Muddiest Point - Week 13

Lesk and Stiglitz both cite the need for gov't involvement in intellectual property rights.  But given that international economy is ever increasing how probable and helpful is gov't specific involvement in the case of property rights issues? 

Week 13 - Intellectual Property Rights

LESK, chapter 11

 

            Intellectual property rights issues are far from unsolved.    The topic is riddled with legal questions. How much gov't involvement is required in this new digital realm?  Will protection increases innovation or halt these advances?  This chapter does not try to answer but offers a myriad of examples of present solutions as well as future possibilities.  Lesk pulls out the old hard debate question of when is gov't involvement appropriate versus contract and technology solutions?  Democrat or republican?

 

Joseph E. Stiglitz, “Intellectual-property rights and wrongs”, Daily Times, Aug19, 2005. http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=story_16-8-2005_pg5_12

 

            A balanced view of property and intellectual rights as it pertains to ideas and materials.  Stiglitz argues for ideas behind the hindrance of innovations as well as fairness in idea and material development of products.

 

Clifford Lynch, “Where Do We Go From Here? The Next Decade for Digital Libraries”,  D-Lib Magazine, Volume 11 Number 7/8 July/August 2005, http://www.dlib.org/dlib/july05/lynch/07lynch.html

 

            A very dramatic article.  I think some would think of it as overly dramatic.  But I do like the set up as to the uncertainty of the digital libraries history, just as its future is surely uncertain. Not in the sense of being in danger.   More along the lines of what will its focus be, which feels rests firmly in broader context in Library and Information Science but the specificity of its purpose does seem to be cloudy. Lynch doesn't make any predictions of what the future brings merely where the future for D-libraries will be.  Location is much easier to predict than future principles.

 

Knowledge lost in Information. Report of the NSF Workshop on Research directions for digital libraries http://www.sis.pitt.edu/~dlwkshop/report.pdf

 

            This report is massive, dealing with every varied little essay and article ranging from usage issues, and management and stewardship of the d-library.  And all in the context of the future decade of the d-library.

Muddiest Point Week 12

Arms discussed that CMU created tehn deleted temporary user records when they accessed data from d-libraries.  In the current light of post PATRIOT ACT topics, is this temporary record creation the norm for d-libraries?  Are there any libraries that maintain user records, rather than deleting them?

Week 12 Security and Economics

ARMS, chapter 7

This chapter looks at two related topics:

1.  Methods for controlling who has access to materials in digital libraries.

2.  Techniques of security in networked computing.

Access Management: The control of access to digital libraries. Some refer to "terms and conditions." In publishing, where the emphasis is usually on generating revenue, expression "rights management". Each phrase is synonymous.

Framework of access management:

• Information managers create policies for access. Access is expressed in terms of permitted operations.
• Policies relate users to digital material. Policies that the information managers establish must take into account relevant laws, and agreements made with others, such as licenses from copyright holders.
• Authorization specifies access. Users need to be authenticated and their role in accessing materials established. Digital material in the collections must be identified and its authenticity established.  Users request access to the collections, request passes through an access management process. Users are authenticated; authorization procedures grant / refuse them permission to carry out operation(s)

Authentication

• Authentication which establishes the identify of the individual user.
• The second is to determine what a user is authorized to do.
• Variety of techniques are used to authenticate users; some are simple but easy to circumvent, while others are more secure but complex.

Chapter looks at basic methods of security:

• Encryption is the name given to a group of techniques that are used to store and transmit private information, encoding it in a way that the information appears completely random until the procedure is reversed.
• Private key encryption is a family of methods in which the key used to encrypt the data and the key used to decrypt the data are the same, and must be kept secret. Private key encryption is also known as single key or secret key encryption
• Dual key encryption permits all information to be transmitted over a network, including the public keys, which can be transmitted completely openly. For this reason, it has the alternate name of public key encryption.
• Digital signatures are used to check that a computer file has not been altered. Digital signatures are based on the concept of a hash function. A hash is a mathematical function that can be applied to the bytes of a computer file to generate a fixed-length number.

Delay of public key encryption:

• Patents are part of the difficulty.
• Agencies such as the CIA claim that encryption technology is a vital military secret and that exporting it would jeopardize the security of the United States. Police forces claim that public safety depends upon their ability to intercept and read any messages on the networks, when authorized by an appropriate warrant. 

William Arms, “Implementing Policies for Access Management”, D-Lib     Magazine,1998. http://www.dlib.org/dlib/february98/arms/02arms.html. 

LESK, chapter 10 “economics” (available in CourseWeb)

ARMS, chapter 6, economics http://www.cs.cornell.edu/wya/DigLib/new/Chapter6.html

Laws and technical solutions must both provide help with d-library economic and legal issues and frameworks. Chapter discusses alot of the framework for these legal and ecomomic issues, but reserves aspecial area of concentration on copyright:

In US law, copyright applies to almost all literary works, including textual materials, photographs, computer programs, musical scores, videos and audio tapes. Major exception: materials created by government employees. Initially, the creator of a work or the employer of the creator owns the copyright. In general, this is considered to be intellectual property that can be bought and sold like any other property.

In France, the creator has personal rights ("moral rights") which can not be transferred. Historically, copyright has had a finite life, but Congress has regularly extended that period. The owner of the copyright has an exclusive right to make copies, to prepare derivative works, and to distribute the copies by selling them or in other ways. It also allows publishers to develop products without fear that their market will be destroyed by copies from other sources. 

2 important concepts in United States law are:

• First sale applies to a physical object, such as a book. The copyright owner can control the sale of a new book, and set the price, but once a customer buys a copy of the book, the customer has full ownership of that copy and can sell the copy or dispose of it in any way without needing permission.
• Fair use is a legal right in the United States law that allows certain uses of copyright information without permission of the copyright owner. Under fair use, reviewers or scholars have the right to quote short passages, and photocopies can be made of an article of part of a book for private study. 4 basic factors that are considered:

 

                  -the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a                                       commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;

                        -the nature of the copyrighted work;

                        -the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted                              work as a whole.

                      -the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted                                work.

The first sale doctrine and fair use do not transfer easily to digital libraries. While the first sale doctrine can be applied to physical media that store electronic materials, such as CD-ROMs, there is no parallel for information that is delivered over networks. This uncertainty was one of the reasons that led to a series of attempts to rewrite copyright law, both in the United States and internationally. Until 1998, the results were a stalemate, which was probably good. Existing legislation was adequate to permit the first phase of electronic publishing and digital libraries. The fundamental difficulty was to understand the underlying issues. 

Muddiest Point Week 11

Do any scholars, librarians or computer science professionals feel that the digital library field might be better served by being divided into more areas? Perhaps the reason there is so much dispute is beacause persons in this field really are talking about not only different definitons but also about different functioning libraries or electronic frameworks.

Week 11 Social Issues

Social Aspects of Digital Libraries. The final report of UCLA-NSF Social Aspects of Digital Libraries Workshop. http://is.gseis.ucla.edu/research/dig_libraries/index.html.

 

Goals: to assess existing data that might inform research and to propose a research agenda that would pose new questions.

 

A definition of digital libraries: emphasizing that they extend and enhance existing information storage and retrieval systems, incorporating digital data and metadata in any form; the other emphasizing that design, policy, and practice should reflect the social context in which they exist.

 

Proposal of an information life cycle model to illustrate the flow of human activities in creating, searching, and using information and the stages through which information artifacts may pass: activity, inactivity, and disposal.

 

Research issues:

• Human-centered: a focus on people, both as individual users and as members of groups and communities, communicators, creators, users, learners, or managers of information. We are concerned with groups and communities as units of analysis as well as with individual users.
• Artifact-centered: a focus on creating, organizing, representing, storing, and retrieving the artifacts of human communication.
• Systems-centered: a focus on digital libraries as systems that enable interaction with these artifacts and that support related communication processes.

• Multiple disciplinary joint projects.
• Digital libraries be developed and evaluated in operational, as well as experimental, work environments.
• The project found a multitude of other research issues: hybrid D-libs, dynamic index and artifact issues, etc.

 

D-libraries represent a set of significant social problems that require human and technological solutions.

 

Attempting to define D-libraries led to 2 separate definitions though complementary:

1. "Digital libraries are a set of electronic resources and associated technical capabilities for creating, searching, and using information. In this sense they are an extension and enhancement of information storage and retrieval systems that manipulate digital data in any medium (text, images, sounds; static or dynamic images) and exist in distributed networks. The content of digital libraries includes data, metadata that describe various aspects of the data (e.g., representation, creator, owner, reproduction rights), and metadata that consist of links or relationships to other data or metadata, whether internal or external to the digital library.
2. Digital libraries are constructed -- collected and organized -- by a community of users, and their functional capabilities support the information needs and uses of that community. They are a component of communities in which individuals and groups interact with each other, using data, information, and knowledge resources and systems. In this sense they are an extension, enhancement, and integration of a variety of information institutions as physical places where resources are selected, collected, organized, preserved, and accessed in support of a user community. These information institutions include, among others, libraries, museums, archives, and schools, but digital libraries also extend and serve other community settings, including classrooms, offices, laboratories, homes, and public spaces."

 

The workshop concluded with the development of a life cycle information model: a cyclical model with hierarchical levels of activity, handling, and process.  The concluded that the individual research problems noted needed to be addressed individually, including exploring the definition for digital libraries used in the workshop project, as it was still thought to be vague in its usage of certain terms, i.e., information, community, library.

 

The Infinite Library, Wade Roush, Technology Review, 2005. (available in CourseWeb)

Could not find text in courseweb.

 

William Y. Arms, “A Viewpoint Analysis of the Digital Library”, D-Lib Magazine, Volume 11 Number 7/8, July/August 2005. http://www.dlib.org/dlib/july05/arms/07arms.html

 

The first federal research program: DARPA's Computer Science Technical Reports Project. Heated discussions during this research about whether the field of study should be called digital libraries or the digital library. "Should digital libraries be encouraged to develop independently or together? "

 

This article looks at D-libraries from three viewpoints: organizational, technical, and the user. Organizationally, the world consists of separate digital libraries, but for the user, this characteristic is obscured.

• Is this important? D-libraries research has neglected recognizing major innovations. Computer scientists resist the simple technology of the Web. Librarians disparaged the value of Web search engines. Greater emphasis must be made toward user viewpoint, and less on the technical and organizational.

 

Besides testing libraries on users, users should be more involved in development not just in criticism.  Rather than just suggesting user groups should perhaps be able to see the incremental suggestions and judge usability before and after.