MLIS: The Final Term

I submitted my course selection today for my last term in Western’s MLIS program.
Naturally, the two classes that I would have liked to rank first and second are scheduled during the same timeslot. The course that I wanted to rank third is a distance course. Distance courses have limited enrollment and fill up quick, so [...]

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The OLE Project Webcast

“A committee is a cul-de-sac down which ideas are lured and then quietly strangled.” (Sir Barnett Cocks)
The above quote comes close to describing what I was thinking as I watched the OLE Project’s Webcast from November 20th, 2008.
Months of consultations, hundreds of thousand of dollars spent ferrying people here, there, and everywhere…all to produce a [...]

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Evergreen 1.4 RC2

Evergreen 1.4, release candidate 2 was released yesterday. Be sure to grab the new 1.0.1 release of OpenSRF when building it.
With this release comes support for internationalization (i18n), so a call for translations has been put out. For those more comfortable with spoken languages than programming languages, this is a great way to contribute to [...]

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Here comes the Canadian DMCA again

Today’s Speech from the Throne (PDF) included one line about copyright:
“Our Government will proceed with legislation to modernize Canada’s copyright laws and ensure stronger protection for intellectual property.“
One year ago, the same government included a similar line in their Speech from the Throne and the result was Bill-61 (which thankfully died on the order paper [...]

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Unicorn records now imported into Evergreen

After successfully importing our ~141 000 Innovative bib records into Evergreen two weeks ago, I finally got around to beating our ~300 000 Unicorn bib records into an importable state. They are now in our test Evergreen system. Working without a unique catalogue key and with too many duplicate TCNs (in 001 fields), my temporary [...]

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Napster Judge on Copyright Reform in the US

Judge Miriam Patel gave a talk about copyright earlier this week, as reported on Wired.
“It was not surprising that the notion of free music caught on,” Patel said at Fordham. “What is surprising is how the industry seemed to be caught so short. While it was fumbling the new ways to distribute digital music at [...]

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A great post about OCLC’s new policy and the legal issues involved

I’m currently making my way through Canadian Copyright: A Citizen’s Guide by Sam Trosow and Laura Murray. I’ve been reading about non-rival consumption, moral rights, economic rights, and all sorts of other legalese goodness, at a level that even I can understand (I tried a practice LSAT for “fun” once – turned out it wasn’t [...]

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GNU FDL 1.3 Released

The FSF has released version 1.3 of the Free Documentation License. The major change, driven by Wikipedia, is a clause allowing public wikis currently licensed under the FDL to relicense their content under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC-BY-SA) license:
“This new permission has been added at the request of the Wikimedia Foundation, which oversees the Wikipedia [...]

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Inaugural Evergreen Newsletter

The first Evergreen Newsletter has been published. I’m even in the background in one of the pictures!
Meanwhile, I have now successfully imported our ~141 000 Innovative bib records on to our new Evergreen server (currently running a test install of 1.4 release candidate 1). The organization held its AGM last week and I began the [...]

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OCLC Madness

OCLC wants to change their policy for the transfer of bibliographic records.

Terry’s Worklog has the best overview of the changes that I have found.

“You have got to be kidding me.  By adding this statement to the records in your catalog — you are essentially giving away your institutions ownership rights to your records (at least, [...]

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