From a WIred Magazine article: A federal judge on Wednesday threw out a copyright infringement lawsuit against universities that participated in a massive book-digitization project in conjunction with Google without permission from rights holders. U.S. District Judge Harold Baer of New York dismissed an infringement lawsuit brought by the Authors Guild and other writers’ guilds, […]
Serving Up Really Large Images
By on September 24, 2012
Recently I came across some open source software for serving really large images on the web, and as the proprietor of a photography web site, I was immediately intrigued. What if, I thought, I could put up the full versions of my photos (multi-megapixel) for viewing and discovery, but not for download? This is because […]
Swartz Faces Additional Charges in Alleged JSTOR Theft
By on September 21, 2012
Seth Finkelstein’s blog alerted me to the fact that the case against Aaron Swartz for stealing JTSOR files had expanded from four felony counts to thirteen. The overview of the revised charges: “Between September 24, 2010, and January 6, 2011, Swartz contrived to: a. break into a restricted-access computer wiring closet at MIT; b. access […]
First Book Comes Unglued
By on September 12, 2012
In June, nicely timed just before the American Library Association’s Annual Conference, Gluejar announced their first “unglued” title: “Oral Literature in Africa”. Well, now it is available for downloading in several different formats: PDF EPUB Kindle Kindle Daisy Full Text DjVu You can also read it online using the Internet Archive’s book reader. It should […]
ArchiveBox Debuts
By on September 10, 2012
As anyone likely knows, the first step to making sure you don’t lose documents or data you want to keep is to back them up. But as you also likely know, hardly any of us do that — at least on any regular basis. This is potentially where ArchiveBox comes in. This isn’t to say […]
Open Source vs. Openly Developed Open Source
By on August 28, 2012
I received an interesting message the other day from a colleague writing about a software development project: “They say they adhere to open-source, but their software is not developed as an open-source project and they do not have a community of developers that contribute.” This caught my eye because I have noticed this as well […]
Hypertext Before the Web
By on August 10, 2012
David Weinberger reminded me that today is the 25th anniversary of HyperCard, the hypermedia technology launched by Apple before the Web existed. I was an enthusiastic user of HyperCard. At UC Berkeley I pulled together a group that created a library orientation guide for the very large and distributed library system on that campus. I […]
When Language Matters
By on August 2, 2012
Many discussions about which programming language is best seem to end up devolving into what resembles a religious war. Every language has its strengths and weaknesses, so a case can be made for just about any language in such arguments. However, often such discussions are fruitless, as for most problems any language could likely solve […]
Fifty Ways to Leave Your Library
By on July 31, 2012
I’d like to help you in your struggle To be free There must be fifty ways To leave your lover – Paul Simon We’ve all been there — or will be. You feel like you’ve come to the end of your time, or that you’ve accomplished what you can and need new challenges. Maybe you […]
