Aargh. the State of Florida has eliminated funding for their library cooperatives, which help facilitate inter library loan, automation, and acquisitions, among other things. just zeroed them out. no warning.

Reposted from Florida library mailing list.

-------- Original Message --------

*/Funding for Florida Library Cooperatives Vetoed!/*

*//*

*/Action Needed: Please Write the Governor!/*Explain to Governor Scott why Multitype Library Cooperatives (MLCs) are important to you, your library and your community!

Governor Scott vetoed MLC funding for 2012-13. This loss of funds will hurt severely in the fiscal year beginning October 1. The funding can’t be restored this year, but Florida libraries badly need it to be restored for 2013-14. Please write Governor Scott and tell him why you believe that Florida’s Multitype Library Cooperatives are valuable – make it personal, and ask him to include funding for them in his 2013-14 Budget Recommendations.

Office of Governor Rick Scott
State of Florida
The Capitol
400 S. Monroe St.
Tallahassee, FL 32399-0001

You can e-mail Governor Scott from his website.

Please, write the governor, and ask your boards and friends groups to do so too! And please keep it positive! We need to show the Governor why he would want to recommend funding.

*/Here's the story /*

On April 17 when Florida Governor Rick Scott signed the state budget bill and presented his veto list, funding for Florida's Multitype Library Cooperatives was eliminated. This came as quite a surprise because there had been no indications that the Governor had any concerns with the funding or how it is used.

The Library Cooperative Grant program was established in law by the legislature in 1992, (F.S. 257.40 - 43) and has been continuously funded since 1993. Funding was proposed for 2012-13 by the Florida Department of State which administers the program using a formal application and review process with thorough reports and audits.

**

The program is an integral part of the provision of library service to Floridians. It supports interlibrary loan of materials among libraries across the state, administers the Ask-A-Librarian reference service, and provides critically needed training for library staff. The Library Cooperative Grants are necessary for the cooperatives’ operation and without this or replacement funding, the cooperatives will go away.

The Governor has been supportive of public libraries, the First Lady's support for reading is well known and respected, and since the legislature actually approved an increase from $1 to $1.5 million to enable the cooperatives to support library e-book services, library advocates were quite surprised by the veto.

**

Florida has five regional organizations that rely on these funds. All five are non-profit organizations with memberships and elected boards. Their combined service areas include all 67 counties.

The Library Cooperatives' funding comes from a variety of sources including federal funds sub-granted by the Florida Department of State's Division of Library and Information Services, member dues, sale of services, and the Library Cooperative Grants. Federal funds are used to support specific services but Library Cooperative Grant funds from the state are necessary for basic operations. These Cooperative Grants make up as much as ½ of the funding of the smaller Cooperatives.

Florida’s Library Cooperatives provide services to all kinds of libraries including academic, public, school, and specialized. While some services are provided directly to the public, most enhance the ability of libraries to serve their users better.

Services with direct public impact include the Statewide Delivery Service that moves Interlibrary Loan materials from library to library in response to customer need, and Ask a Librarian, a virtual reference service allowing Floridians to obtain information from librarians via chat, text, or e-mail.

**

Continuing education provided to library staff by Cooperatives has an indirect benefit for the public. With rapidly changing technology and information, it’s vitally important to keep library staff current and up to speed so they can do things like provide the public with popular e-books and help them figure out how to load content on their readers.

The Lbrary Cooperatives also help libraries participate in Interlibrary Loan in a variety of ways. They help libraries maintain their records in a national database so their books can be discovered by those needing them and requested. Some manage subscriptions for record loading and Interlibrary Loan, and they all provide training for library staff.

Some Cooperatives provide group purchasing plans or negotiate discounts for members.

**

In short, Cooperatives play an important role in the provision of library services to Floridians. If they are not around, another way will have to be found to provide the services. Library Cooperatives can’t survive long without state funding.

Library advocates will be working to demonstrate the cooperatives' value to Governor Scott and to persuade him to recommend funding in his 2013-14 budget proposal.

**

*/Value of MLC’s/*

*- Library Books Are Moved Around the State Cheaply*- MLCs coordinate Florida’s statewide library delivery service that moves over 435,000 library items annually. Savings over U.S. Mail - $750,000!

*- Floridians Are Served by Well Trained Library Staff*- MLCs train over 11,000 library staff each year, primarily to help people use computers. Market value - $1.4 million!

*- Floridians Receive Books & Materials from All Over the State*- MLCs help connect libraries through statewide interlibrary loan that shares more than 300,000 library items each year! - Value of loans – $7.5 million!

*- Florida Library Jobs & Jobs in Florida Libraries*– These web sites connect Florida libraries with jobs with job seekers. Employers use the sites to post positions. Job seekers use them to post resumes and search for positions. In 2010-2011, 224 position postings generated 446,425 searches by job seekers.

*- Reciprocal Borrowing Lets Floridians Check Out Books in Other Communities*– MLCs support agreements allowing residents to use libraries in other communities without charge. Libraries in the TBLC area alone lend over 500,000 items. Value of TBLC sharing - $12.5 million!

*- Floridians Can Find Materials in All Florida Libraries*– MLCs help libraries add their titles to the Florida Catalog’s 20 million items for Floridians to find and borrow.

*- Floridians of All Ages Can Use the Florida Electronic Library 24/7*- MLCs partner with the State Library & Archives of Florida promoting the FEL. 

A notable Valve engineer (before joining valve, he co-authored Quake, and was also largely responsible for engineering management for much of the graphics engine for Microsoft Windows NT) writes about taking up the challenge of wearable computing. Not just at Google (Glasses) - a lot of software and hardware people are turning to this.

http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/abrash/valve-how-i-got-here-what-its-like-and-...

"By “wearable computing” I mean mobile computing where both computer-generated graphics and the real world are seamlessly overlaid in your view; there is no separate display that you hold in your hands (think Terminator vision). The underlying trend as we’ve gone from desktops through laptops and notebooks to tablets is one of having computing available in more places, more of the time. The logical endpoint is computing everywhere, all the time – that is, wearable computing – and I have no doubt that 20 years from now that will be standard, probably through glasses or contacts, but for all I know through some kind of more direct neural connection. And I’m pretty confident that platform shift will happen a lot sooner than 20 years – almost certainly within 10, but quite likely as little as 3-5, because the key areas – input, processing/power/size, and output – that need to evolve to enable wearable computing are shaping up nicely, although there’s a lot still to be figured out.

Of course, hardware is only as useful as the software running on it, and there’s a vast web of intertwined issues and questions to be resolved about how the combined hardware-software system might work. What does a wearable UI look like, and how does it interact with wearable input? How does the computer know where you are and what you’re looking at? When the human visual system sees two superimposed views, one real and one virtual, what will it accept and what will it reject? To what extent is augmented reality useful – and if it’s useful, to what extent is it affordably implementable in the near future? What hardware advances are needed to enable the software? "

This is a *really important* case. Among many other things, it might impact on whether libraries can place foreign printed books on their shelves.

More from Public Knowledge:

http://publicknowledge.org/blog/supreme-court-will-hear-case-importation-and-

"This ruling could cripple markets for used books, movies, CDs, toys, and any other goods that contain copyrighted works. For example, many cars contain copyrighted computer programs, so used car sales for foreign-manufactured would become illegal (without the copyright owner's permission).

"On a broader level, this case fits into the continued battle that publishers and certain other distributors wage against secondary markets. As PK has previously explained, these publishers and other distribution intermediaries need to let go and accept that secondary markets are not illegitimate threats. In today's increasingly global economy, it's simply more and more unreasonable to expect that a publisher can price-discriminate based on where a particular buyer lives, and the law should certainly not be interpreted to wrongly prop up that business model."

and ... http://www.publicknowledge.org/blog/publishers-distributors-must-learn-let-go

"If copyright owners and their distributors could find an end run around the first sale doctrine, many would certainly seize the opportunity to extract more money from consumers every time copies of (already paid-for) works change hands.

The Second Circuit’s reading encourages copyright owners to move their manufacturing jobs abroad to get indefinite control over all of the copies, and they can use this control to keep used copies from competing with new copies in the marketplace. This harms both consumers and retailers who participate in secondary markets: consumers will have to pay full retail price for a new copy or go without, and retailers will have to shut down operations that support secondary markets (like eBay’s auctions or Amazon.com’s marketplace for used goods)."

and the SCOTUS blog, http://www.scotusblog.com/2012/04/orders-one-new-grant/

Read the rest of this post »

This last week, an amazing conference organized by the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology on orphan works and mass digitization was held at the Claremont Hotel. It was a unique gathering of 200 accomplished IP attorneys, practitioners, and libraries. The convention included an address by Maria Pallante, the Register of U.S. Copyright.

Here are my notes - a brutal condensation of the event, leaving out many worthy ideas and names - a mean attempt to highlight some of the most striking moments.

"Serving a public that knows how to copy"

http://blogs.publishersweekly.com/blogs/PWxyz/2012/04/14/serving-a-public-tha...

"This is a crucial point that is rarely noted: orphan status may be most common for materials generated on the margins of society — by people whose names and presence were never recorded, sometimes because of persecution; or by informal or transient organizations, groups, and movements that never had an opportunity to create their own legacy. For this content — which includes some of the most important artifacts that a society is likely to produce, documenting both its struggles and those who speak without a recorded voice — formal interventions are unlikely to make a meaningful difference because there is so little ownership data to work with. In these cases, Fair Use is often the appropriate apparatus. "

Baldur has a looong post on interactivity and ebooks. Some excerpts relating to the central thesis, which is really incredibly important:

http://www.baldurbjarnason.com/notes/lessons-in-interactivity/

"I’m beginning to worry that ebooks won’t have any place in the future of interactive media. Interactive non-fiction will grow to encompass the markets that today are served by print non-fiction and it won’t look anything like a book.

"In a way this has already happened. Reference books and cookbooks are being pushed out by reference websites and recipe blogs. In a few years, non-fiction as a genre will be dominated by apps and websites, the exceptions being the fields that legitimately require long-form text to deliver their message properly.

...

"Publishing is on a crossroads. It’s not just a question of how the form will develop but also who we want as an audience. As books lose their real-world presence, do we really want to just cater to a minority of voracious expert readers? A casual reader is never going to buy a bespoke reading device, but will buy an iPhone or iPad, where ebooks are competing with games, apps, websites, and comics.

...

"Books aren’t a special little snowflake. They are just a medium among many. Interactive media authors and web developers will go where their creative and practical goals are best served.

...

"Thinking that book unit sales will transfer on a one for one basis to ebook sales, possibly with slight changes due to lower prices and easier sampling, is one of the most dangerous assumptions you can make. It’s one that could ruin the industry.

"It’s just as likely that, after novels have transitioned to digital, ebook growth will stall because non-fiction in a digital era is a web and app genre, not a book genre."

PLOS has launched a new journal based on the open source platform annotum, PLOS Currents | Disasters.

What's striking about this is that annotum is built on wordpress, and offers a variety of built-for-the-web publishing affordances.

http://currents.plos.org/disasters/about/

"PLoS Currents is a new publication that aims to minimize the delay between the generation and publication of new research. The content is peer-reviewed, citable, publicly archived, and included in PubMed. By facilitating and accelerating the sharing of new findings and ideas, we hope that PLoS Currents will accelerate the research cycle itself.

"Authors use the Annotum publishing platform to create their submission, and are in complete control of the appearance of their article. With PLoS Currents, submission to publication can take place in a matter of days and there are no publication fees."

http://annotum.org/about/

"Project Objectives

Develop a simple, robust, easy-to-use authoring system to create and edit scholarly articles

Deliver an editorial review and publishing system that can be used to submit, review, and publish scholarly articles

"Project Approach

Modern platforms such as WordPress provide a model for a successful eJournal authoring platform – WordPress is extremely simple to set up and run, with rich, user-friendly web-based editing controls and easily-extended functionality using plugins. The WordPress platform not only provides free and open access to source code, with a diverse and productive ‘ecosystem’ of developers for themes, plugins, and extensions, but also numerous cheap or free hosting opportunities for technical and non-technical users alike."

Some of you on this list saw a presentation that I was privileged to
give at a Firebrand Technology conference a couple of years ago, on the
transformation in publishing. For a Univ. of Michigan event following
upon a DPLA meeting (but unconnected with DPLA) this last week, I gave
an updated version of that talk. Thanks to Paul Courant, and everyone
at the Univ. of Michigan Library and Press who made this talk possible,
and all who attended.

It's a relatively "academic" talk, but I noted this morning much
congruence with e.g. the DBW interview released today with James
McQuivey, who also noticed some of the fundamental shifts that I
discuss here.

Recording below. 81 mins.

"Digital books and flying cars"

http://www.lib.umich.edu/gallery/video
http://inst-tech.engin.umich.edu/leccap/view/gallery1-qs62mnczzu/16965

Videos of talks from the Personal Digital Archiving Conference are now available at the Internet Archive. This conference, held February 23-24, was initiated by Jeff Ubois, now of Macarthur. I had a small role in helping put this year's together.

The 2013 conference will be sponsored by the Library of Congress, and
will be held there, in Washington DC.

http://www.archive.org/details/personaldigitalarchiving2012pt1
http://www.archive.org/details/personaldigitalarchiving2012pt2

This was a wide ranging conference with many contributions; there's something for everyone. Just picking out a few, Jason Allen Scott's
has both high entertainment value and is troubling for the extent to
which it highlights how often major Internet services hit icebergs and
take their users' data down with them; David Rosenthal of Stanford and
LOCKSS talks about storage costs and storage density advances (not too
techie; not under-techie; just techie right). And Maciej Ceglowski of
Pinboard gives a beautiful talk, which covers essentially what it takes
to run a net business, and how much money he makes running Pinboard.

James McQuivey, of Forrester (and on this list), suggests that extrapolation from recently observed trends is not the smartest approach to adapting to a digital book environment:

http://www.digitalbookworld.com/2012/analyst-publishers-seeing-steady-print-d...

"In a Digital Book World survey conducted by Forrester Research, 5% of publishers believe their print sales will “decrease significantly” in 2012 versus 12% who thought the same about 2011 when asked in 2010. The percentage of publishers who predicted any print declines in 2012 was virtually unchanged versus the previous year.

" “There’s an optimism about the pessimism,” said James L. McQuivey, Ph.D., vice president and principal analyst at Forrester, who conducted the survey. “But in reality the decline hasn’t hit yet. And when it does, it comes in big drops, not gradual tapers – that’s what we learned from music and DVD, both of which tapered down until they hit big drops and shelf-space disappeared rapidly. The same will happen in books, probably by late this year and certainly in 2013.” "

goodreads reports phenomenal growth through facebook's timeline mechanism:

http://venturebeat.com/2012/02/29/goodreads-facebook-timeline/

"For Goodreads, too, the growth curve has been significant — nearly 6.5 million actions published to Facebook since the app’s Timeline launch, in fact.

...

"For many of us, books are a big part of how we identify ourselves to our friends. With a few well-chosen titles, you can paint yourself as an intellectual, an iconoclast, an aesthete, a gourmand — just about anything. Books are one of the more obvious sociological symbols we have, and Goodreads allows you to splash those symbols all over your Facebook Timeline, now more easily and expressively than ever before.

...

"“The exciting thing is, the more structure we can tell Facebook, the more interesting patterns that they can pull out and highlight,” [Chandler] said, echoing the sentiment we’ve heard from many developers: more structured data is a very, very good thing.

"Facebook uses that structured data to create summaries of app activity — tidy little aggregations of, for example, the books you started and finished within a given period of time. “The clickthroughs on those aggregations are a lot higher, because I think it’s more interesting to the users,” Chandler said.

"But it’s not just about quantity; Chandler said Facebook is also looking at how book objects are linked to other objects, such as authors. “If you’ve used Goodreads for a while, you can go back and see in 2011, you read four books by this author and three by that author. And it’s all because we’ve told Facebook about that structure,” he said."