New and Noteworthy

Citation

(1999), "New and Noteworthy", Library Hi Tech News, Vol. 16 No. 5. https://doi.org/10.1108/lhtn.1999.23916eab.001

New and Noteworthy

Library of CongressDecision Upheld by US Court of Appeals

On 29 January, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia issued a judgment (No. 97-1659) upholding the decision of Librarian of Congress James H. Billington in a lawsuit brought against the librarian by the Satellite Broadcasting and Communications Association (SBCA). Under the US Copyright Law, the Librarian of Congress reviews and adopts or rejects determinations of the Copyright Arbitration Royalty Panel (CARP). The lawsuit sought to overturn the librarian's adoption of the CARP's determination that raised the royalty rates for superstation and network signals under the satellite carrier compulsory license, 17 U.S.C. 119.

The three-paragraph judgment noted that, by law, the librarian must adopt the recommendation of the CARP unless he "finds that the determination is arbitrary or contrary" to the provisions of title 17, 17 U.S.C. sec. 802 (f) and that the court, in turn, may set aside the order of the librarian only if it finds that the librarian "acted in an arbitrary manner" in adopting the recommendation of the CARP.

The court held that "Neither the CARP's determination nor the Librarian's adoption of it was arbitrary".

The SBCA sought to overturn a decision that changed the rate satellite carriers have to pay to carry nonlocal broadcast TV programming on their systems to 27 cents per subscriber per month for network and for each superstation signal and to zero for the retransmission of local superstations. Previously the rates had been 6 cents for network signals, 17.5 cents for superstations subject to FCC syndicated exclusivity rules, and 14 cents for superstations not subject to these rules.

The Copyright Arbitration Royalty Panel had recommended the change in rates to reflect the "fair market value" of the programming, as required in accordance with a 1994 amendment to the law.

The copyright system has been a part of the Library of Congress since 1870. In addition to administering the copyright law, the US Copyright Office creates and maintains the public record of copyright registration and recorded documents, provides technical assistance and policy advice on copyright issues to Congress and executive branch agencies, offers information to the general public, and obtains deposits for the collections of the Library of Congress.

Receives $3.5 Million DLP Grant from AT&T

AT&T is donating $3.5 million to the Library of Congress National Digital Library (NDL) Program to support continuation of this initiative to make rare and important materials accessible through the Internet by the year 2000. A portion of the grant, the largest corporate donation to the NDL Program, will go toward digitizing materials from the Library of Congress' collections of Alexander Graham Bell and Samuel F.B. Morse.

The AT&T grant completes the Library's effort to raise $45 million in private money for the NDL Program. The US Congress has committed $15 million in appropriations to the program, for a $60 million total over five years.

The electronic materials in the Alexander Graham Bell Family Collection and the Samuel F.B. Morse Collection will be added to the more than 40 collections already available from American Memory, a project of the NDL Program http://www.loc.gov/. Approximately 1,400 items from the Bell Collection are already online.

From the Bell Collection, sketches for the first telephone and Bell's laboratory notebooks and journals will be digitized. From the Morse Collection, the first telegraph tape and personal papers will be accessible to users everywhere. The majority of the grant will go toward overall NDL Program development.

Library of Congress: Public Affairs Office, 101 Independence Avenue SE, Washington, DC 20540-1610; Tel: (202) 707-9217; Fax: (202) 707-9199.

Cornell UniversityLibrary Project to Study Preservation Methods

Funded by a $123,928 grant from the National Historic Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC), archivists and computer systems specialists at Cornell University have embarked on an 18-month project to study new record-keeping technologies and recommend ways to ensure that electronic records are preserved for the future.

"There are things we have been collecting for over 50 years that suddenly aren't being generated on paper," said Elaine Engst, director of Cornell's Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, unversity archivist and project director. "How do we preserve the history of the university in the 21st century?"

It's partly a hardware problem, she said. Because of the rapid changes in computer technology, reading today's computer record tomorrow may be akin to finding a machine to play a 78-rpm record. But that's only one of the worries, she added. Even if the physical data can be retained, archivists will have to work with it in new ways.

For example, Engst pointed out, the university has kept student records in electronic form since 1982 so there are no formal transcripts of grades. "You don't have a single record listing all of a student's courses and grades; you have student records, courses, course information, grade information. You assemble data from those into a transcript when you need it."

Another example is university policy manuals, which are no longer printed and distributed but maintained on a Web site. "Web sites are four-dimensional since they vary in time," she said. When policies are changed, the computer files that make up the Web site are changed. "How will you be able to know what the policy was years ago?"

The research project coincides with a major revamping of Cornell's administrative computer system, known as Project 2000, which will use new software supplied by the PeopleSoft Corp. The research team will work with administrators setting up the new system and recommend procedures that can be built in to preserve critical records. One goal is to create "metadata", or data about data. These data describe records, indicating what sort of hardware and software were used to create and store them as well as who created them, when, and why.

The project focuses on two of Cornell's 12 colleges ­ the College ofArts and Sciences and the College of Human Ecology ­ chosen, according to the release, because they have very different administrative structures. Project staff already have conducted extensive interviews with managers in both colleges and at the university administration level.

"It is the intent of the project in focusing on Human Ecology and Arts and Sciences to produce results that can be implemented in a wide variety of academic institutions", Engst said. The work builds on the experience of other recent NHPRC-funded projects, especially those at the University of Pittsburgh and Indiana University, she said.

The project team brings together expertise in both library archiving and computer technology. Cheryl Stadel-Bevans, who holds graduate degrees in library and information and science and in mathematics, is the full-time project archivist. Others on the team are Oliver Habicth, computer systems specialist with the Cornell Institute for Digital Collections; Philip McCray, technical services archivist with the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections; and Eileen Keating, university records manager. Peter Hirtle, assistant director of the Cornell Institute for Digital Collections, formerly with the National Archives, is project advisor, and Lee Stout of Pennsylvania State University serves as consultant.

Cornell University: c/o News Service, Surge 3, Judd Falls Rd., Ithaca, NY 14853; Tel: (607) 255-4206; Fax: (607) 255-5373, cunews@cornell.edu, http://www.news.cornell.edu.

Special Libraries AssociationSelects Scheeder as New President-Elect

Donna W. Scheeder is the newly elected president-elect of the Special Libraries Association (SLA). Scheeder is deputy assistant director of the Congressional Research Service, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. She and the newly elected members of SLA's board of directors will be installed 9 June 1999 at the 90th Annual Conference in Minneapolis, Minnesota, when Susan S. DiMattia, editor for Cahners Publishing Company, will be sworn in as president of SLA. Scheeder will serve as president-elect of SLA until June 2000.

Elected to other SLA offices and the board of directors for the coming year are:

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  Chapter cabinet chair-elect ­ Juanita Richardson, director of knowledge management, Canadian Surety/ Canada West, Toronto, Ontario.

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  Division cabinet chair-elect ­ Doris Helfer, science librarian at California State University, Northridge.

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  Board of directors ­ Lynn Tinsley, head of the Engineering and Science Library at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh; and Mary "Dottie" Moon, group leader of competitive intelligence, United Technologies Research Center, East Hartford, Connecticut.

Several other current SLA officers will assume new positions for 1999-2000. They are L. Susan Hayes (Oak Arbor Publishing, Boynton Beach, Florida) as past president; Sandy Spurlock (Lovelace Respiratory Research Institute, Albuquerque, New Mexico) as chapter cabinet chair; and Joan Gervino (American Bankers Association, Washington, DC) as division cabinet chair.

Special Libraries Association: 1700 Eighteenth St., NW, Washington, DC Tel: 20009-2514; (202) 234-4700; Fax: (202) 265-9317, http://www.sla.org.

University of MichiganGrant to Expand Making of America Project

The University of Michigan (UM) has received a $430,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to expand UM's Making of America (MoA) project.

Known as the American Voice, 1850-1876, the 18-month conversion effort will expand the online collections and tools developed during the original MoA project, and will seek to establish benchmarks and guidelines for the digital preservation of materials, according to project director Maria Bonn, assistant librarian at the University Library.

The primary purpose of the effort, according to a UM release, is to produce a handbook for the library community and the Mellon Foundation, which documents a model of accomplishing both preservation and access, says Bonn. The effective methods and costs represented in the handbook will assist the Mellon Foundation in evaluating and guiding future conversion projects, and establish a model for conversion that is cost-effective, migratable to future technologies, and of interest and available to a wide audience.

According to the release, more than 7,500 monographs will be converted and added to the current MoA online collection of 19th-century American journal articles and monographs. The resulting electronic resource will represent a significant percentage of materials published in the United States during the latter half of the 19th century, and will be available freely over the Internet.

The American Voice will draw upon the preservation, system development, interface design, and digital conversion expertise of the UM Library. The project began in February and will conclude in July 2000.

University of Michigan: News and Information Services, 412 Maynard, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1399; Tel: (734) 647-1848; E-mail: jmendler@umich.edu; http://www.umdl.umich.edu/moa/.

OCLCReaches Accord with National Library of Australia

The National Library of Australia and OCLC have reached an accord that will enable the 1,300 Australian libraries that use the National Library's new Kinetica resource-sharing service to become full or partial OCLC members, thus gaining access to the OCLC Cataloging and Resource Sharing services.

The accord signals the intention of both organizations to develop a close working relationship to ensure that Kinetica's National Bibliographic database is updated with contributions to WorldCat, the OCLC online union catalog, from Kinetica libraries. Australian libraries will gain access to the more than 40 million WorldCat records, and OCLC libraries outside of Australia will gain increased access to Australian bibliographic records. The National Library of Australia and OCLC also intend to examine further opportunities for global resource sharing, according to a recent OCLC release.

DA Information Services Pty. Ltd., OCLC's distributor in Australia, will provide training and local support of OCLC users in Australia.

Kinetica, the Networked Services Project of the National Library, was established in 1998 as the successor to the Australian Bibliographic Network. It provides Australian libraries with interlibrary loan and cataloging services and access to national and international databases: http://www.nla.gov.au/kinetica/.

Improves International Access to Its Services

Libraries in 14 countries will receive improved telecommunications access to OCLC services due to a strategic alliance between OCLC and Digital Island, a privately held global applications network founded in 1995 and headquartered in Honolulu, Hawaii: http://www.digisle.net/.

According to an OCLC release, Digital Island bypasses the domestic and international Internet infrastructure and replaces it with a managed service directly from OCLC to key networks and Internet service providers (ISPs) in served countries. This provides a more direct route for the communications to travel, reducing the number of hops between the library and OCLC. The Digital Island link does not replace existing methods of accessing OCLC but serves as an alternative for libraries in areas where current access is slow due to congestion caused by heavy use.

The service is available to Beijing, China; Hong Kong, China; Taipei, Taiwan; Tokyo, Japan; Seoul, South Korea; Singapore; Sydney, Australia; Sao Paulo, Brazil; Moscow, Russia; Monterrey, Mexico; Madrid, Spain; Paris, France; Munich, Germany; Amsterdam, The Netherlands; and London, United Kingdom. Other service areas are planned.

Digital Island provides global IP network services to multinational corporations by integrating applications, patented technologies, and an intelligent network.

OCLC and PAISBegin Merger Negotiations

OCLC and PAIS, Public Affairs Information Services, have announced the signing of a letter of intent that could lead, following negotiations, to the merger of the two organizations.

PAIS, a not-for-profit corporation with offices in New York City, publishes the PAIS International database, which contains over 450,000 records of abstracted and indexed literature from over 120 countries. OCLC is a non-profit corporation based in Dublin, Ohio, which serves over 33,000 libraries in 67 countries.

The letter of intent results from extended discussions, started in June, between board chairs and senior management of each organization. According to the letter of intent, subject to satisfactory negotiations, and approvals by both boards of trustees and appropriate state authorities, the joining of resources of the two entities would potentially result in OCLC providing access to PAIS databases via the Internet, and supporting the expansion of existing PAIS databases and the construction of new OCLC/ PAIS databases.

Subject to the conclusion of the due-diligence process, the parties hope to conclude an agreement and complete the transaction by April 1999.

OCLC: 6565 Frantz Rd., Dublin, OH 43017-3395; Tel: (614) 764-6000 or (800) 848-5878; E-mail: oclc@oclc.org.PAIS: http://www.pais.org.

Library of International RelationsTo Add Four Million Pages to Internet

More than four million pages of legal, business, and international documents will be added to the Internet's World Wide Web by the Library of International Relations, according to a Library of International Relations release.

According to the release, four million pages of information represent the accumulation of scanned images of library materials. Approximately 30,000 pages have been converted from print to image each week since 1991 when the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) Information Center began to convert the collection of its three libraries: the Chicago-Kent Law Library, the Library of International Relations, and the Stuart Business Library. The images retain all of the information on the pages of the books and other items that have been scanned, including graphs, charts, diagrams, foreign languages, signatures, marginalia, and interlineations.

The data are now available using standard Internet Web browsers and the Internet as the distribution vehicle. They represent a variety of disciplines and types of materials. By agreement with the Department of Foreign Affairs of Canada, the IIT Information Center will provide all bilateral treaties between Canada and the United States to the general public at no cost. Additional materials include:

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  Reports of cases decided by the US Supreme Court.

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  The United Nations, US, South African, and Korean treaties series.

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  International trade statistics.

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  UN General Assembly documents.

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  Census documents related to Illinois.

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  All UN Commission on Human Rights documents.

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  Environmental information.

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  UN press releases.

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  Exams used by law students for study purposes.

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  Writings by Chicago-Kent faculty.

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  Case reports of many Canadian courts.

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  Illinois Administrative Codes.

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  Federal government regulations.

Library of International Relations: 565 W. Adams St., Chicago, IL 60661-3691; Tel: (312) 906-5615.