Google Books

For those of you who don't know Google has been scanning books and creating snippets available online for some time now.  This seemed like an innocuous practice until copyright got in the way.  As usual with digital projects copyright likes to rear its ugly head and try to stop great projects.  Now, I understand copyright protects the author's time and investment into their product.  Copyright is great for people who did the work and can get credit, accolades and cash they deserve.  A group of authors bound together to stop the practice of scanning books and making them accessible online.

By now you can probably tell where my bias is, since this is my soapbox I'll come out and say it.  I'm all for making more things available and searchable online.  Apparently U.S. Circuit Judge Denny Chin agrees with me.  He ultimately dismissed the lawsuit by by the authors which will lead to the future of Google Books project as we know it.

So in conclusion I would like to thank Google for the Google Books project and to U.S. Circuit Judge Denny Chin (above) for allowing Google Books to continue.

If anybody out there is a published author and has a different opinion about this issue I'd love to hear the other side to better understand the issue.  I believe this is a landmark case for copyright law and I believe it will be interesting to see how this affects other industries.

Topography

Working in an engineering office I find many new tools that I didn't know existed.  Today I found the USGS Topography map tool.  Using this tool you can look up current and historical topography maps anywhere in the U.S.  It's a great tool for looking at not only the topography but also the layout of roads from a particular era, and comparing how the roads changed over time.  This could be a very powerful tool for looking at the growth of cities, towns and unincorporated areas in the 20th Century.  The search is pretty intuitive, I started with only filling out the state field, Washington, and received over 4,000 hits.  I then ran a search for Poulsbo and received only 5 hits, so it pays to be exact and have an area you'd like to look at in mind.  Have a look and see you city in a different way.

Bonus feature: on the more recent maps they also contain aerial photography.

British Library Digital Archives

Recently I listened to a podcast which was a symposium hosted by the British Library explaining various points of view on digital archival methods and practices.  While the podcast sound quality was poor, it opened my eyes to the British Library's take on digital archives.  Having worked at the Washington State Digital Archives, I was interested to hear another take on digital archiving.

For some background for those of you, like me, who have no idea what the British Library is doing.  The British Library and their partners: the National Library of Scotland, the National Library of Wales, the Bodleian Libraries at Oxford, the University Library at Cambridge and the Library of Trinity College in Dublin, have been authorized to capture what they are calling the U.K. web.  To be certain this is websites with the .uk suffix. However this effort is not limited to .uk websites but includes e-books, e-journals, e-everything published within the U.K.  I found this video, which was their grand event on 4.6.13 to kick-off the digital archival experience. 

The purpose of this is to create a historical record of web activity for future scholars to get an idea of life in the early information age (assuming this is the beginning of the information age and we don't blow ourselves up).  This effort varies greatly from the Washington State Digital Archives in that the Digital Archives does not focus on websites and e-books but is focused on public records.  The Washington Digital Archives is an online, searchable archive that anybody with web access can use.  The Washington Digital Archives also has a reading room where users can come into the Digital Archive and access the archive from public workstations, this method of access rarely gets used. 

The British Library and their partners are planning on preserving these records to be used in a reading room of sorts with computers which have specialized access to the collection.  The libraries are treating the archived websites, ebooks and other materials as any other copyrighted material in their collection, which is why they do not have a web access to this archive, the user must use them in the library similar to the way you use a paper archive.  The project started with a list of 100 Websites to be archived.  If you read down the list, some of the choices are interesting however they seem to portray life in 2013, which was the point.

If you are interested in following the progress of the British Libraries in their efforts, you can follow the project on Twitter using the #digitaluniverse hashtag.  I know I will be watching their continued efforts and will be interested with their findings and results.