Category Archives: Open Library

Upcoming Lecture: Richard Danner on Open Access (4/29 at 12:30 p.m. at Harvard)

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I’m just thrilled that Richard Danner has agreed to give a major lecture on the Harvard campus about open access on April 29, 2010.  As a rookie law library director, I’ve asked many people in the profession about the leaders in the field, and roads inevitably lead to Danner, among a small handful of others consistently mentioned (in my totally-non-scientific survey).  Danner is the Senior Associate Dean for Information Services and Archibald C. and Frances Fulk Rufty Research Professor Of Law at Duke Law School.  His talk will be entitled, “Taming Multiplicity in the Post-Print Era: Law Librarians, Legal Scholarship, and Access to the Law.”  It will take place on Thursday, April 29th, from 12:30-1:30pm, Lamont Forum Room, in Lamont Library on the Harvard College campus.  RSVP via this link; we expect a good crowd, so please do let us know you’ll be there.   The lecture is sponsored by the Harvard Law School Library, the Office for Scholarly Communication, and the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, our partners in the open access movement on campus.  (Thanks especially to Michelle Pearse, Librarian for Open Access at HLS, for organizing this event.)

Professor Richard Danner has been at the forefront of the open access to legal scholarship movement for many years and has also recently written about the role of academic law librarians in supporting faculty scholarship.  For an article out in this month’s edition of the Journal of Law & Education (April 2010), on the role of the academic law librarian, click here.  See also the Durham Statement, drafted during a meeting in Prof. Danner’s conference room at Duke and now proudly posted on the Berkman Center’s web site; or listen to Prof. Richard Leiter‘s podcast about it, featuring Prof. Danner.

Peter Suber at Harvard University on the Future of Open Access

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Peter Suber is addressing a standing-room-only house today at Harvard, in a session jointly hosted by the Berkman Center, the Office for Scholarly Communications, and the Harvard Law School Library. He insisted on a question-mark at the end of the talk’s title, so his topic is “The Future of Open Access?”, not “The Future of Open Access.”

The premise of Peter’s talk is his assessment of a series of cross-over points which move us from a proprietary world for scholarly information to an open world. There are different cross-over points for information found in books, journals, funder policies, peer-reviewed manuscripts, author understanding of the issues involved in open access, and university policies.

Peter mentioned, in passing, that the OA movement has no equivalent to the Free Software Foundation in the context of free/libre/open source software. This comment gives rise to a series of interesting side-issues. Who are the members of the OA movement? How are they (we?) organized? What is the trajectory of the movement? Is there anything that the OA movement’s leadership or followership could learn from other similar movements as to effective modes of advocacy?

It’s also interesting to think about the many disciplines involved in moving the world toward open access. Many specific fields are implicated: computer science, economics, law, and library sciences, among many others. FWIW, the crowd here at Harvard Hall is dominated by librarians, so far as I can tell, which I think is great.

Stay tuned for the archived version of the talk, to be posted soon at the Berkman Center’s site.

OpenLibrary.org

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There’s enormous promise in the Open Library project, which we’re hearing about today at Berkman’s lunch event from Aaron Swartz. The idea is wonderfully simple: to create a single web page per book. That web page can aggregate lots of data and metadata about each book. In turn, the database can be structured to indicate very interesting relationships between books, ideas, and people. The public presentation of the information is via a structured wiki.

I’m most interested in hearing what Open Library thinks it needs in the way of help. They have a cool demo here. It seems to me that one way to succeed in this project is to combine what start-ups call “business development” with what scholars do for a living with what non-profits think of as crowd-sourcing or encouraging user generated content or whatever. There’s a lot that could be done if the publishers and libraries contributed the core data (should be in everyone’s interest, long-term anyway); scholars need to opt in an do their part in an open way; Open Library needs to get the data structured and rendered right (curious as to whether OPML or other syndicated data structures are in play, or could be in play, here); and human beings need to contribute, contribute, contribute as they have to Wikipedia and other web 2.0 megasites.

A note from a participant: “libraries resist user-generated cataloguing.” This seems to me a cultural issue that is worth exploring. We do need to balance the authority of librarians in with what the crowds have to offer. But I’m pretty sure it’s not an either-or choice, as David Weinberger makes clear through his work.

One thing that makes a lot of sense is their plan for supporting the site over time. The combination of philanthropy (at least as start-up funds, if not for special projects over time) plus revenue generated through affiliate links over time makes a lot of sense as a sustainable business plan.

One could also see linkages between Open Library and 1) our H2O Playlists initiative (hat-tip to JZ) to allow people to share their reading lists as well as 2) what Gene Koo and John Mayer at CALI are doing with the eLangdell project.

It’s not a surprise that the truly wonderful David Weinberger — I can see him blogging this in front of me — brought Aaron here today to talk about this.

Where I’m left, at the end of lunch, is with a sense of wonder about what we (broadly, collectively) can accomplish with these technologies, a bit of leadership, a bit of capital, good communications strategies, and some good luck in the public interest over time. It’s awe-inspiring.