Table of contents: issue62

Editorial Introduction to Issue 62: The Wisdom of Communities

editor — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Richard Waller introduces Ariadne issue 62.

Readers of last year's issues will possibly have been aware of a small initiaitive on Ariadne's part to give practitioners with in the archives field the opportunity to voice their views on developments in their airspace. You may recall in Issue 61 an open and sincere investigation by Michael Kennedy into his views of the wider involvement of non-professionals in the generation of information for archival entries.

Towards a Toolkit for Implementing Application Profiles

editor — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Talat Chaudhri, Julian Cheal, Richard Jones, Mahendra Mahey and Emma Tonkin propose a user-driven methodology for the iterative development, testing and implementation of Dublin Core Application Profiles in diverse repository software environments.

Moving Targets: Web Preservation and Reference Management

editor — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Richard Davis discusses the role of Web preservation in reference management. This article is based on a presentation given at the Innovations in Reference Management workshop, January 2010.

It seems fair to say that the lion's share of work on developing online tools for reference and citation management by students and researchers has focused on familiar types of publication. They generally comprise resources that can be neatly and discretely bound in the covers of a book or journal, or their electronic analogues, like the Portable Document Format (PDF): objects in established library or database systems, with ISBNs and ISSNs underwritten by the authority of formal publication and legal deposit.

Yet, increasingly, native Web resources are also becoming eminently citable, and managing both the resources, and references to them, is an ongoing challenge. Moreover, the issues associated with referencing this kind of material have received comparatively little attention, beyond introducing the convention that includes the URL and the date it was accessed in bibliographies. While it may be hard to quantify the "average lifespan of a web page" [1], what is undeniable is that Web resources are highly volatile and prone to deletion or amendment without warning.

Web Preservation is one field of endeavour which attempts to counter the Web's transient tendency, and a variety of approaches continue to be explored. The aim of this article is to convey the fairly simple message that many themes and concerns of Web preservation are equally relevant in the quest for effective reference management in academic research, particularly given the rate at which our dependence on Web-delivered resources is growing.

Digital preservation is, naturally, a strong theme in the work of the University of London Computer Centre (ULCC)'s Digital Archives Department, and Web preservation has featured particularly strongly in recent years. This article will draw upon several initiatives with which we have been involved recently. These include: the 2008 JISC Preservation of Web Resources Project (JISC-PoWR) [2], on which we worked with Brian Kelly and Marieke Guy of UKOLN; our work for the UK Web Archiving Consortium; and the ongoing JISC ArchivePress Project [3] (itself, in many ways, a sequel to JISC-PoWR).

Another perspective that I bring is as a part-time student myself, on the MSc E-Learning programme at Edinburgh University. As a consequence I have papers to read, and write, and a dissertation imminent. So for this reason too I have a stake in making it easier to keep track of information for reading lists, footnotes and bibliographies, whether with desktop tools or Web-based tools, or through features in online VLEs, databases and repositories.

An Attack on Professionalism and Scholarship? Democratising Archives and the Production of Knowledge

editor — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Andrew Flinn describes some recent developments in democratising the archive and asks whether these developments really deserve to be viewed as a threat to professional and academic standards.

This article was originally delivered as a paper for the 'Archives 2.0: Shifting Dialogues Between Users and Archivists' conference organised by the University of Manchester's ESRC Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change (CRESC) in March 2009. The paper came at an opportune time. I was absorbed in a research project examining independent and community archival initiatives in the UK and exploring the possibilities of user- (or community-)generated and contributed content for archives and historical research [1]. Furthermore I had just received referees' comments on a proposed research project examining the potential impact of the latter developments on professional archival practice. Whilst two of the reports were very positive, one was more than a little hostile. The reviewer was scathing about the focus of the proposed research on the democratisation of knowledge production, dismissing the notion as part of a short-term political agenda that was detrimental to the idea of scholarship and one with which the archive profession should not concern itself. In particular, scorn was reserved for the idea that, in future archive catalogues, many 'voices' might be enabled 'to supplement or even supplant the single, authoritative, professional voice', an idea which was described as being, in extremis, 'a frontal attack on professionalism, standards and scholarship'.

At the time of receiving this review and considering my response, I was also beginning to write my paper for the conference and had already decided that my theme would be democratising the archive. However I realised that these comments neatly encapsulated a powerful and genuine strand of thinking within the archive profession and academia more generally, which one might loosely term 'traditional'. Although there are now many user-generated content archive and heritage projects in existence, and terms such as participatory archives, Archives 2.0 and even History 2.0 are an increasingly common part of professional discourse [2], some, perhaps many, archivists and scholars remain deeply sceptical about the need for a democratisation of the archive and of scholarship.

In the end the research project was supported by the AHRC despite the critical review and has now commenced [3]. However, in this brief article I will try to respond to this strand of thinking by, first identifying what is meant by the democratisation of the archive and why advocates of such a thing believe it to be important. I will then briefly introduce two different but linked developments (independent or community archives and user- or community-generated content), which in harness with new technologies might play a role in such a democratisation, and in so doing challenge aspects of traditional archival thinking and practice. Finally I will offer a few thoughts on the shifts in our understanding of the archive and the resistance to those shifts. Ultimately, I will suggest that rather than viewing this debate as one between the expert (or the academic or the professional) and the crowd, it is in the concept of communities that the key might be found. A successful democratised and participatory archive is one which recognises that all those who come into contact with the archive (directly or indirectly), the 'community of the record', can and do affect our understanding and knowledge of that archive.

Get Tooled Up: Xerxes at Royal Holloway, University of London

editor — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Anna Grigson, Peter Kiely, Graham Seaman and Tim Wales describe the implementation of an open source front end to the MetaLib federated search tool.

Rarely is software a purely technical issue, though it may be marketed as 'technology'. Software is embedded in work, and work patterns become moulded around it. Thus the use of a particular package can give rise to an inertia from which it can be hard to break free.

Moreover, when this natural inertia is combined with data formats that are opaque or unique to a particular system, the organisation can become locked in to that system, a potential victim of the pricing policies or sluggish adaptability of the software provider. The speed of change in the information world in recent years, combined with the actual or expected crunch in library funding, has made this a particular issue for library management system (LMS) users. While there is general agreement on the direction to take - more 'like Google' - LMS suppliers' moves in this direction can prove both slow and expensive for the user.

Open source software has often been suggested as an alternative, but the nature of lock-in means that the jump from proprietary to open system can be all or nothing; in effect too big (and complex) a risk to take. No major UK university libraries have yet moved to Koha, Evergreen, or indeed any open source LMS [1].

The alternative, which brings its own risks, is to take advantage of the pressures on LMS suppliers to make their own systems more open, and to use open source systems 'around the edges' [2]. This has the particular benefit of creating an overall system which follows the well-established design practice of creating a clean separation of 'view' (typically the Web interface) from 'model' (here the LMS-managed databases) and 'controller' (the LMS core code). The 'view' is key to the user experience of the system, and this separation gives the ability to make rapid changes or to integrate Web 2.0 features quickly and easily, independently of the system back-end. The disadvantage of this approach is that it is relatively fragile, being dependent on the willingness of the LMS supplier to provide a detailed and stable application programming interface (API).

There are several current examples of this alternative approach. Some, like the Vufind OPAC, allow the use of plug-ins which adapt the software to a range of different LMSs. Others, like Xerxes, are specialised front-ends to a single system (MetaLib from ExLibris [3]). This has an impact on evaluating the software: in particular, the pool of active developers is likely to be smaller in the latter case.

Royal Holloway Library Services

Within this general context, Royal Holloway Library Services were faced with a specific problem. The annual National Student Survey had given ratings to the Library well below those expected, with many criticisms centred on the difficulty in using the Library's MetaLib federated search system.

MetaLib is a key access point to the Library's e-resources, incorporating both A-Z lists of major online databases available to library users, and a federated search tool. Feedback showed that many users found the interface less than satisfactory, with one user commenting that:

'MetaLib is possibly the worst and most confusing library interface I have ever come across'

The Library Management Team decided to remedy this as a matter of urgency and set a deadline of the start of the 2009 Autumn term. There was no funding available to acquire an alternative discovery system so the challenge was to identify a low-cost, quick-win solution for the existing one. With this work in mind, the incoming Associate Director (E-Strategy) had already recruited two new colleagues over the Summer vacation: a systems officer with Web development experience, the other an experienced e-resources manager.

The first possible route to the improvement of MetaLib was modification of the existing MetaLib Web interface. This was technically possible but presented several major difficulties: the underlying ExLibris designs were based on the old HTML 4.0 and pre-dated current stylesheet-based design practice; the methods to adapt the designs were opaque and poorly documented, based on numbered variables with semantics that changed depending on context; and perhaps most importantly, the changes were to be made over the summer months, giving no time for user feedback on the details of the changes to be made.

The second possibility was the use of Xerxes [4]. Xerxes offered the advantage of an interface design which had been user-tested on a range of (US) campuses, partially solving the user feedback issue. It was not, however, entirely cost-free, as ExLibris charges an annual maintenance fee for the MetaLib X-server API on which Xerxes depends.

Uncovering User Perceptions of Research Activity Data

editor — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Cecilia Loureiro-Koechlin discusses the outcomes and lessons learned from user tests performed on the Oxford Blue Pages, a tool designed to display information about researchers and their activities at the University of Oxford.

Competition, complex environments and needs for sophisticated resources and collaborations compel Higher Education institutions (HEIs) to look for innovative ways to support their research processes and improve the quality and dissemination of their research outcomes. Access, management and sharing of information about research activities and researchers (who, what, when and where) lie at the heart of all these needs and driving forces for improvements.

A Research Revolution: The Impact of Digital Technologies

editor — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Dicky Maidment-Otlet and Judy Redfearn describe a new JISC activity to highlight how digital technologies are changing research.

At the end of November 2009, JISC launched a year-long suite of activities under the heading Research 3.0: driving the knowledge economy. A series of events, publications and Web activity are stimulating discussion about how advanced digital technologies are creating a revolution in research and the way researchers work.

Abstract Modelling of Digital Identifiers

editor — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Nick Nicholas, Nigel Ward and Kerry Blinco present an information model of digital identifiers, to help bring clarity to the vocabulary debates from which this field has suffered.

Discussion of digital identifiers, and persistent identifiers in particular, has often been confused by differences in underlying assumptions and approaches. To bring more clarity to such discussions, the PILIN Project has devised an abstract model of identifiers and identifier services, which is presented here in summary. Given such an abstract model, it is possible to compare different identifier schemes, despite variations in terminology; and policies and strategies can be formulated for persistence without committing to particular systems. The abstract model is formal and layered; in this article, we give an overview of the distinctions made in the model. This presentation is not exhaustive, but it presents some of the key concepts represented, and some of the insights that result.

The main goal of the Persistent Identifier Linking Infrastructure (PILIN) project [1] has been to scope the infrastructure necessary for a national persistent identifier service. There are a variety of approaches and technologies already on offer for persistent digital identification of objects. But true identity persistence cannot be bound to particular technologies, domain policies, or information models: any formulation of a persistent identifier strategy needs to outlast current technologies, if the identifiers are to remain persistent in the long term.

For that reason, PILIN has modelled the digital identifier space in the abstract. It has arrived at an ontology [2] and a service model [3] for digital identifiers, and for how they are used and managed, building on previous work in the identifier field [4] (including the thinking behind URI [5], DOI [6], XRI [7] and ARK [8]), as well as semiotic theory [9]. The ontology, as an abstract model, addresses the question 'what is (and isn't) an identifier?' and 'what does an identifier management system do?'. This more abstract view also brings clarity to the ongoing conversation of whether URIs can be (and should be) universal persistent identifiers.

Identifier Model

For the identifier model to be abstract, it cannot commit to a particular information model. The notion of an identifier depends crucially on the understanding that an identifier only identifies one distinct thing. But different domains will have different understandings of what things are distinct from each other, and what can legitimately count as a single thing. (This includes aggregations of objects, and different versions or snapshots of objects.) In order for the abstract identifier model to be applicable to all those domains, it cannot impose its own definitions of what things are distinct: it must rely on the distinctions specific to the domain.

This means that information modelling is a critical prerequisite to introducing identifiers to a domain, as we discuss elsewhere [10]: identifier users should be able to tell whether any changes in a thing's content, presentation, or location mean it is no longer identified by the same identifier (i.e. whether the identifier is restricted to a particular version, format, or copy).

The abstract identifier model also cannot commit to any particular protocols or service models. In fact, the abstract identifier model should not even presume the Internet as a medium. A sufficiently abstract model of identifiers should apply just as much to URLs as it does to ISBNs, or names of sheep; the model should not be inherently digital, in order to avoid restricting our understanding of identifiers to the current state of digital technologies. This means that our model of identifiers comes close to the understanding in semiotics of signs, as our definitions below make clear.

There are two important distinctions between digital identifiers and other signs which we needed to capture. First, identifiers are managed through some system, in order to guarantee the stability of certain properties of the identifier. This is different to other signs, whose meaning is constantly renegotiated in a community. Those identifier properties requiring guarantees include the accountability and persistence of various facets of the identifier—most crucially, what is being identified. For digital identifiers, the identifier management system involves registries, accessed through defined services. An HTTP server, a PURL [11] registry, and an XRI registry are all instances of identifier management systems.

Second, digital identifiers are straightforwardly actionable: actions can be made to happen in connection with the identifier. Those actions involve interacting with computers, rather than other people: the computer consistently does what the system specifies is to be done with the identifier, and has no latitude for subjective interpretation. This is in contrast with human language, which can involve complex processes of interpretation, and where there can be considerable disconnect between what a speaker intends and how a listener reacts. Because the interactions involved are much simpler, the model can concentrate on two actions which are core to digital identifiers, but which are only part of the picture in human communication: working out what is being identified (resolution), and accessing a representation of what is identified (retrieval).

So to model managing and acting on digital identifiers, we need a concept of things that can be identified, names for things, and the relations between them. (Semiotics already gives us such concepts.) We also need a model of the systems through which identifiers are managed and acted on; what those systems do, and who requests them to do so; and what aspects of identifiers the systems manage.

Our identifier model (as an ontology) thus encompasses:

Entities - including actors and identifier systems;
Relations between entities;
Qualities, as desirable properties of entities. Actions are typically undertaken in order to make qualities apply to entities.
Actions, as the processes carried out on entities (and corresponding to services in implementations);

An individual identifier system can be modelled using concepts from the ontology, with an identifier system model.

In the remainder of this article, we go through the various concepts introduced in the model under these classes. We present the concept definitions under each section, before discussing issues that arise out of them. Resolution and Retrieval are crucial actions for identifiers, whose definition involves distinct issues; they are discussed separately from other Actions. We briefly discuss the standing of HTTP URIs in the model at the end.

eBooks: Tipping or Vanishing Point?

editor — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Emma Tonkin investigates ebooks and takes a look at recent technological and business developments in this area.

Due in large part to the appearance since mid-2006 of increasingly affordable devices making use of e-Ink technology (a monochrome display supporting a high-resolution image despite low battery use, since the screen consumes power only during page refreshes, which in the case of ebooks generally represent page turns), the ebook has gone from a somewhat limited market into a real, although presently still niche, contender. Amazon sold 500,000 Kindles in 2008 [1]; Sony sold 300,000 of its Reader Digital Book model between October 2006 and October 2009. In September 2009, ebooks represented between 1% and 3% of the total US publishing market [2].

Following the JISC National eBooks Observatory Study [3] in the UK, one participant, David Nicolas, was quoted as stating that ebooks have 'reached the tipping point' [4]. Keeping in mind Bohr's statement that, 'prediction is very difficult, especially about the future', it's nonetheless safe to say that publicity about these devices is currently at a high point. But for ebook readers, as Figure 1 shows, this is not their first time in the spotlight.

"A good book has no ending. ~R.D. Cumming"

This article marks the third time that Ariadne has discussed the subject of ebooks, namely "Ebooks in UK Libraries: Where are we now?" [5] and "e-Books for the Future: Here But Hiding?" [6]. There is something very beguiling about the idea of a book that has 'the marvelous chameleon-like quality that it can very quickly be made to substitute for a different printed work by simply loading different content' [7] - a book that can play the role of a library.

As Striphas [8] points out, the concept of the electronic book, and the exploration of the interaction between the size of a container and the quantity of knowledge held, has an extraordinarily long history. He traces the idea back to the creation of miniature manuscript books, composed of 'tiny handwriting, or micrographia', in the late 15th century, which were functional objects and could be read by means of a magnifying glass.

Striphas notes the development of microphotography techniques in the 19th century. This was initially pioneered by John Benjamin Dancer, an optical instrument-maker who combined microscope and camera in order to create the earliest example of microphotography on record [9]. Luther reports that 'the 21 May 1853 issue of Notes and Queries carried a letter from a Dublin scholar asking "May not photography be usefully applied to the making of catalogues of large libraries?' Microphotography led to the report in the British Photographic Journal of, 'A page of printing, from Quekett's "Treatise on the Microscope", reduced to such size that the whole of the volume of 560 pages could be contained in a space one inch long and half-an-inch broad ' [8].

Intranet Management: Divine Comedy or Strategic Imperative?

editor — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Martin White suggests that a failure to recognise the value of intranets is a symptom of a failure to recognise information as a strategic asset.

According to Dante in his Divine Comedy the inscription above the door to Hades reads "Abandon hope all ye who enter here". For many this could also be the sign on the home page of their organisation's intranet as, with business-critical decisions to make, they begin the daily hunt for information that they are sure should be somewhere in the application. It could just as easily be the sign on the door of the intranet manager of the organisation, though this door usually also carries a number of other job descriptions, all of which seem to be given more priority by the organisation than the care and development of the intranet. Most organisations of any size will have a full-time web manager, often with a support team, but this is rarely the case with the intranet.

There are a substantial number of intranets in the UK. Statistics from the Office for National Statistics indicate that 22% of all businesses have an intranet [1]. As the size of the business increases so does the level of penetration, and most businesses of more than 500 people will now have some form of intranet. Given the number of businesses in the UK the author estimates that there are probably around 300,000 intranets in the commercial sector, and at a guess a further 100,000 in the public sector, charities, Higher Education institutions (HEIs) and other organisations. Only over the last few years has any reliable statistical information become available on intranet use and development, and this is a in-depth global survey of only around 300 intranets [2]. In the UK HEI sector a major opportunity was lost in a survey commissioned in 2009 by Eduserv into the management of web content in the HEI sector as no account of intranet use of CMS applications was included in the scope of the survey [3]. A survey of SharePoint use in HEIs undertaken for Eduserv in late 2009 [4] did indicate that a number of institutions were using SharePoint for intranet applications but the survey did not look in detail at intranet implementation.

It is also only over the last few years have forums been set up in which intranet managers are able to share experiences and challenges with others. The work of the Intranet Benchmark Forum [5] is focused on providing services to large organisations, but there are also other virtual and physical discussion forums, such as the Intranet Forum [6] run by UKeiG for its members. It is probably reasonable to suggest that the majority of intranet managers have seen very few intranets from which to gain a sense of good practice, whereas web managers have an almost unlimited supply of sites from which to gain ideas for their own use. This is as true in the HEI sector as in other sectors. Given the installed base of intranets in the UK it is also surprising that there is no 'intranet conference' event even though intranet management does feature in events such as Online Information [7]. Most countries in northern Europe have an intranet conference [8], often with several hundred delegates, so why there is no equivalent in the UK is a mystery.

Intranets Are Different

All too often an intranet is regarded as an internal web site. The reality is that about the only commonality between an intranet and a web site is the use of web browser technology. Many very successful intranets do not even use a web content management application but instead are based on Notes technology or portal applications. Intranet content contribution is usually highly distributed, with individual members of staff publishing content direct to the intranet perhaps only a few times a year. This means that the web content management system has to be highly intuitive, and enable Word documents to be rendered into clean HTML code to create web pages. The teams supporting public web sites are using the systems every working day, working often in HTML and having a much more limited range of content to cope with. Many of the problems that arise in keeping content current on an intranet are a result of staff having to use a complex Web publishing system that was specified for Web site management and not intranet management.

Another factor to be considered is that increasingly intranets are federated applications [9]. This is often the situation in HEIs where each department wants to have its own intranet, and on top of all these individual intranets there is some form of top-level 'corporate' home page and navigation. Often there is no central coordination of these intranets, and so each adopts some or none of the visual design standards of the HEI.

As far as enterprise applications are concerned, intranets are different because they are not based on business processes or work-flow. Finance, registry, personnel and most other applications support well-defined processes, usually within a specific department, and where the content requirements are usually specified in database terms. Anything approaching text content is usually relegated to a single field in the database. Intranets exist because there is a substantial amount of information in any organisation that is not based on business processes and cannot be managed within a formal database structure, such as policies, procedures, campus maps, events, staff notices and hundreds of other information formats produced by every department and location within the organisation.

As a result the intranet becomes an information dumping ground. Under-resourced intranet managers do not have the resources to maintain content quality, and so multiple versions of documents with no visible ownership or provenance proliferate. Employees leave or change responsibility but the intranet is based on a 'file-and-forget' principle and no effort is taken to ensure that document ownership is transferred to another member of staff. Very quickly the information architecture of the intranet, based usually on the structure of the organisation at the time of the last WCMS (Web content management system) deployment, is not fit for purpose. The decision is taken to implement a search engine, and only then does the scale of the problem of information decay become apparent. It can also be an interesting exercise to search for 'Confidential' and see just how many documents are returned!

Fedora UK & Ireland / EU Joint User Group Meeting

editor — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Chris Awre reports on the first coming together of two regional user groups for the Fedora digital repository system, hosted by the University of Oxford in December 2009.

The Fedora digital repository system [1] (as opposed to the Fedora Linux distribution, with which there is no connection) is an open source solution for the management of all types of digital content. Its development is managed through DuraSpace [2], the same organisation that now oversees DSpace, and carried out by developers around the world. The developers, alongside the extensive body of Fedora users, form the community that sustains Fedora.

The Future of Interoperability and Standards in Education: A JISC CETIS Event

editor — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Sarah Currier reports on an international working meeting involving a range of educational interoperability standards bodies and communities, organised by JISC CETIS.

The stated intention of this working meeting organised by JISC CETIS, and held at the University of Bolton, UK, on 12 January 2010 was to:

The Digital Preservation Roadshow 2009-10: The Incomplete Diaries of Optimistic Travellers

editor — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000

William Kilbride and Malcolm Todd report on the Digital Preservation Roadshow - an eleven month tour of the UK and Ireland designed to provide archivists and record managers with practical advice and support in managing digital resources.

Subject Repositories: European Collaboration in the International Context

editor — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Dave Puplett reports on the conference Subject Repositories: European Collaboration in the International Context held at the British Library in January 2010. The conference launched Economists Online (EO), an innovative economics subject repository.

Institutional repositories are now common in Higher Education, but successful examples of subject repositories, which cater to an entire discipline, are much rarer. The Subject Repositories conference taught some key lessons about the role of transnational collaboration in setting up a subject repository. The conference drew on the expertise of renowned specialists in the field and the two and a half-year-long development process of Economists Online [1].

News and Events

editor — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Ariadne presents a brief summary of news and events.

UKeiG Intranet's Forum: ERM's Knowledge Sharing Platform – February 2010

UKeiG Intranet's Forum: ERM's Knowledge Sharing Platform:
A chance to see one of the world's top 10 best intranets
Free informal Intranets Forum meeting for UKeiG members

ERM, 2/F Exchequer Court, 33 St. Mary Axe, London EC3A 8AA
Friday 26 February 2010, 4.00 - 5.30 p.m.
http://www.ukeig.org.uk/

Book Review: Delete - The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age

editor — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Pete Cliff hopes he'll not forget this marvellous book, even when the author seems to suggest it might be better if he did!

In the past the storage and recall of information (the act of remembering) was limited. If people wanted to keep a record, it had to be written down (at great expense in the days before printing) or they had to rely on (notoriously error-prone) human memory. As time moved on, more and more could be recorded, but recall in the analogue world remained difficult - the raison d'être of information science. However, with the proliferation of digital recording and the advent of cheap and vast storage, the balance has shifted. In a world deluged with data - including our personal collections of digital photos, email inboxes and the like - it has become easier to record everything than attempt any kind of manual pruning - deleting bad photographs, irrelevant emails, etc. At the same time recall methods have advanced, so that I can (should I want) look up an email I sent more than five years ago or see what a colleague blogged last year.

This shift from people forgetting to machines remembering is the central theme of Viktor Mayer-Schönberger's book Delete, published by Princeton University Press. And a fascinating, frightening, well-argued and accessible read it is!

The work opens with the now familiar horror stories of digital remembering - a newly qualified teacher failing to get a job on account of the picture of her on a social networking site, the psychotherapist refused entry to the USA because of a (presumably open access) journal article, published several years before, in which he mentions having taken LSD in the 1960s. Examples of how society is now able to discover (to remember) facts about your life that you have forgotten yourself. This opening chapter neatly sets the scene and highlights just how much Mayer-Schönberger has read around the problem of 'perfect memory'.

In the next two chapters, the reader is taken on a ride through the psychology, sociology and history of forgetting and humankind's battle against it. They culminate in the rise of the technologies that now leave us with a society capable of seemingly perfect memory (though not everything is remembered digitally and we'd do well to remember that!) while individuals are now capable of looking up their past in ways hitherto unimagined. Though the author's arguments are compelling, they are on occasion overstated or based on false premise - is it really all that easy to mine the vast data resources we have at our command yet? However, the book does get the reader thinking and the author himself states that part of his reason for writing it was to stimulate debate.

Chapter IV, Of Power and Time - Consequences of the Demise of Forgetting, is probably my favourite - perhaps because I love a good tale of doom! It examines the consequences of total recall and boils the issue down to two fundamentals. Firstly there is the loss of power, as information about us is duplicated and reused (often out of context) with or without our permission; and secondly the negation of time. Among the issues are two terrifying possibilities: that perfect memory threatens reason, abstract thought and the ability to make decisions in the present, and; that the reasons for retaining data now may seem sensible, but what if (as with the chilling example given) it should fall into the wrong hands in the future?

Having clearly and concisely built a picture of the problem, from the early days of human history to the present, Mayer-Schönberger then turns to some potential solutions. Chapter V outlines six potential responses, drawing on information privacy issues as well as other areas. Curious here is the way he suggests one response would be for information sources (us) to use digital rights management techniques to ensure our data are safe, effectively turning the tables on the music industry or search engines. It is an interesting idea, though one the author later dismisses.

Book Review: Copyright - Interpreting the Law for Libraries, Archives and Information Services

editor — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Charles Oppenheim sees much to like in the new edition of this work by a well-known authority but identifies one potentially major drawback.

This is the fifth edition of what is, obviously, a very successful title. The previous edition was published in 2004, and five years is a long time in copyright law and practice, so it was felt no doubt that a new edition was due. However, as I will explain at the end of this review, that decision may have been unsound.

The book follows its normal format of a series of questions regarding UK copyright law and practice, with brief answers. The author is a well-known UK copyright expert and has a gentle, witty writing style, which makes it possible to read the book cover-to-cover if you so wanted. The main chapters, covering the basics of copyright, the major media types, licences, electronic copyright and other matters, is followed by lists of useful addresses and sources of information, and a good index [1].

It is always difficult to achieve the magic combination of accuracy and approachability in legal matters, but Cornish largely manages this. I did identify errors and niggles though. For example, question 2.11 [1] on copyright in facts fails to cross-refer to protection of collections of facts in databases, which is covered elsewhere in the book; the claim in 3.19 and 4.27 that a library, archive or museum when given a bequest of unpublished works can assume that it has also acquired the copyright in such materials unless it is told otherwise is incorrect; in 4.3, the author makes reference to 'trivial works' without explaining what he means by the term; in 4.37 it is claimed that a slide or PowerPoint of a book page made for teaching cannot be made legally, but this is not true, as there could be an argument that the reproduction is for criticism or review, and so is permitted (in any case, the CLA's scanning licence will also often allow this); when discussing the communication to the public right in 4.54, the author fails to note that placing copyright material on an Intranet or as an e-mail attachment is also prohibited; in 6.8, it is claimed that someone who transcribes an interview will own the copyright in the transcription, when in fact the transcriber will jointly own the copyright with the interviewer and interviewee; in 11.64, the author claims it is always an offence to remove or alter rights management information, when in fact it is only an offence when it is done with the intention of enabling or concealing copyright infringement - a very important distinction.

Book Review: My Word! Plagiarism and College Culture

editor — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Brian Whalley reviews a look at this problem from an American anthropologist and finds there is more in it than just a consideration of plagiarism.

My Word! is an attention-grabbing title for a book on plagiarism by an academic anthropologist and teacher. Although written entirely from a North American perspective, many bells will ring here for all concerned with teaching and education. Do not, however, expect a set of ideas or rules to prevent (!) or reduce plagiarism.