Showing posts with label Information. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Information. Show all posts

Tuesday, September 24, 2013

Celebrating the Freedom to Read


Banned Books Week is an annual celebration of the freedom to read. It began in 1982 in response to widespread censorship of books, and since that time over 11,000 books have been challenged in communities throughout the United States.

The American Library Association's Office for Intellectual Freedom has been documenting cases of challenged and banned books since 1990, and the ALA's Library Bill of Rights strongly supports free and unfettered access to information and ideas.

An illustration of the extent of the phenomenon is the remarkable fact that of the 88 titles featured in the Library of Congress' 2012 exhibition, Books That Shaped America, 30 have been challenged or banned at one time or another.

Saturday, February 11, 2012

Opposition Grows against ACTA / TTP

As with SOPA and PIPA domestically, opposition is mounting against the international agreements, ACTA (the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement) and TPP (the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement). Both have lacked transparency in the negotiating process and threaten to rewrite intellectual property laws, thereby impacting citizens' rights globally to access content on the Internet and innovate with information technology. The Electronic Frontier Foundation provides further information on ACTA and TPP, and Fight for the Future is sponsoring a petition for people living around the world against the implementation of both.

In Europe, numerous protests are planned for February 11, 2012:

Wednesday, January 18, 2012

Internet Archive Protests SOPA / PIPA

As stated on its blackout page: The Internet Archive believes that it is critical to protest and raise awareness of pending legislation in the United States: House Bill 3261, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and S.968, the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA).

We are going dark from 6am to 6pm PST on Wednesday, January 18 (14:00 - 02:00 UTC) to drive a message to Washington. We need your help to do this.

Legislation such as this directly affects libraries (pdf) such as the Internet Archive, which collects, preserves, and offers access to cultural materials. Furthermore, these laws can negatively affect the ecosystem of web publishing that led to the emergence of the Internet Archive.

For United States residents, please take action.

For non-US Residents: Sorry for dragging you into this, and if you are willing please sign a petition to the State Department to express your concern.

Wikipedia Protests SOPA / PIPA

On January 18, 2012, the Wikipedia community is blacking out millions of articles of content in the English version for 24 hours to protest pending US legislation: the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA). The decision to withdraw content was made by the global community of Wikipedia editors and is supported by the Wikimedia Foundation, which is the non-profit organization that operates Wikipedia and numerous related projects.

Wikipedia is urging US constituents to contact their elected representatives and voice their opposition to the two acts now under consideration in the House of Representatives and Senate. Wikipedia states further that:

SOPA and PIPA cripple the free and open internet. They put the onus on website owners to police user-contributed material and call for the blocking of entire sites, even if the links are not to infringing material. Small sites will not have the sufficient resources to mount a legal challenge. Without opposition, large media companies may seek to cut off funding sources for small competing foreign sites, even if big media are wrong. Foreign sites will be blacklisted, which means they won't show up in major search engines.

In a post SOPA/PIPA world, Wikipedia --and many other useful informational sites-- cannot survive in a world where politicians regulate the Internet based on the influence of big money in Washington. It represents a framework for future restrictions and suppression. Congress says it's trying to protect the rights of copyright owners, but the "cure" that SOPA and PIPA represent is much more destructive than the disease they are trying to fix.

To learn more about SOPA/PIPA, click here.

Thursday, July 21, 2011

Marshall McLuhan: Medium or Messenger?



Media theorist Marshall McLuhan [1911-1980] would have turned 100 today, July 21, 2011. Known for such provocative formulations as the medium is the message, McLuhan's work on communications and information technology anticipated much that is now commonplace in today's global village, another of his terms. The video here contains a dialogue between McLuhan and Norman Mailer, and was originally shown in 1968 as an episode of "The Summer Way" by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). The CBC's Digital Archives features McLuhan in a number of other television and radio clips that may also be of interest.

Saturday, January 15, 2011

Wikipedia Celebrates Tenth Anniversary

Wikipedia, the open access encyclopedia, is celebrating its tenth anniversary today, January 15, 2011, with hundreds of events scheduled around the world. Wikipedia's growth has been nothing less than phenomenal, with over 17 million articles of content distributed over 278 languages at present. English is the largest Wikipedia language, with over 3.5 million articles.

Wikipedia is hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation, which also sponsors numerous other projects, such as Wiktionary, Wikiquote, Wikibooks, Wikimedia Commons, etc.

For previous Wikipedia-related posts, click here.

Tuesday, August 31, 2010

New Consortium for History of Medicine Finding Aids

The History of Medicine Division of the National Library of Medicine (NLM) is pleased to announce the release of its prototype History of Medicine Finding Aids Consortium, a search-and-discovery tool for archival resources in the health sciences that are described by finding aids and held by various institutions throughout the United States.

The new resource crawls existing Web content managed by partner institutions, provides keyword search functionality, and provides results organized by holding institution. Links point to the holding institution's Web sites. Formats indexed consist of HTML, PDF and Encoded Archival Description XML. The project does not include content held in bibliographic utilities or other database-type information. Crawls are conducted monthly to ensure information is current and to capture new content as it is released.

Current Consortium partners are:

-- NLM History of Medicine Division, Archives and Modern Manuscripts Program
-- Columbia University Health Center Library Archives and Special Collections
-- Medical Archives of the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions
-- University of California-San Francisco Library Archives and Special Collections
-- University of Virginia Health Sciences Library Historical Collections
-- Virginia Commonwealth University Tompkins-McCaw Library Special Collections and Archives

NLM's History of Medicine Division invites libraries, archives and museums which include in their collections archival materials related to the history of medicine and health sciences to join.

For more information about the project or requests to join the Consortium, please contact John P. Rees, Archivist and Digital Resources Manager, NLM, at reesj@nlm.nih.gov, or visit the Consortium's web site.

Monday, June 7, 2010

Study of Open Access Publishing Project

A survey is being conducted by the Study of Open Access Publishing (SOAP) project, financed by the European Commission. The study is investigating publishing practices and attitudes towards Open Access publishing. More information about the SOAP project can be found on the project's public website.

The survey is primarily aimed at active researchers in public and private organisations, from all fields of the research in the sciences and humanities. It focuses on publication of research articles in peer-reviewed journals. All responses will be confidential and submitted anonymously. It should take about 10-15 minutes to complete. Results will be made publicly available in the second half of 2010.

The SOAP consortium represents key stakeholders such as publishers (BioMed Central Ltd (BMC), Sage Publications Ltd (SAGE) UK and Springer Science+Business Media Deutschland GmbH (SSBM)), funding agencies (Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) UK), libraries (Max Planck Digital Library of the Max Planck Society) and a broad spectrum of research disciplines.

It aims to study the new open access business models that have emerged as a result of the shift from print to digital documents and inform the European Commission and all stakeholders about the risks, opportunities and essential requirements for a smooth transition to open access publishing.

Tuesday, June 1, 2010

Beyond Impact Factor: Panel & Discussion

Beyond Impact Factor: Understanding & Supporting Scholarly Work in the New Academy
Wednesday, June 9, 2010, 9am-12:30pm
Pleasants Family Assembly Room, Wilson Library, UNC

The UNC Libraries' Scholarly Communications Committee invites you to a half-day panel and discussion, exploring alternative forms of scholarly output and their impact on academia. Please register by Friday, June 4. Beverages and refreshments will be served.

Panelists include:

Gary Marchionini (moderator), Dean, School of Information and Library Science, UNC
Phil Edwards, Instructor in School of Information and Library Science, UNC
Molly Keener, Scholarly Communications Librarian, Wake Forest University
Erin O'Meara, Electronic Records Archivist, UNC
Kevin Smith, Scholarly Communications Officer, Duke

Wednesday, May 26, 2010

The Internet Tidal Wave -- Then and Now

"The Internet Tidal Wave" was the subject of a memorandum delivered to Microsoft executives and other staff by Bill Gates fifteen years ago today, on May 26, 1995. The memo is supplied in its entirety on Wired Magazine's This Day in Tech, and is remarkable both for its prescience and for its observations that from today's vantage seem almost quaint, such as the following:
Most important is that the Internet has bootstrapped itself as a place to publish content. It has enough users that it is benefiting from the positive feedback loop of the more users it gets, the more content it gets, and the more content it gets, the more users it gets. I encourage everyone on the executive staff and their direct reports to use the Internet.
The memo was made available as a trial exhibit in a District Court filing for the antitrust case, United States v. Microsoft.

Tuesday, May 25, 2010

Journal Cancellations Review for UNC Health Sciences Library

The UNC Health Sciences Library (HSL) is preparing for reductions to the FY 2010/2011 acquisitions budget. As a result, we are again reviewing all areas of purchasing and asking publishers to keep price increases to a minimum for 2011. However, the primary strategy for finding reductions is to continue the 2009 comprehensive review of active journal subscriptions. Approximately 95 percent of HSL’s acquisitions budget is spent on journal or database subscriptions. To achieve budget reductions we must lower this recurring annual expense through targeted cancellations.

Last year, 670 users helped us evaluate our subscriptions and we need even more help this year. During the next couple of months we plan to post a list of potential journal cancellations and to ask for feedback. Here is some preliminary information about this review effort, which is also available via the Journal Review homepage:

Cancellation Criteria
Timeline
FAQ

Our goal is the same as for 2009: to keep as much valued content available as possible, minimizing negative impact on our community of users, while still achieving our budget reduction targets. Please keep checking the Journal Review homepage for updates and changes, and your opportunity to provide feedback. We value all feedback received and use it to help make the best decisions possible.

The 2009 review process helped greatly to reduce recurring annual expenses. Through extensive feedback from the UNC Chapel Hill Health Affairs community and beyond, and through aggressive negotiations with journal publishers for better pricing, we were able to cancel only 58 titles. We also implemented other changes to save costs, such as converting more journal subscriptions from print plus online to online only. However, these savings will not carry the HSL through another budget reduction in 2010/2011, so the comprehensive review continues.

While the need to reduce the acquisitions budget is driven partly by current economic conditions, carrying out a journals cancellation review is normal library practice, done most recently in 2009 and 2003. Furthermore, our acquisitions budget cannot keep pace with the annual price increases for journals in the health sciences, as the average cost of a health sciences journal is now $1,400.

Monday, March 8, 2010

Edward Tufte Named to Recovery Independent Advisory Panel

President Obama on March 5, 2010 named four members to the Recovery Independent Advisory Panel, including Edward Tufte, the noted expert on information design and visualization. The White House provided the following bio for Tufte on its blog:
Edward Tufte is Professor Emeritus of Political Science, Statistics, and Computer Science at Yale University. He wrote, designed, and self-published The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Envisioning Information, Visual Explanations, and Beautiful Evidence, which have received 40 awards for content and design. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the Society for Technical Communication, and the American Statistical Association. He received his PhD in political Science from Yale University and BS and MS in statistics from Stanford University.
On his own website, Tufte made the following comments on the appointment:
I will be serving on the Recovery Independent Advisory Panel. This Panel advises The Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, whose job is to track and explain $787 billion in recovery stimulus funds:

"The Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board was created by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 with two goals:

To provide transparency in relation to the use of Recovery-related funds. To prevent and detect fraud, waste, and mismanagement. Earl E. Devaney was appointed by President Obama to serve as chairman of the Recovery Board. Twelve Inspectors General from various federal agencies serve with Chairman Devaney. The Board issues quarterly and annual reports to the President and Congress and, if necessary, "flash reports" on matters that require immediate attention. In addition, the Board maintains the Recovery.gov website so the American people can see how Recovery money is being distributed by federal agencies and how the funds are being used by the recipients.

Mission statement: To promote accountability by coordinating and conducting oversight of Recovery funds to prevent fraud, waste, and abuse and to foster transparency on Recovery spending by providing the public with accurate, user friendly information."

I'm doing this because I like accountability and transparency, and I believe in public service. And it is the complete opposite of everything else I do. Maybe I'll learn something. The practical consequence is that I will probably go to Washington several days each month, in addition to whatever homework and phone meetings are necessary.
The others named to the Panel include Steven Koch, Chris Sale, and Malcolm K. Sparrow.

Tuesday, February 9, 2010

National Archives Solicits Input on Open Government Plan

The Open Government Directive of December 8, 2009 was issued to promote new lines of communication and cooperation between the Federal government and the American people. To meet the goals of Open Government, each Federal agency is creating an Open Government Plan. The National Records and Archives Administration (NARA) is soliciting public input on how it can promote transparency, participation, and collaboration.

Comments can be made via the following forums by March 19, 2010:

:: Open Government Idea Forum
:: NARAtions Blog
:: E-mail: opengov@nara.gov

NARA's Open Government Plan will be released on April 6, 2010 and made available online.

Wednesday, January 20, 2010

UNC Law School Sponsors Forum on Reader Privacy in the Digital World

Reader Privacy: Should Library Privacy Standards Apply in the Digital World?

January 22, 2010
8:30am - 12:30pm

UNC-CH School of Law
Room 4085

As reading expands from a world of print publications to electronic formats, can and should we retain traditional notions of reader privacy? Just what is the privacy we have come to expect as readers of books, and do these notions of privacy translate effectively in the world of Google Book Search, the Kindle, the Sony Reader --- or to the many pages of text we read online daily?

Keynote Speaker John Palfrey, Vice Dean for Library and Information Resources and Henry N. Ess III Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and Co-Director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, introduces a discussion about these issues of the policy and law of reader privacy.

Two panels of speakers explore whether special protection for readers of library books merit recognition in the electronic environment. Speakers include Jane Horvath, Global Privacy Counsel for Google Inc.; Andrew McDiarmid, Policy Analyst at the Center for Democracy and Technology; Lili Levi, Professor of Law at the University of Miami; Annie Anton, Professor of Computer Science at North Carolina State University and Director of ThePrivacyPlace.org; Paula J. Bruening, Deputy Director of the Centre for Information Policy Leadership at Hunton & Williams LLP; and Anne Klinefelter, Director of the Law Library and Associate Professor of Law at the University of North Carolina. Moderators are Bill Marshall, William Rand Kenan, Jr. Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of North Carolina and David Hoffman, Director of Security Policy and Global Privacy Officer at Intel Corporation.

This event is held in honor of Data Privacy Day 2010 and is sponsored by the University of North Carolina School of Law, the UNC Center for Media Law and Policy, the UNC Kathrine R. Everett Law Library, the UNC University Libraries, the UNC School of Information and Library Science and The Privacy Projects. The Privacy Projects thanks the Official Sponsors of Data Privacy Day 2010 for their support: Intel, Microsoft, Google, AT&T, and LexisNexis.

Questions about the event should be directed to Anne Klinefelter at klinefel@email.unc.edu.

Questions about Data Privacy should be directed to Jolynn Dellinger at jolynn@dataprivacyday.org.

This event is free and open to the public, but registration is required. To register, complete the form available online.

Thursday, December 10, 2009

UNC Symposium on Public Information in a Digital World

The School of Information and Library Science (SILS) and School of Government (SOG) at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (UNC-CH) will hold a day-long symposium called "Preparing Stewards of Public Information in a Digital World" on January 15, 2010 from 8-5 in the Warren Jake Wicker Classroom of Knapp-Sanders Building on the UNC-CH campus. The symposium will include panel discussions and other interactive sessions related to lessons and strategies for professional preparation to engage in public information stewardship. Registration for the symposium costs $45 (or $25 for students) and can be done online.

The themes of the day will include persistent issues in the stewardship of electronic records; the "policy game" – what it is and how to play it successfully; advancing professional values through IT policies and systems; and professional education – context and strategies of SILS and the SOG at UNC.

The symposium is part of Educating Stewards of Public Information in the 21st Century (ESOPI-21), which is a three-year collaboration between SILS and the SOG at UNC-CH, sponsored by the Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS).

ESOPI-21 is based on the belief that the stewardship of public information is a fundamental responsibility of a democratic society. Public information (e.g. agency records, government publications, datasets) serves as evidence of governmental activities, decisions, and responsibilities at the local, county, state, and federal levels. Providing appropriate access to public information promotes accountability, rights of citizens, effective administration of policy, and social memory.

Monday, November 9, 2009

Medieval Help Desk, or The More Things Change . . .

Originally broadcast in 2001 on Norwegian television, "Medieval Help Desk" was a skit from the show "Øystein og jeg" that has subsequently been viewed several million times on YouTube. The piece is credited to Knut Nærum, and features Øystein Backe as the assistant and Rune Gokstad as the monk. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose!

Thursday, October 15, 2009

International Open Access Week

The first International Open Access Week will take place October 19-23, 2009. The Open Access movement aims to promote free, online access to content that has traditionally been available on a subscription or fee basis. Many examples of open access journals can be found in the Directory of Open Access Journals, which currently tallies 4,371 journals world-wide. BioMed Central and the Public Library of Science (PLoS) are among the leading publishers that make scientific and medical literature freely available to the public.

The UNC Health Sciences Library has long been a strong supporter of Open Access, and a number of useful Open Access and Scholarly Communication resources can be found on the HSL web site. Beginning in April 2008, Congress mandated that National Institutes of Health-funded researchers must submit articles produced from such funding to PubMed Central no later than 12 months after publication in a peer-reviewed journal. To facilitate this process, HSL has prepared an NIH Public Access Policy Toolkit, and also manages a fund to support Open Access publishing fees.

On Monday, October 19, the UNC Libraries Scholarly Communication Committee will be sponsoring a panel on Perspectives on Open Access, which will feature Phil Edwards, UNC School of Information and Library Science; Kate McGraw, UNC Health Sciences Library; James Boyle, Duke Law School; and Kevin Smith, Duke Scholarly Communications Officer. The event will be held in Room 214, Davis Library, from 3:30-4:30pm, and is open to the public.

Wednesday, October 14, 2009

ICMJE Adopts Uniform Format for Financial Disclosures

The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) has adopted a uniform format for the disclosure of financial associations of authors. To date, different journals have had different reporting requirements, which has led to inconsistencies and confusion regarding potential conflicts of interest. The new form [PDF] is available on the ICMJE web site, as is a sample completed form [PDF].

Editorials announcing this new approach are being published by all journals that are members of the ICMJE. In this editorial, it is stated:

We ask authors to disclose 4 types of information. First, their associations with commercial entities that provided support for the work reported in the submitted manuscript (the time frame for disclosure in this section of the form is the life span of the work being reported). Second, their associations with commercial entities that could be viewed as having an interest in the general area of the submitted manuscript (the time frame for disclosure in this section is the 36 months before submission of the manuscript). Third, any similar financial associations involving their spouse or their children younger than 18 years of age. Fourth, nonfinancial associations that me be relevant to the submitted manuscript.

The ICMJE is also soliciting feedback about the new form until April 10, 2010, and is calling this interval a period of beta testing. The ICMJE will be meeting in late April 2010, and will make any needed changes at that time.

Monday, September 28, 2009

Banned Books Week 2009

Banned Books Week: Celebrating the Freedom to Read is observed during the last week of September each year, and for 2009 it runs from September 26 to October 3. Established in 1982, this annual American Library Association (ALA) event urges citizens not to take the fundamental democratic freedom of reading for granted.

First Amendment rights protect the unhindered access to information that is essential to a free society. Banned Books Week celebrates freedom of expression, for both authors and readers, and serves as a reminder that attempts at bans, restrictions, and censorship of books are ongoing. According to the American Library Association, over 500 books were challenged in 2008 alone; for further information, visit the ALA website.

Scientific, medical & health-related books are of course no exception to controversy and have also been challenged over the years, including such notable works as Galileo's Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, Ptolemaic and Copernican (1632), Darwin's On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection . . . (1859), Margaret Sanger's Family Limitation (1914), and more recent titles such as Our Bodies, Ourselves (1971) by the Boston Women's Health Book Collective.

Thursday, August 20, 2009

The Public Library of Science Launches PLoS Currents

Harold Varmus, Chairman and Co-Founder of the Public Library of Science (PLoS), has just announced PLoS Currents (Beta), an experimental website that is designed to accelerate the communication of research and ideas. The first project is PLoS Currents: Influenza, which utilizes Google Knol and Rapid Research Notes, a new database of the National Center for Biotechnology Information. Contributions on all aspects of influenza are being solicited, but will not be subject to in-depth peer review; instead a board of moderators will screen submissions, and all results and conclusions must be regarded as preliminary until such time as they merit publication in a formal journal.