arrangements are being offered; sharing licenses such as CC more prevalent. What is needed: international harmonization and clarification for CR exceptions and underlying licensing arrangements.


// Paul Gerhardt, BBC Creative Archive. BBC opening up its archive for reuse. Created their own license – Creative Archive License. Ran as a pilot project, 500 content items; generated over 100,000 registered users. Committed that it would have limited impact on the market for new content. Released from factual and news areas to simply rights clearances. Discovered only two possibly infringing uses of the License. Obviously a huge public appetite. BBC is heavily regulated, perhaps over-regulated. The new BBC Trust (replacing Board of Governors) regulates BBC and has few broadcasters among trustees. Every new idea has to go through a Public Value Test, a multi-month review process.

How to engage the audience in a post-broadcast world? Stymied by governance. BBC is primarily funded through a licensing fee; funding tightness has forced a review of activities. Debate between past and future is a debate over resources. BBC committed itself to making its content more open and available for read/write/share. The BBC Trust made a confounding decision relating to BBC classroom content to suspend and then kill the digital curriculum project, even after an expenditure of 75 million pounds. Now subject to Public Value Test.

British Film Institute is now using the Creative Archive License; possible that other institutions may take the lead from the BBC. BBC has not given up on its archive. BBC’s program catalogue is now online. There is also a new archive trial, which is read-only, that will be starting in the next few weeks. 1000 hours of content, and closed to trialists, only 50 hours will be fully open to the public.

Discussing the Scientology subversion of the BBC Panorama Program. Suddenly overwhelming the traditional model of broadcast agenda setting and production. Will BBC have to adjust in a dramatic shift to the revolution in open content production?


// Rick Prelinger, “Remarks from a recovered archivist.” Board president of the Internet Archive. Film goes back 113 years, but visual arts and education goes back many hundreds of years. “Visual education” as a term goes back to 1906. Edison, 1923, “Books will be obsolete. Scholars will soon be instructed through the eye. It is possible to teach every branch of human knowledge with the motion picture.” Discussing evolution of AV in education. University production has a long history, as does educational TV, which itself transformed into Public TV. Much early production is lost.

Best practices. 1) Leverage existing material. Overly deferential to potential rights holders. Free archives of educational and public video. How do perform a buyout of all the rights for educational and public TV? Can we de-monetize this content? 2) Segmentation. Subtraction is growth. Make content available for re-use, perhaps by breaking longer content into shorter segments. Media objects that are easier to touch; queries respond closer to hits; smaller pieces are more easily mashable. 3) Openness. Production is continual, not one-shot. Openness is not binary, but a broad spectrum. Openness is not just an image of page image, it is access to the actual text of the page. For video, it is being to use material along the lines of the BBC Creative Archive. Openness is the ability to crawl, navigate and index whatever can be found. Touch the code, editable for display, capable of annotation. Openness is interoperability. Think of quilting: primitive sampling. Merge past and present. Default to openness. Online archives are tremendous assets for computational exploration. Open video archives are particularly rare. 4) Moratorium. Declare a period of experiementation for educational video. Moratorium for enclosure by restrictive copyrights. Enable Paris in the 20s, not Silicon Valley in the 90s. Apply copyright homeopathically, not as a weapon of shock and awe.

Points of departure. Moving images privilege preservation over access, traditionally. Archives have faced unprecedented demand for the content; archives have gone retail. Media archives take only baby steps to opening up their repositories due to fear of rights claims. Youtube opened up the world in a way that archives cannot match; archives lost. Can entertainment video be repurposed as education? Do we really want to digitize all the lectures? Is that useful? Maybe we need to rethink our past priorities.

Q (Jeff Ubois): How do we do the Great Rights Buyout? A: Just beginning to figure out how to proceed on this. Do we need legislative help to clear this? Even rights holders have trouble negotiating secondary rights clearances? Q: Can we create an open rights indemnification fund? A: Both users and content holders would need to be indemnified. Stanford has done a slice of this for documentary filmmakers; it is a limited-risk indemnification for filmmakers who accept certain practices in production.

Can we create a vision of what we want to see in copyright, and how we envision people working with content? Create an affirmative vision.

Transcript of an older BBC talk of Rick Prelinger’s.

It's that time of year: DLF sends its invoices out to its membership, and waits for the checks to roll back in so we can keep the lights on, the disks spinning, and the RAM confused.

It is customary for the Director to send out a brief message rallying the troops. This is part of what I wrote to the Library Directors and Provosts who comprise my Board:

The coming year will shape critical issues across the realms of libraries, publishing, and scholarship. As vast amounts of data accumulate in a small number of hands guided by the principles of the marketplace, we must formulate and advance our interests with a solidity of focus and purpose which we never before had need to forge. The issues of information access, the re-assertion of individual privacy, re-writing our understanding of intellectual property and fair use, and encouraging learning across our global reach are critical touch-points for DLF and our allied organizations. We must seek to work together – with shared planning and purpose – to develop services that enable the collaborative creation of scholarship and the promulgation of education, all the while transforming our organizations. Enhanced mobility, increasingly rich media choices, and the democratization of contribution have the potential to trigger one of the most creative periods in the history of human thought if we are alert enough, clever enough, and sensitive enough to shape and learn from the changes around us.

We welcome and encourage your participation not merely in our DLF Forums (the next to be held in Philadelphia, November 5-7, 2007), but more urgently in on-line forums, in our face-to-face meetings, and in individual engagements with our communities. The world is enmeshed in an increasingly open and urgent conversation, and our voice is important and clear. When we are given the opportunity to speak, we have an obligation to do so; when we have no opportunity, we must make one.

Please raise your voices with me.

2007:05:18

I've been struggling to work up a "can-do" talk for an upcoming conference on video in New York, and at the same time musing about the things I learned and saw a week ago (in New York) in my whirlwind publishing conference extravaganza.

One of the things that I keep coming back to is the glue that Google has spread around the world that makes their site so sticky. Hardly the first one to do so, Nick Carr recently observed how the big get bigger in Web 2.0 (this is actually a theme that Tim O'Reilly has hit upon several times as well). Of course, this means that for things-that-libraries-care-about, like books and so forth, Google will increasingly be both a discovery and services platform.

Today, Google announced that they were combining all of their silos into their primary search interface. Despte the huge user interface challenges associated with this strategy, Jeff Jarvis observes in BuzzMachine that the impacts of this move will probably be pretty profound, and will almost certainly cause additional stickiness.

If you think for a moment about the incredible things that Google can do in their Book Search product - try running this book search on Drew Faust for example - then there are increasingly few places to "make a impact" in the areas of search, discovery, and access. One of the things that Google has not done, so far at least, is to fully widgetize Google Book Search. There is only a limited degree to which one can embed their page turner into external applications. The Random House widget (BISG presentation) has some very nice and appealing features that encourage it to be viral, and customizable by other users such as bloggers. The Harper Collins widget (IDPF presentation) also has some of this functionality, and I think overall widgets will see continued evolution for marketing, sales, and ultimately data integration.

I have to imagine that digital libraries should be aggressively seeking some of this kind of functionality too. For example, we should have lightweight DSpace and Fedora repository widgets that permit users to embed high value digital library content into other locations, such as blogs, and that provide basic functionality for those objects, like page turning, video display, and so forth. (I would imagine that Fedora's default action class would particularly well lend itself to such an applet). There might be embeddable descriptions associated with the objects.

One of the challenges for widgets is that they must be easily found, or their naming and creation obvious. Otherwise, they simply will not get used. This means that digital library widgets have to permit easy entry into the workflow of the collaborative user. Workflow insertion is a very difficult problem for content distributors - or DADs, as Mike Shatzkin describes them.

Libraries particularly have been very passive in content creation and distribution, at best adopting a "come and get it" mentality. This is not a winning approach. Instead, digital libraries need to be pushy, actively encouraging their content to be re-used, re-combined, and separated from its source. Widgets can help.

Gotta love the spirt.

The day immediate following the IDPF Conference, the Book Industry Study Group held another conference with overlapping and similar topics called "Making Information Pay."  One of the presentations of that half-day summit was by Allen Noren, who is O'Reilly Media's Director of Online Marketing.  

This presentation (in pdf version) is instructive because it discusses some of the ways that publishers and information providers can take advantage of the wide range of applications and technologies available to re-think how to market books, make their content available, and provide utility to readers and information seekers.  O'Reilly has been a leader in these areas, and this talk is an important window in the thinking behind some of the responses to a transformative publishing environment.  

Many thanks to Allen for allowing me to publish it here.

2007:05:13

Dale Flecker from Harvard is making available his slides and accompanying podcast presentation from the IDPF Digital Book 2007 conference recently held in New York.

Dale writes:

E-books are still a minor part of most libraries’ services. Few believe they will remain so. However to reach a point where we have a robust infrastructure for library e-books, many things will need to be attended to. This talk attempts to shed a little light on those by looking at some of the developments over the past 15 or so years in the related domain of e-journals in libraries, a domain that has reached considerable maturity.

2007:05:12

This week I was invited to speak at the International Digital Publishing Forum Digital Book 2007 conference. I helped organize a panel on libraries, publishers, and search, which included Dale Flecker from Harvard University, Tom Turvey of Google, and myself. All of the presentations are quite distinct, although Dale and I both addressed some of the same themes, at different points and with different objectives. (I may be able to present Dale’s slides here in the next few days). I was not able to get Google’s slides (no surprise), but my talk in pdf and the accompanying podcast are here.

In brief, I argue that a fundamental and traditional covenant between publishers and libraries is threatening to rip and must be mended. Libraries have served as the institutions that have safeguarded the cultural heritage held in our published literature. As we move to a digital world, it is imperative that we re-initiate this core understanding of our obligations and responsibilities, and craft new norms supporting the permanent deposit of digital material in trusted repositories.

This does not mean necessarily that every library is provided digital files; perhaps a subset, such as a federation formed out of the Digital Library Federation; perhaps a mutually supported enterprise, similar to the position of Portico in the journals world; perhaps at worst only national libraries. But with the transition to digital fast upon us, we must brook no delay in our discussions.

Publishers should have many motivators to participate in this re-weaving, the foremost among them being their traditional strong allegiance and participation in enhancing social welfare. But beyond this, digital deposit could serve as an otherwise unavailable trusted escrow service for publishers, protecting them against unforeseen or accidental losses. Indeed, it is conceivable that the provision of this service could help serve as a financial support for the maintenance of digital files and the administration of the digital book repository.

Rarely for my tongue-tied self, perhaps the podcast stumbles more eloquently towards my thinking, and I welcome feedback and comment.

It is increasingly clear to libraries, publishers, and information providers that the value of books and other published media content stems from their aggregation, and the services that aggregation generates for enriching personalized and community use. In other words, the value of a digital collection of books is not from the books, but from the collection. As in so many other areas, aggregation trumps the value of granular content, and in ways that reach far beyond the ability to provide a search interface across a larger mass of material.

In this situation, the contract concerns of authors are arguably radically transformed. Increasingly the value of the rights associated with a book is less “the book” but rather the bundle of information that the book represents, and the value generated from its aggregation with other works. If I was an author, I would be concerned about negotiating rights not only for issues relating to the production, sale, and marketing of my “book” but also for the additive value that is generated by the publisher and its partners in their aggregation of my book with other materials, both text and – as in the case of the very largest media companies – the combination with other media properties. Further, publishers are increasingly distributing content to other players, including Google and Amazon, which benefit from the aggregation of services across content. If a particular work strongly informs a content recommending function for a particular market niche, is the author without recourse to compensation for that enhanced value to the service? Does she share in the advertising revenue from re-combinant services that do not explicitly present the book as “book”?

Authors are not negotiating for these rights now, and publishers would probably be loath to raise awareness of this suite of issues. There is no best practice guide, and not much in the way of useful prior art – no new-generation license templates exist for authors and publishers.

For publishers, there are further complications. Publishing firms seek to avoid their titles going out of print, and in a digital world there is enhanced value from long tail access and consequent sales, with potentially reduced unit marketing costs; these factors shift the calculation of the advisability of letting registration lapse or of negotiating a rights reversion to the author – particularly digital rights.

But if rights do lapse, then what happens to the “smartness” that the book’s digital content contributed to the repositories in which it resides? Reversion might imply a loss of information to the system. Do social sites need to redact the book’s content from all digital permutations? Can personalization, recommending, and other social services continue to utilize the underlying media content if the publisher removes the book from page views and downloads? If a book reverts to an author, does the repository index have to be recalculated if inclusion rights are not re-negotiated with the rights-holder/s?

How many of these issues are informed by the existing case law relating to web search and harvest? Perhaps the periphery has been litigated, but I am very curious how the current treatment of intellectual property law would contort to accommodate these issues.

2007:05:10

I just gave a talk at the National Library of Medicine entitled, "The Inline Interface."

(Now also available online as a talk at SlideShow).

This is a stub post; I hope to get back and explain this talk in more narrative at a future point.

I want to express my thanks to those who attended on a Friday morning, including Director Donald Lindberg, Director Clement MacDonald, Sheldon Kotzin, Dianne McCutcheon, Jennifer Marill, and many others.

I look forward to coming back!