2010 Fall Assembly

LAUC-B Fall Assembly

Tuesday, 16 November 2010

8:30 10:00 am

Morrison Library

MINUTES

I. Call to order by LAUC-B Chair Susan Koskinen

II. Welcome by University Librarian Tom Leonard

Tom Leonard graciously shared his notes on his welcoming remarks, which follow:

I dont know what Brewster Kahle will say, it will be interesting if we see things the same way, but I am here today with the feeling that an era of cooperation is breaking out in handling the books digitized in the past few years.

We are no longer waiting around and speculating on what Judge Chin will decide about the Google Books Settlement. We take as a given that litigation here will go on and on.

We are talking about making the world of digitized books better, though the other means possible e.g. Bernie Hurley at the recent Google partners meeting. HathiTrust, with 7.2 million volumes, is gearing up for expanded access to public domain and the concept of lending digital copies. Last year Hathi was the size of an average ARL Library, today it is about the equivalent of the University of Minnesota 1.7 volumes are now in the public domain. UC Berkeley is talking with libraries of comparable size about quietly doing this.

The Samuelson Law, Technology and Public Policy Clinic (a group of faculty and fellows that spans Berkeley Law and the Information School) would like to work to realize the potential of copyright to green light the digital lending of books, the access to orphan works, and the ordering of books by authors into the public domain. Michigan, Stanford, and others, including Google, are working on ways to discover if there are rights holders and to do something to change the current landscape that serves no ones interest: Authors not being clear on what rights they gave up and publishers on what rights they received.

More cooperation is in sight in the preservation and storage needs that the downturn in funding as well as the digitized legacy collection create. WEST, the Western Regional Storage Trust, will pick off journal runs that are backed by trusted digital files. The more difficult job of determining the optimal number of paper copies of monographs then storing that number safely across the US is proceeding by baby steps, by CDL and IMLS for instance at an October meeting in Chicago with many other partners.

Prospectively, ARL libraries have been consulting with AAUP about investing in the digitization of back files so that ebooks of university presses are the sorts of products we want as part of our collection, allowing for multiple users, sharing, and so forth. Print-on-demand (POD) services will be rolled out in the New Year across UC, giving us a better chance to see if ebooks and our digitized legacy collection presented in this form fall into the comfort level of our users.

III. Introduction of New LAUC-B Members

Susan Koskinen welcomes Heather Thams, Elliott Smith, Josh Schneider, Daniel Hensley, and Michele Morgan. She also bid a fond farewell to retiring librarian Hisayuki Ishimatsu.

IV. LAUC: Update & call for agenda items or concerns for the LAUC Spring Assembly in Santa Barbara, March 10-11, 2011

 

  • Four UC Berkeley delegates will attend the LAUC Statewide Assembly in the spring. 
  • Distinguished Status for librarians: ULs charging a group to review distinguished status and produce a report by January a short time line. UC Berkeleys Susan Wong and, perhaps, Lynn Jones will be members of the group.

 

V. LAUC-B Committee Reports

A. CAPA Report by Chair Lynn Jones

  • Lynn Jones thanks the members of CAPA for great work over the past year. Changes in the membership of CAPA include Rita Evans taking over for Paul Atwood, Kathryn Neal and Jennifer Nelson joining, and Lynn Jones and Nick Robinson completing their service.
  • The full CAPA report is available at http://lib.berkeley.edu/LAUC/minutes/new_index.html. Highlights of their work include 14 candidate interviews for five jobs and completion of 55-60 reviews. CAPA held their fall peer review workshop on October 26th and have plenty of updated information on peer review on the CAPA webpage on LAUCB site: http://lib.berkeley.edu/LAUC/capa.  

B. Committee on Diversity Report by Chair Debbie Jan

  • Debbie Jan focused on the committees work during the coming year, which includes a job shadowing program (for library staff), a conference shadowing program (for library staff), and a library staff mentoring program. Volunteers are needed for all three programs. 
  • Tom Leonard added that he hopes to announce in the next few months a new Diversity Fellow position. The Fellow will be based in the Bancroft Library and work on a collection they hope to acquire. A donor may provide funding.

VI. Report from the Chair, Susan Koskinen  

  • S. Koskinen introduced the current members of ExComm and welcomed Brian Quigley as incoming CAPA chair.  
  • New LAUCB website! S. Koskinen thanked Harrison Dekker and Julie Lefevre as well as Corliss Lee and Margaret Phillips for their efforts. The website has a lot of new information and a calendar of events will soon be available too. 
  • S. Koskinen asked LAUC-B members to say yes to any requests from Nominations Committee to run or be appointed to positions within LAUC-B and LAUC Statewide.
  • Congratulations to our newest distinguished librarians, Barclay Ogden and Gary Handman. The Distinguished Librarians Reception will be held on December 1st at 4:00-6:00 p.m. in the Morrison Library.
  • Fiat Flux, the 2011 LAUC-B Conference: The committee has submitted a request for proposals and LAUC money available for those who wish to present.

VII. Questions and Other Announcements

None.

VIII. Guest Speaker, Brewster Kahle, "Digital Librarians, Digital Libraries"

The last time that Brewster Kahle was in the Morrison Library, he was launching the Internet Archives Wayback Machine. He thanked UC Berkeley for taking a risk in supporting the Wayback Machine from the start.

Rather than discuss the future of all things online, Kahle emphasized that we are living in the future now. Kahle presented what the Internet Archive has that could be of use to librarians and asks what librarians need out of digital libraries to do their jobs.

The Internet Archive is a non-profit located in the Richmond District of San Francisco: http://www.archive.org/about/about.php. The Internet Archive employs about 300 people, many of whom are scanners. Funding comes from government contracts, foundation grants, and keeping the money they receive by being frugal.

The Internet Archive works with a variety of open access projects. They have different collection types: free texts (public domain, the Linux to Googles Microsoft), modern texts for the blind or dyslexic, and a modern lending library. The Internet Archive is no longer scanning at NRLF or SRLF but is still scanning items from the Bancroft Library and UCLA. In the last five years, the Internet Archive has worked to build a public domain library.

Lending Library (http://www.archive.org/post/312815/digital-lending-library): But what about in-print and out-of-print materials still in copyright? Libraries are worried because of the legal risks involved. The Internet Archive has made available works still in copyright for the blind and/or dyslexic! Google did not do this. A new project for is the Internet Archives Lending Library, which digitally lends books. The process is managed using Adobe Digital Editions users can download a book for two weeks, one copy at a time. Own to loan! The Lending Library currently holds up to 10,000 books and they want to add to this number, especially for out-of-print materials.

Scanning (http://www.archive.org/scanning): The Internet Archive designed its own book scanner, the Scribe. Scanning services are available. It is hard to start again when a project subsides, so keep using it! Even when Microsoft bowed out, the Internet Archive continued scanning. They digitize about 1000 books per day and about 200 microforms per day. It costs about $30 per book and 10 cents per page. The Korean, Chinese, and Japanese governments are all funding digitizing books with the Internet Archive and the Internet Archive is working with them to keep materials openly accessible.

Open Library (http://openlibrary.org/): Open Library is meant to be a Wikipedia of books, with a webpage for every book ever published an open catalog. Everything is open-source. They get metadata from multiple sources, then weave the data together. They have about 200,000 users per day, 100,000 edits per month, 1 million ebooks, and 23 million records. It is wiki-editable, so please contribute. It is blind and dyslexic accessible and they are constantly trying to make it easier to use, including on the devices where people want them: Kindles, iPads, etc. It costs about $1 million per year to keep the Open Library up-to-date. If libraries put 5% of their acquisitions budgets into digitization and posting digital materials online, so much would be accessible to all.

Audio (http://www.archive.org/details/audio): Audio is very popular, especially music collections, but also lectures, news, and audio books. The Internet Archive has 500,000 user contributions and offers free hosting forever. Please contribute!

Moving images (http://www.archive.org/details/movies): Including archival films, current news, lectures, etc. They currently have about 400,000 user contributions. The Prelinger Archives (http://www.archive.org/details/prelinger), a collection available through the Internet Archive, has been reconverted six times since it was acquired to keep up with technological formats. Reprocessing takes about a month on clusters of computers. The Internet Archive is up for taking on this roll, but they need more collections. They will cover all of the costs, so contribute lectures and other moving image content.

Wayback Machine (http://www.archive.org/web/web.php): Every two months, a snapshot of the web is archived. Many use it for retrieving lost sites. It is not yet searchable but Kahle would like it to be. He is not quite sure yet how to make it a really useful tool for research around particular subjects and is open to ideas.

Archive-it (http://archive-it.org/): Archive-it is a pay service allowing users to build custom, curated collections. There are currently 1200 curated collections and over 2 million URLs. It is searchable and browsable. Kahle says they are doing well at archiving and availability, but they do not know how to make it a better service for researchers. Generally, the Internet Archive will start with collecting and move forward and iterate from there. They are also collecting television programs and they hope to make TV news collections searchable before the next US election cycle.

Digital Archive for Your Collections: The Internet Archive can be a backend infrastructure for collections for organizations that do not yet have and cannot build it themselves. Collections could be lectures, photos, books, web collections, etc. For example, a new federal court documents collection is being built, and being populated by robots, as an open alternative to PACER. You can help by sending books, lending ebooks, providing feedback, using the collections, and coming to the Internet Archive open lunch on Fridays. The Internet Archive is buying property in Richmond, CA for climate controlled space to hold physical materials. You can donate your own books or library withdrawn books to the Internet Archive. We are all digital librarians now. We need to work together to build this world.

Q&A:

  • The Internet Archive is trying to get publishers to allow books in web browsers, which are more open than apps for iPads or closed reader platforms like Kindles.
  • There is no metasearch for Internet Archive materials other than use of large search engines. The Internet Archive exposes data in all sorts of ways so that the search engines can find it. Kahle suggest adding open library or archive to your search, which should push Internet Archive resources higher in search results.
  • What about image collections? The Internet Archive has worked with NASA on NASA Images (http://nasaimages.org/) using Luna imaging software. They are still novices with images, but are open to projects, so contact Kahle if you have a project in mind.
  • Tom Leonard on the HathiTrust: 24% of its materials are in the public domain, it has new search capacity, and is providing access to them. What is bad about it? Kahles response: If it is all we can muster, okay, but researchers are using texts in a different ways (including text mining) now and HathiTrust is too restricted in how materials can be used (e.g., only one item at a time). Kahle sees it as locking up the public domain. Corporate licensing restrictions are highly troubling. Creating a lots of copies allows us to push the law in ways that make sense for our society from a number of different points. If there is only one access point, it is easy to lock it up and restrict it. 
  • The Internet Archives text collections are currently hot research corpora for computer scientists, so associated interface and infrastructural technologies are moving forward. For now. New technology can help with problems such as OCR on old typefaces. 

 IX. Adjournment