http://paulcourant.net Paul Courant's blog about libraries, economics, public policy, and other stuff Mon, 02 Nov 2009 15:49:21 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en From the very beginning, one of the most exciting possibilities of the Google Digitization Project was its potential to open up vast stores of text to a group of users to whom it had previously been inaccessible: people with visual impairments and print disabilities. Before Google (B.G.), students and scholars ... http://paulcourant.net/2009/11/02/digitization-and-accessibility/ The current issue of The Economist has a leader supporting the Google settlement and an article in the business section that quotes me in the course of discussing the issue. I am described, with my enthusiastic consent, as running an orphanage. The more I think of it the ... http://paulcourant.net/2009/09/07/the-economist-and-the-librarian-economist-on-the-google-settlement/ I spent Friday at a fascinating conference at the Columbia University Law School, on the subject of (what else?) the Google settlement. Lead counsel from all three parties, lots of other lawyers, several princpals, publishers, authors and librarians were there. I learned something important that at some level I ... http://paulcourant.net/2009/03/15/orphan-works-legislation-and-the-google-settlement/ Suppose that there were a major fire, and that in order to put out the fire you would need, say, a trillion gallons of water.  Can you imagine a city council that would say, "oh no, we can only afford 734 billion gallons of water, so let's leave out about ... http://paulcourant.net/2009/02/07/the-stimulus-package-and-now-for-something-completely-different/ Robert Darnton recently published an essay in the New York Review of Books on the Google settlement. There has been much commentary in blogs, listserves, and print media. Below I reproduce a letter that I sent to the New York Review of Books, that they found to be ... http://paulcourant.net/2009/02/04/google-robert-darnton-and-the-digital-republic-of-letters/ If you think about it, a universal bookstore is a pretty cool idea. Bookstores are wonderful things. Anyone can walk into bookstore, take a book off a shelf, read in it, decide whether to buy it or forget about it, or get it from the library. The settlement ... http://paulcourant.net/2008/10/28/the-google-settlement-from-the-universal-library-to-the-universal-bookstore/ In a recent paper prepared for the Boston Library Consortium, Richard Johnson decries the fact that some mass digitization arrangements between libraries and corporations have been "less than perfect." The choices that we face are indeed less than perfect. We can choose purity and perfection, and not permit any restrictions ... http://paulcourant.net/2008/10/21/less-than-perfect-is-not-always-bad/ In my previous post I briefly discussed peer review, which has been raised by many in the publishing industry as a justification for opposing the NIH mandate for deposit of articles into PubMed Central, and, more broadly, as a justification for the vigorous protection of publisher-held copyright in scholarly publications. ... http://paulcourant.net/2008/10/12/on-the-meaning-and-importance-of-peer-review/ Last week there was a hearing on a new bill before the House Judiciary Committee, the “Fair Copyright in Research Works Act.” Think of it as the Clear Skies Act for copyright; an odious piece of corporate welfare wrapped in a friendly layer of doublespeak. The bill, introduced by Michigan ... http://paulcourant.net/2008/09/17/fair-copyright-in-research-works/ {If you don’t like baseball, you should probably stop reading this post now.} Thursday my wife and I made a pilgrimage to Yankee Stadium, to mark the imminent passing of one of the most famous and significant of ballparks. Neither of us had ever been to the Stadium before, even though ... http://paulcourant.net/2008/08/02/take-me-out-to-the-ball-game/