Search results

The conference co‐ordinator and an invited speaker of the International Conference on Digital Libraries (ICDL) which took place in New Delhi, India, February 2004 provide an overview of the conference – one of a growing series of digital library conferences that bring together computer scientists and librarians. The objectives of this conference were to bridge the knowledge gaps between developing and developed countries; initiate capacity building activities in digital libraries; evolve a road map for the digitization of archives, manuscripts and libraries; provide a forum for facilitating interaction among participants; and formulate recommendations on digitization technologies and policies. Outlines the themes and topics covered and provides the main points of the inaugural address to the conference by the President of India as well as the three keynote addresses.

How can we digitize the spoken word in a way that maximizes its usefulness and accessibility over as long a period as possible? This editorial lists six issues: copyright and ownership; selection at both the collection and contents level; conversion, formats, and analog input; segmentation and structuring; metadata at both the bibliographic and contents level; and maintenance and refreshing.

The Folk Heritage Collections in Crisis conference pursued three themes: access, preservation, and intellectual property. The 100 invited participants were mainly middle‐aged, established, upper‐echelon professionals. What is interesting is how much agreement there was on issues like digital preservation and the use of encoded archival description. Participants saw the US copyright law as a barrier which neither upheld the rights of people of non‐European origin, nor facilitated the free movement of information.

Libraries tend to make assumptions about copyright. The assumption is that any work published since 1923 has copyright protection. This article is about how to discover key facts about the copyright status of a work using Copyright Office publications and the records of the Copyright Office itself. One question for libraries is whether it is worth the time and trouble to check the Copyright Office records. This depends both on the value of pursuing particular projects, and on how likely it is that a particular type of work fell into public domain through some failure to comply with all the legal formalities. A few preliminary statistics are provided.

In copyright law, the principle of moral rights is that some part of the creator’s personality has gone into each original work, and that that element of personality cannot be sold or transferred. Moral rights are not about money, which is readily divisible, but about concepts like reputation and integrity, which are not. This column offers three examples of international collaborations where moral rights expectations could clash. At present the best remedy for moral rights disputes in the neworked environment is for all parties to understand the potential for diverging expectations.

Every page on the Web represents an international publication. A client machine in Germany can easily access a server in Michigan, but the copyright laws in the USA differ in a number of significant ways. This column looks at two specific examples, one where there is a difference in the length of protection, and another where German moral rights legislation gives privileges not found in the US law. Although the examples are German and American, similar differences exist between other legal systems.

Systems librarians are a subspecies on whom everyone in the library world depends. Yet no one who has worked as a systems librarian would recognize themselves as having an exalted status. The problem lies in the dual nature of their work: they must be computer professionals and librarians simultaneously. And that is hard.

This editorial aims to discuss how technology has transformed the cultural map for libraries so that experiences in Taiwan, Iran, India, Greece, or New Zealand are relevant anywhere in the developed world.

The methodology draws heavily on cultural anthropology in looking at the cultural context and its changes over time.

Four sets of shared problems emerge in these articles: technology applications to solve specific library problems, user studies, cataloging issues, and electronic publishing. These are topics that librarians discuss around the world.

It is a commonplace today that technology has tended to equalize widely separated parts of the world. This is obviously true in terms of consumer goods, but appears to be less well accepted in terms of scholarly endeavor. The international and intellectual breadth of this issue can be seen as something to celebrate.

PDAs (personal digital assistants) have evolved from toys for geeks into tools with real potential for professionals. This editorial examines mental models about PDAs in order to understand the expectations of patrons and to help libraries plan for the future.