Behold the Coconut!

So I've been researching Web resources for my Comp II students, Web sites offering free, full-text books and periodical articles (I'm interested in finding such sources for all kinds of subjects, but especially literature, literary biographies, and literary analyses). I've been investigating Google Books and Google Scholar, for instance.

Then, I came across this today in the Times. It's about Google's recent settlement with authors and publishers wherein Google will "pay $125 million to create a system under which customers will be charged for reading a copyrighted book, with the copyright holder and Google both taking percentages":

So while there is a large direct-mail effort, a dedicated Web site about the settlement in 36 languages...and an online strategy of the kind you would expect from Google, the bulk of the legal notice spending — about $7 million of a total of $8 million — is going to newspapers, magazines, even poetry journals, with at least one ad in each country. These efforts make this among the largest print legal-notice campaigns in history.

That Google is in the position of paying for so many print ads “is hilarious — it is the ultimate irony,” said Robert Klonoff, dean of Lewis & Clark Law School in Portland, Ore., and the author of a recent law review article titled “Making Class Actions Work: The Untapped Potential of the Internet.”

So far, more than 200 advertisements have run in more than 70 languages: in highbrow periodicals like The New York Review of Books and The Poetry Review in Britain; in general-interest publications like Parade and USA Today; in obscure foreign trade journals like China Copyright and Svensk Bokhandel; and in newspapers in places like Fiji, Greenland, the Falkland Islands, and the Micronesian island of Niue (the name is roughly translated as Behold the Coconut!), which has one newspaper.

The almost comically sweeping attempt to reach the world’s entire literate population is a reflection of the ambitions of the Google Book Search project, in which the company hopes to digitize every book — famous or not, in any language, published anywhere on earth — found in the world’s libraries.

Under the proposed settlement, reached on Oct. 28 and still subject to court approval, there must be an effort the court finds “reasonable and practicable” to find authors and publishers — especially copyright holders of so-called orphan books, which are still in copyright but long out of print. So the task means placing at least one advertisement in every country in the world.

Send me any links you think I might find useful.

Abortion is no longer in the neocon lexicon

Recently, a medical librarian at the University of California - San Francisco noticed that a health database named Popcite (similar to Medline) was returning odd results when she searched for health information related to abortion.

Puzzled, she contacted the manager of the database, Johns Hopkins' Debbie Dickson, who replied in an April 1st e-mail that the university had recently begun blocking the search term because the database received federal funding.

"We recently made all abortion terms stop words," Dickson wrote in a note to Gloria Won, the UCSF medical center librarian making the inquiry. "As a federally funded project, we decided this was best for now."

There was no notice of the change on the site.

Dickson suggested other kinds of more obscure search strategies and alternative words to get around the keyword blocking.

"In addition to the terms you're already using, you could try using 'Fertility Control, Postconception'. This is the broader term to our 'abortion' terms and most records have both in the keyword fields," she wrote.

She also suggested using a euphemistic search strategy of "unwanted w/2 pregnancy." But the workarounds don't satisfy critics of the censorship.

"The main function of their site is keyword search, and if you use a phrase that contains the word 'abortion,' it ignores it," notes Melissa Just, the library director at the cancer research institute and hospital named City of Hope in Duarte, California. Just followed the conversation on a listserv and said she was outraged when she found out about the censorship incident. |U.S. Funded Health Search Engine Blocks 'Abortion' - Wired|

As a librarian, much of my time is spent working with different ontologies.

Ontology is both a branch of philosophy and a fast-growing component of computer science concerned with the development of formal representations of the entities and relations existing in a variety of application domains. Ontology has been shown to have considerable potential on the level of both pure research and applications. It provides foundations for diverse technologies in areas such as information integration, natural language processing, data annotation, and the construction of intelligent computer systems.|National Center for Ontological Research|

Popcite has chosen to deny reality by lobotomizing its ontology.

Apparently this was in response to pressure in the form of complaints from the Bush administration about medical literature related to abortion.

University administrators of the world's largest scientific database on reproductive health blocked the word "abortion" as a search term after receiving a complaint from the Bush administration over two abortion-related articles listed in the database.

"The items in question had to do with abortion advocacy -- the two items dealing with abortion were removed following this inquiry, and the administrators made a decision to restrict abortion as a search term," said Tim Parsons, a spokesman for the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Maryland.

The blocking of the keyword "is a decision that the dean does not support in any way," he added, and the administrators are unblocking the search for the term right now. |Overreaction to Bush Administration Complaint Prompted Block on 'Abortion' Searches - Wired|

While they've reversed the action, it still offends me that librarians would cave like this.

Link

This post at Crooked Timber about the origins of surnames is neat, neat, neat. Don't skip the comments.