SCHOLARLY COMMUNICATION ISSUES
A NEWSLETTER FOR THE UIUC COMMUNITY
Issue No. 42
April 22, 2003
Paula Kaufman, University Librarian
Editor
IRAQI
CULTURAL HERITAGE DISASTER
In an attack on the cultural history of Iraq, looters and arsonists ransacked
and gutted the National Library this week, transforming the nation's
intellectual legacy into a wasteland of smoldering remains of books and
artifacts dating back thousands of years. In much of the library, not a single
recognizable book or manuscript could be seen
among the ash. Also destroyed was Iraq's principal Islamic library, home to some
of the world's most priceless early Qurans and other scholarly material
pertaining to the Islamic faith. Except for wooden card catalog drawers and a
carved-wood service counter, which somehow escaped the flames, nothing was left
in the National Library's main wing except its charred walls and ceilings. Built
in 1977, the three-story National Library building housed all books published in
Iraq, including copies of all doctoral theses. It preserved rare old books on
Baghdad and the region, historically
important books on Arabic linguistics, and antique handwritten manuscripts in
Arabic that were gradually being transformed into printed versions. The Library
was known to also house manuscripts from the Ottoman and Abbasid periods of
Middle Eastern history. "Books that survived a fire set by ransackers are seen
on the floor of the Iraqi National Library in
Baghdad
Wednesday, April 16, 2003 (Click on link below). Looters and arsonists
ransacked and gutted
Iraq
National Library and the country's principal Islamic library, dealing another
terrible cultural blow to a society that prides itself on its universities,
literature and educated elite.” ALAWON: American Library Association Washington
Office Newsline Volume 12, Number 33 April 17, 2003
http://cctr.umkc.edu/user/fdeblauwe/iraq.html
USING REQUIREMENTS FOR INSTITUTIONAL PORTALS
The PORTAL project report 'Stakeholder Requirements for Institutional Portals' is now available. The report is the result of consultation with over 600 individuals and combines the results of the PORTAL online survey with interview and focus groups data gathered at 5 UK tertiary education sites. Work package 3 of the PORTAL project "Defining User Requirements for Institutional Portals" aims to provide consultation with stakeholders regarding their needs and a literature review of the outputs of portal projects in the UK and overseas. Three deliverables have been developed. 1) Literature Review. As part of the literature review a table of portal functionality has been developed. The table provides a view of the functionality included in institutional portals at a selection of sites both in the UK and overseas. The table will be updated throughout the course of the project. The table can be accessed - as an Excel spreadsheet - at www.fair-portal.hull.ac.uk/downloads/PortalFunction.xls. A full literature review will be added shortly. 2) Online Survey. As part of the research conducted for the report "Stakeholder Requirements for Institutional Portals" an online survey was developed. The portal survey can be accessed via the link on the menu bar or by following the link to www.learndev.hull.ac.uk/portal_survey/. 3) Report. The report "Stakeholder Requirements for Institutional Portals" involved consultation with over 600 stakeholders. The full report can be accessed at www.fair-portal.hull.ac.uk/downloads/stakereq.pdf
The executive summary can be accessed as a pdf document at
www.fair-portal.hull.ac.uk/downloads/ExecSummary.pdf The report's conclusions can be accessed as a pdf document at
www.fair-portal.hull.ac.uk/downloads/Conclusions.pdf or at
http://www.fair-portal.hull.ac.uk/WP3.html
EBOOK
PUBLISHER AND RANDOM HOUSE REACH DEAL
RosettaBooks and Random House have reached a deal to issue electronic versions
of books by authors such as Margaret Atwood and John Updike. The two companies
were embroiled in a lengthy dispute over some previously released electronic
books that settled last December. BNA's Internet Law News (ILN) -
4/10/03
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/news/editorial/5595494.htm
ROUNDUP OF E-BOOK INITIATIVES
In “Where Did All the Books Go?” Syllabus Magazine, April, 2003, Steve Epstein presents an overview of e-book projects, especially open-access initiatives like Project Gutenberg and the Online Book Page. The article also covers more scholarly and more flexible initiatives such as the DLF architectures for digital libraries, OAIster, and DSpace. FOS News 4/6/03 http://www.syllabus.com/article.asp?id=7474
BUY THE MUSIC AND COPYING RIGHTS TOGETHER
The St. James Music Press publishes sheet music in priced, printed books. But it has a nice policy: when you buy one of its books (or at least one of its books in a certain series), you buy permission to copy the contents and share the copies with others. Some publishers remove the price barriers without removing permission barriers, e.g. making a work free to read but not to print, or free to copy once but not multiple times, or free for personal web sites but not for public archives. St. James Music Press is removing permission barriers without removing the price barrier. It's not open access, but it's half of open access and very creative. FOS News 4/4/03 http://www.sjmp.com/default.htm
AAP USING CONTENT DIRECTIONS TO REGISTER DOIs
Content Directions, Inc. (CDI) and the Association of American Publishers, Inc. (AAP) announced recently that they have signed a comprehensive DOI Registration Agreement. As a result, AAP will begin registering Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) for its published materials (including research studies, industry reports, white papers, etc.).
For a live example of the technology as applied to an AAP report, click on the following DOI for "What Consumers Want in Digital Rights Management (DRM): Making Content as Widely Available as Possible in Ways that Satisfy Consumer Preferences" – DOI and for information specifically about AAP's "Digital Policy/Ebook Project," including the white paper "Numbering Standards for eBooks" which selected the DOI as an integral part of its eBook numbering standard and specified guidelines for its use, click on the following DOI: http://www.publishers.org/press/releases.cfm?PressReleaseArticleID=145
UNEARTHING THE OBSCURE IN DIGITAL COLLECTIONS
One of the major goals of the Digital Library Federation (of which UIUC is a
member) is to make available the rare book and artifactual material that can
only be accessed under restricted-use conditions. But with scanning, digitizing
and improved indexing, this material can now be widely distributed. Of course,
there's still the issue of locating material in various collections. It's
relatively simple for search engines to find digitized material on static HTML
pages. It's much more difficult when the content is housed in different
databases and formed into so-called dynamic pages only when retrieved. Digital
resources are often invisible because the search engine doesn't delve into the
CGI (Common Gateway Interface) that ports resource information to the Web.
Consequently, these resources are generally accessible only to those who know to
look in digital library repositories, generally at universities which are
developing the collections in these repositories. DLF's goals include developing
a set of metadata that works across multiple databases and facilities.
(Syllabus
1 Apr
2003) ShelfLife, No. 101 (April 10 2003)
http://www.syllabus.com/article.asp?id=7474
WIKI
WATCH
A wiki—just one of the emerging and disparate communication technologies that
sail under the banner of "social software"—is an expandable hypertext system of
interlinked Web pages that allows any user to edit any page. Easy to learn and
use, wikis are good for collaborations, discussions, storing information or just
exchanging e-mails. While their popularity is currently overshadowed by blogs,
David Mattison, access services archivist at the British Columbia Archives,
predicts you'll be hearing a lot more about wikis in the future. There are
plenty of applications in the library field, he says, "both behind the scenes
where they are being used, and in public customer service areas where you could
create a librarian-administered, self-serving knowledge bank." Among his
suggestions: a readers' advisory or book-rating wiki, a suggestion box wiki, an
FAQ wiki, a collaborative story created by children, or a guide to using the
library wiki by friends and neighbors. The National Science Digital Library
offers several, including
http://annotations.comm.nsdlib.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl, and
http://sourceforge.comm.nsdlib.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?WikiResources. Wikis can
also be used to create a more flexible type of Web log, as in such "wiki-like"
Web content management systems SnipSnap [http://snipsnap.org/space/start].
ShelfLife, No. 101 (April 10 2003)
http://www.infotoday.com/searcher/apr03/mattison.shtml
NATIONAL ARCHIVES HISTORICAL DOCUMENT BONANZA
The National Archives has just made life easier for Internet users looking for
information from its historical records database. While they represent only a
small fraction of the archives electronic holdings, more than 50 million
historical records have been made accessible to researchers, genealogists and
other interested parties. Before the system became available, people had to
either visit the Archives and spend hours combing through documents or request
the files by phone and pay to have them mailed. The database draws from the
records of 20 federal agencies, and records were selected because of their
analytical and statistical nature. Most deal with information that can be easily
looked up based on specific names, dates, organizations, cities or states. The
database URL is
http://www.archives.gov/aad/. (Yahoo! News
4 Apr 2003)
ShelfLife, No. 101 (April 10 2003)
THE
FUTURE IS NOW: MIT PRESS LAUNCHES PRINT-ON-DEMAND PROGRAM
Saying that the time has arrived to end "a perennial problem for book
publishers," the MIT Press this week announced that it has officially launched
an ambitious print-on-demand (POD) publishing program to keep available titles
on the press's backlist regardless of demand. In partnership with Edwards
Brothers printing, the MIT Press
Classics Series now offers more than 250 titles, with the list scheduled to
include 1750 titles by the year's end. Orders are routed directly to Edwards in
Ann Arbor, MI for production and fulfillment, with
U.S.
customers promised delivery of their books within seven business days. The model
could be especially good news for university presses,
whose specialized lists and short-run titles suffer acutely from the costs of
warehousing, printing, and fulfillment. The value of POD has been touted by
university presses for several years, with the results not quite living up to
the hype. But MIT officials say this program is different. For more
information, see
http://mitpress.mit.edu/Classics Library Journal Academic News Wire: April
10, 2003
CROSSREF HITS MILESTONE, SURPASSES 200 MEMBERS
CrossRef, the collaborative effort of publishers to offer navigation of online
content via DOI-based citation links, announced that it has surpassed the
200-member mark,
doubling the number of members from last year. In addition, CrossRef officials
say that "several hundred thousand non-journal DOIs, including books and
conference proceedings," have also been added to its extensive linking network.
CrossRef now covers more than 7,600 journals and books, and 7.5 million
individual content items. Unlike URLs, which become obsolete when an online
entity changes location, the DOI provides a permanent name associated with an
object's location in a readily updateable directory. Most libraries today are
implementing local link servers and recognize that DOIs enhance their linking
capabilities. CrossRef (www.crossref.org)
was established by scholarly publishers as an independent, non-profit entity in
2000. Library Journal Academic News Wire:
April 10, 2003
TAYLOR AND FRANCIS POSTS MAJOR GAINS
Soft economic conditions apparently didn't have much effect on UK-based
scholarly publisher Taylor & Francis, as the company reported that FY2002
pre-tax profits rose a stellar 23 percent to 32.9 million ($52 million).
Revenues were up 7.3 percent, to 147.4 million ($230 million). The company's
journal division had the largest growth in 2002
with sales up 11.4 percent, to 71 million. Sales in the book group rose 3.8
percent. Growth was driven almost entirely by internal initiatives, as T&F's
lone acquisition
in 2002 was the 2.9 million purchase of Fitzroy Dearborn. Last year, T&F cut its
U.S. work force, and this year the company executives said T&F plans to stop
publishing
in "peripheral areas" while expanding its presence in core subjects such as
medicine, nursing, and psychology. The company released a total of 2,193 new
titles in 2002, up
from 1,788 in 2001. Growth in journal revenue was helped by the publication of
24 new journals; T&F plans to publish 27 new titles this year. Online
subscriptions in 2002 were 70 percent of institutional subscribers, up from 50
percent in the previous year. Library Journal Academic News Wire: April 10,
2003
INTERNET VIA THE POWER GRID
Technology enabling Internet access via the electric power grid is maturing, and
could become a powerful new rival to cable, telephone and wireless companies in
the business of providing high-speed Internet access to homes, says the New
York Times. Seven companies have been licensed by the FCC to conduct field
tests in about a dozen communities. But, the piece posits, even if the
technology works, the open question remains: is there a business model that can
turn a profit?
http://www.corante.com/internet/redir/20593.html
CONNECTIVITY COSTS ADDING UP
The cost of connectivity is starting to add up. The extra fees for cable, cell
phones and high-speed Internet have created a series of continuing monthly
charges that users can't escape. Research at Columbia University in the late
1990's suggests that an increasing percentage of household income is going to
connectivity, but research at
Rutgers
suggests that American families only spend half as much as they would be willing
to pay
for the technologies. Sari Boren, a designer of museum exhibits from Cambridge,
Mass. says it's addictive. "They get you hooked, and then you can't let go. A
big part of what bothers me about the monthly payment thing is that no matter
which of these services you subscribe to, you know they're going to keep raising
the rates."
http://www.corante.com/communications
ACLU LOSES DIGITAL COPYRIGHT BATTLE
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has lost in its attempt to defang the
Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). U.S. District Judge Richard Sterns shot
down the ACLU's challenge to the DMCA, saying there was "no plausibly protected
constitutional interest that...outweighs N2H2's right to protect its copyrighted
property from an invasive and destructive trespass." The ACLU was also asking
that researcher Ben
Edelman be immunized from potential DMCA suits for trying to reverse-engineer
N2H2's code. Sterns said that the suit was premature since Edelman had not yet
been sued. The ACLU has not yet decided whether to appeal the ruling.
http://www.corante.com/policy/redir/20599.html
APPLE
COMPUTER SINGS
Apple Computer is in talks with Vivendi Universal to buy Universal Music Group,
the world's largest record company, in a multi-billion dollar deal that would
reshape the record business. The deal "would instantly make technology guru
Steve Jobs, Apple's co-founder and chief executive, the most powerful player in
the record industry," says the Los Angeles Times. The story says discussions
have been under way in secret for several
months, though Apple hasn't yet made a formal bid, and that Apple is interested
in owning Universal because it's on the verge of release of a new Internet
service that "some music business insiders believe could pave the way for
widespread online distribution of songs." http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/5611142.htm
FORMATS OF THE FUTURE
OCLC has published a report, Five Year Information Format Trends, which "presents data and forecasts about information format trends that will likely shape the information landscape of the future." Four areas are examined: traditional materials, scholarly materials, digitization projects, and web resources. There is a section on eprint archives.
FOS News 4/10/03
THOMSON TO BUY ELITE INFORMATION GROUP
In another deal at the intersection of IT and IC (Information Technology and
Information Content), Thomson Corp. has agreed to acquire Elite Information
Group. Elite was purchased for $14 a share, a total of $122 million, making the
acquisition multiples 1.63 x 2001 revenue ($68.8 million) and 20x EBIT ($6.1
million), moderate
multiples for a profitable business in the current market. The Los
Angeles-based company produces law practice management solutions that will fill
a gap in West's market coverage: large practice management tools. West's ProLaw
is widely used in small- and mid-sized firms, while Elite is in more than
one-half the top 100
U.S.
law firms, and one-third of the top 1,000 law firms. Providing "Taskware" for
the buyers of its content creates additional points of contact between West and
its customers, going beyond the legal associate researcher to encompass back
office functions, CRM and office-wide work flow. Integrating tasks with content
is one of the key unmet needs
identified by our recent content integration tour and Briefing, so this deal is
clearly in tune with the market forces we are seeing. Outsell's e-briefs, April
11, 2003
IBM DEVELOPS WEBFOUNTAIN
Outsell’s recent work on content integration revealed that integration of
diverse bodies of content, and extracting meaningful information from it all,
remains an unrealized dream of most organizations. Outsell looks for a new
technology from IBM called WebFountain to take a good run at the problem.
WebFountain is designed to extract actionable information from large stores of
unstructured and semi-structured text, both inside and outside the firewall. In
Outsell's opinion, WebFountain has a number of things going for it: a) Initial
solutions in beta are concrete, tangible applications such
as corporate reputation management, tracking buzz and trends on the Web, and
market analysis. b) WebFountain is an open platform that can be enhanced with
third-party technologies and contributions by business partners, including
content providers. c) Finally, this is an exciting new Content Software
Technology that is not cobbled together on venture capital money - it will have
the sales and marketing muscle of Big Blue behind it. Outsell thinks that both
IC and IT companies should be watching WebFountain as a potential partner and/or
competitor. A core strategy is to develop
WebFountain as a platform on which others can build their applications, so there
will be plenty of room for participation by both content and technology
players. Outsell's e-briefs, April 11, 2003
NEW GERMAN COPYRIGHT LAW MEETS NEEDS OF SCHOLARS, BUT NOT PUBLISHERS
A hotly contested copyright law adopted recently by Germany's Parliament gives universities and research institutions considerable leeway to digitally distribute copyrighted materials among students and scholars without paying extra charges. The law has been welcomed by academics. But academic publishers, who fought tooth and nail against the bill, say it will force them out of business. The bill was designed to bring German law in line with a two-year-old European Union directive covering a wide range of digital-copyright issues. But the directive is silent on the issue of copyright exemptions for education and research. Publishers say they will challenge the new legislation with European authorities in Brussels. The law in effect grants exemption from copyright restrictions, for specified nonprofit purposes, to "privileged institutions," meaning schools, higher-education institutions, and public research organizations. Two key changes inserted at the last moment stipulate that only "small parts" of copyrighted material can be distributed this way, and that access to such material shall be for "a defined, limited, and small" number of people—for example, the students in a particular course. Access must be controlled by the use of passwords or a similar mechanism. Moreover, to remain valid, this section of the law must be reviewed by Parliament and re-approved at the end of 2006. Until now Germany has had very restrictive legislation that, for example, made it illegal in most cases for scholars to put copyrighted material on even an internal computer network. Academics say the new law basically gives them the same rights over copyrighted material in digital form as they already have over such material printed on paper. Just as they may photocopy pages from a book and distribute them to students registered for a class, they will now be allowed to post such material on a Web page with access limited to those same students. But the changes did not satisfy everyone. Georg Siebeck is head of a loose group of 35 academic book publishers, who include the majority of German publishers producing books for academe and have combined annual revenues of $2-billion. He says allowing only "small parts" of copyrighted material to be distributed is no guarantee for publishers' commercial interests. Mr. Siebeck, who is the owner of a small publishing house, says that digital copies of works should in fact benefit from greater copyright protection than paper copies since, unlike paper copies, digital copies are as good as the original. The new law, he says, "doesn't provide publishers with an incentive to publish in digital form." Tomas Hoeren, a professor of law and director of the Institute for Telecommunications and Media Law at Westfälische Wilhelms University, in Münster, says the new legislation will make Germany, along with the Scandinavian countries and the United States, among the nations with a relatively tolerant approach to the use of copyrighted materials for specified educational purposes. France and Spain are among those with a more restrictive approach. http://chronicle.com/free/2003/04/2003041407n.htm
INCENTIVES TO PRESERVE DIGITAL MATERIALS
OCLC has issues a white paper, written by Brian Lavoie, The Incentives to Preserve Digital Materials: Roles, Scenarios, and Economic Decision-Making. In it Lavoie argues that economic issues are a principal component of the research agenda for digital preservation. Economics is fundamentally about incentives, so a study of the economics of digital preservation should begin with an examination of the incentives to preserve. Securing the long-term viability and accessibility of digital materials requires an appropriate allocation of incentives among key decision-makers in the digital preservation process. But the circumstances under which digital preservation takes place often lead to a misalignment of preservation objectives and incentives. Identifying circumstances where insufficient incentives to preserve are likely to prevail, and how this can be remedied, are necessary first steps in developing economically sustainable digital preservation activities." FOS News 4/13/03 http://www.oclc.org/research/projects/digipres/incentives-dp.pdf
SCHOLARLY ASSOCIATIONS AND OPEN ACCESS PUBLISHING
John Willinsky’s article, “Scholarly Associations and the Economic Viability of Open Access Publishing,” Journal of Digital Information, 4, 2 (April 9, 2003), considers a number of economic issues that scholarly associations are confronting in moving their journals online, with a focus on the possible viability of an open access or free-to-read format. It explores the current content overlap between subscription-based and open access sources, and considers how these redundancies favor open access publishing and indexing. Willinsky utilizes the tax returns for 20 US non-profit scholarly associations to analyze current publishing revenues against costs, arguing that the associations could make up the loss of revenue posed by the open access publishing model through cost savings and other revenue sources, while serving their membership better through the increased readership in an era of declining subscriptions. Although the decision to publish journals in an open access format is by no means simply an economic one, the viability of open access publishing warrants serious consideration by scholarly associations that are currently determining what this new medium may mean for the circulation of knowledge." FOS News 4/12/03 http://jodi.ecs.soton.ac.uk/Articles/v04/i02/Willinsky/
FIVE BIGGEST TECHNOLOGY TRENDS
Despite our economic and geopolitical woes, the future is bright asserts David Kirkpatrick in Fortune. Technology is increasingly the solution to the world's problems, and it's getting cheaper and better. Fortune points to five trends that will help remake the world. 1) Standardization: ''An ever-widening array of technology tools are available in inexpensive, standardized form.'' 2) Open source software. 3) Wireless. 4) ''Data Comes Alive,'' a catch-phrase referring to new technologies that may dramatically enrich software capabilities. 5) Selling software as a service. ''Take these trends together and it is clear that a dramatic new set of inexpensive but powerful capabilities is emerging.''
http://www.fortune.com/fortune/fastforward/0,15704,442551,00.html
PEW
STUDY OF INTERNET EVADERS
A study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project has found that 42 % of
American adults are not connected to the Internet, even though two out of three
of those people have relatives or close friends who are. In addition, the
study's authors label as "Net Evaders" 20% of the nonusers who live in
Internet-connected homes where other relatives go online. And then there's a
category of "Net Dropouts" to characterize the 17% of nonusers who tried the Net
and didn't like it. The director of the Pew project says of the Net Dropouts:
"Some grew disillusioned with the online world. They decided it was just a time
swamp, or they never found what they wanted." (New York Times
17 Apr 2003)
Newscan 4/17/03
http://partners.nytimes.com/2003/04/17/technology/circuits/17shun.html
DESPITE DOUBTS, INTERNET REIGNS AS TOP INFORMATION SOURCE
More
than 70% of Americans now use the Internet, and nearly two-thirds of those
consider online technology to be their most important source of
information—despite some doubts about that information's credibility. According
to findings in Year Three of the UCLA Internet Report, even the newest
users of online technology consider it a vital information source. For the first
time, though, the credibility of information found online has declined. In 2002,
52.8% of users said that most or all of the information online is reliable and
accurate—a decline from 58% in 2001 and 55% in 2000. "A troubling split in
perceptions about the Internet is becoming increasingly clear," says Jeffrey
Cole, director of the UCLA Center for Communication Policy. "The Internet is
viewed as a vitally important source of information by new users and experienced
users alike, yet disturbingly large numbers of users do not trust what they find
online. If the Internet's importance for information is growing, but it
continues to be perceived as a source of unreliable information, then a
'credibility clash' is looming. How long will the Internet be valued as an
important source of information, if the material users find online continues to
be considered unreliable and inaccurate?" (UCLA Internet Report 11 Feb 2003)
ShelfLife, No. 102 (April 17 2003)
http://www.anderson.ucla.edu/admin_dept/media_rel/releases/2003/03internet.html
CREATIVE COMMONS SUPPORTS DISTANCE LEARNING & ONLINE EDUCATION
The nonprofit organization Creative Commons was formed on the idea that some
authors "prefer to share their works on more generous terms than standard
copyright provides." To expand access to high-quality content online (while at
the same time "reducing the legal friction and doubt" surrounding copyright
issues), Creative Commons has been helping such authors retain their copyrights
while allowing certain uses under certain specified conditions. Glenn Otis
Brown, the organization's executive director, says that "as the licenses grow in
popularity (licensors now number in the tens of thousands), they will grow in
value. Like any kind of standard, the licenses' benefits will build as the
community of users grows, as our language of rights and permissions gains
currency, and as our metadata becomes a technical lingua franca. This
standardization is particularly appealing in light of the growing number of
distance learning and online education projects blooming every day. Creative
Commons licenses and metadata, once widely adopted, will allow these otherwise
separate communities to harmonize their copyright policies and thus encourage
the sharing of information across specific contexts or cohorts. " ShelfLife,
No. 102 (April 17 2003)
http://www.syllabus.com/article.asp?id=7475
ACADEMIC JOURNAL POLICY DATABASE
The University of Cincinnati has launched the Academic Journal Policy Database (AJPD), which currently covers over 1700 journals. For each, it links to the journal's home page and to its page of policies e.g. on transferring copyright or accepting previously disseminated work. Registered users of the database (registration is free of charge) can update entries, add new entries, annotate journal records, and participate in a discussion forum. No registration is needed to search or browse the collection. At the moment, AJPD draws special attention to a journal's policy on accepting ETD submissions (electronic theses and dissertations), and in the future will draw attention to other specific policies. The AJPD overlaps somewhat with Project Romeo, which tracks journal policies on copyright and eprint archiving. The two projects are in conversation to see how to minimize duplicated labor. FOS News 4/15/03 http://www.etd.uc.edu/journal/
BOOK TITLE REVEALED IN PRIVACY CASE
On behalf of his client, the lawyer representing the customer at the center of a landmark case involving Denver's Tattered Cover Book Store and its fight to protect the privacy of customer records recently authorized Tattered Cover's legal counsel to reveal the name of the book that had been sought by law enforcement officials for more than two years. The title, Guide to Remembering Japanese Characters by Kenneth G. Henshall, had nothing to do with the case involving a methamphetamine lab. Bookstore owner Joyce Meskis, who knew the name of the book, chose to fight in court to protect the privacy of her customers' records. http://news.bookweb.org/1355.html
EPIC
STARTS PRIVACY INDEX
The Washington-based Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) is
establishing a new Privacy Threat Index to track the growing threat to privacy
resulting from the expansion of government surveillance. EPIC said it would
follow the color-coded scheme established for the Homeland Security Advisory
System by the Department of Homeland Security for the EPIC Privacy Threat Index.
The rankings from green, blue, and yellow to orange and red signal Low
Condition, Guarded, Elevated, High and Severe. Based on developments during the
past year, EPIC assessed the current level as Yellow. Among the factors cited
included: Expanded use of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which
permits the government to conduct surveillance without the general
safeguards required by the Fourth Amendment; The decision of the FBI to relax
the legally mandated accuracy requirement for the National Crime Information
Center, the nation's largest criminal justice database; Increased funding for
surveillance systems, including immigration control and video surveillance;
Possible consideration of the Domestic Security Enhancement Act, dubbed by some
as "Patriot II", that would further expand government surveillance authority;
Required use of biometric identifiers for routine identification documents
without associated privacy protection to assure personal information will not be
misused; Ongoing efforts by the FBI to extend the application of the
Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, which requires the
development of wiretap friendly communications services, to Internet telephony.
At the same time, EPIC noted that there were some hopeful signs: The United
States has so far rejected the development of a mandatory national ID card; the
proposal for the establishment of Total Information Awareness research program
has been suspended by Congress pending an investigation; the passenger profiling
system, CAPPS II, is under increased scrutiny.
http://www.epic.org/privacy/threat/pr.html
The scholarly communications are also available on line at http://www.library.uiuc.edu/administration/news.htm