PAMnet News
Debra Bailey
Thomson-ISI study
Bob Michaelson posted information about the Thomson-ISI study (October 2004) by Marie E. McVeigh on open-access journals, titled "Open Access Journals in the ISI Citation Databases: Analysis of Impact Factors and Citation Patterns."To read the entire paper, go to: http://www.isinet.com/forms/whitepapers (you need to sign in to access the pdf report, but it is free). Findings suggest that over 55% of the journals and over 65% of the articles indexed in Web of Science® in 2003 are produced by publishers who permit some form of self-archiving, and could be made OA by author archiving. Michaelson also posted a link and excerpts from E-News for ARL Directors http://www.arl.org/enews/augoct04. He commented, "Ultimately, power resides with the faculty who publish for research journals, if only they decide to use it. Personally, I would hope that a version (such as Draft Version 1) incorporating the Creative Commons License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/1.0/legalcode would be adopted, but that may be too utopian. For more on Creative Commons see http://creativecommons.org/ and their new project Science Commons http://creativecommons.org/projects/science/proposal."
University of Hawaii Flood
Joseph Kraus posted links and a message of concern about the University of Hawaii floods. Hawaii Manoa campus sustained a 6 foot high flood on Saturday night.
General: Harvard Libraries and Google announce Pilot Digitization
On December 14th, 2004, Donna Coletti posted, "PAMnetters, We awoke this morning to front page newspaper articles about Harvard and other institutions striking a deal with Google to broaden access to materials in their Libraries. Apparently Google approached Harvard a while ago but there was little interest. Google went away and designed scanners and has offered to do the scanning--Harvard said okay and a pilot project to scan 40,000 books is set to begin within months." Coletti posted many links, including, Details provided by the Harvard University Libraries are available at http://hul.harvard.edu/publications/041213news.html and
FAQ about Harvard's pilot project at
http://hul.harvard.edu/publications/041213faq.html.
JoAnn Sears posted , "For those of you that missed NPR this morning, there is a bit of
copyright-Q&A in regard to this project at:
http://www.umich.edu/news/index.html?Releases/2004/Dec04/library/q&a.
Also, the more general UM news announcement site is available at http://www.umich.edu/news/index.html?Releases/2004/Dec04/library/index.
A. Ben Wagner stated, "I still don't see how this project won't run into copyright problems. True,
everyone using Google will be able see only a "snippet", but to do the project at all, Google has to create and maintain at least a single digital full-text image to index and display snippets from."Matthew R. Marsteller pondered, "This is an interesting development, but I wonder what it holds in store for the Million Books Project at http://www.library.cmu.edu/Libraries/MBP_FAQ.html?
I hope that some cooperation between the two endeavors will be forthcoming."Bob Michaelson weighed in, "Libraries are already digitizing in-copyright material, and the consensus in the library preservation community is that this is obviously legal if it is used for preservation purposes, such as to create a print version to replace a deteriorating print copy in the stacks. This seems to me to be very much like "just in case something happened to the original". A. Ben Wagner responded, "My understanding of copyright law is that there is a huge difference between the "preservation exemption" (that contains a number of caveats
like: is a replacement copy available at a fair price?) and copying for "just in case something happens" which I believe is forbidden."R. Marsteller continued, "I believe that out of copyright works will be available, complete copies, free of charge ... at least for now. I'm guessing that they'll be tracking usage statistics for publishers and passing along topic ideas for new works."
dbailey@rice.edu
Sara Rutter responded from the Hamilton Library
University of Hawaii at Manoa, that everyone was okay. She gave an accounting of the flood, and the status of the departments, "maps of Hawaii and the Pacific, rare and unique maps are being rinsed and put into freezer shipping containers. Aerial photographs of Micronesia are being washed by hand and then put into cool conditions to halt the growth of fungus. We have 90,000 photos to save. Library staff are working in shifts, without electrical power, telephones, to salvage the collections and cpu's. The systems folks are working to salvage data from the cpu's.
The community, both UH and town are volunteering, which is great."Rutter continued, "This event really brings home the importance and relevance of those disaster plans that we all put together when we are dry, clean and comfortable, never believing that decisions will have to be made so fast."Kathleen Robertson posted a link to photos: http://library.kcc.hawaii.edu/main/flood/.
