April 2007 Archives

This is just too amusing not to share, from Copyfight Blog:

Technorati Tags: copyfight, copyright, mandatory licensing, compulsory licensing

I'll just leave it at that.  Here's an obit on Variety if anybody is interested:

Variety.com - Movies were Valenti's Mission

Technorati Tags: jack valenti, obit, obituary, mpaa

Technorati Tags: barack obama, iraq war, petition

Just commenting a little on this blog post on TechCrunch:

Steve Jobs:  "People want to own their music"

I haven't read the accompanying URLs in the post yet, but this is certainly an interesting topic and I'll probably click through to them when I'm not at work.

Some personal thoughts...sorry Steve, I'm quite happy not owning my music (at least digitally).  Actually the thought of buying a bunch of proprietary music files and loading down my computer with these files does not appeal to me.  Nor does the thought of something happening to my computer where I would lose all of that music that I just invested in with no way to be refunded or to get them back.  Or worse yet, the formats or players change to where I can no longer access that music the way I want.

I actually am a bit torn by Steve Jobs right now.  On one hand I commend him taking a stand against DRM a few months ago.  On the other hand I'm not sure charging more for non-DRM protected files is the way to go either.  Maybe it's because I believe that the 99-cent track is a little too much to begin with.  Then again, maybe that's because I'm cheap :)  Some tracks are probably worth the 99-cents, I don't believe all of them are, especially when we're talking about the Long Tail tracks.

Although, what Apple is doing is an interesting experiment in just how much consumers will pay to download music, both protected with DRM and not protected.  I'm not sure I believe the bit about subscription music being unpopular, I just think that Apple is hugely popular.  My prediction may be wrong, but I don't see Apple holding on to the digital music market forever, although they are a hugely innovative company, maybe they can. 

Buying tracks has not appealed to me, I don't buy much CDs anymore and if it weren't for the subscription music model I probably would continue to get my music from the library (which really isn't all that bad either.)

There is always good debate with this topic though...probably because it is so unpredictable.

Technorati Tags: steve jobs, apple, itunes, ipod, subscription music, drm

I just got done reading this post from librarian.net about Library Audiobooks.  Initial impression, (1) I sympathize and (2) I just got done with my research paper on DRM so I feel like a pseudo-expert (although I hate claiming to be an expert on anything).

I know I've discussed these things on my blog before, my own experiences with Overdrive at AADL have not been positive, but because they were my own experiences and I cut my losses early.  If I were working with a patron, like Jessamyn, I would have tried every possible thing to get that service working for them...apparently not every librarian approaches this issue the same...according to Jessamyn blog:

The book was from Overdrive. Our library isn't a subscriber but this patron had another library card at a place that has Overdrive. I was told when I got in that a patron with an iPod needed help getting an audiobook from this library.  I said yeah he should be having some trouble, Overdrive doesn't support Macs/iPods, or they don't suppoer it. I launched into an explanation of DRM until I got the impression it wasn't helping and sat and waited for the kid to show up. Turns out he didn't have an iPod (as I suspected) and turns out he had checked out an MP3 player from the library that has the Overdrive subscription. They had offered to put the book on the MP3 player for him, but they also told him they didn't know how to do it and suggested, according to him, that he should do it himself. So he came to the library that I work at. They told him to come back when I was working because no one there knew how to do it either.

Yea to Jessamyn, she went above and beyond for this patron, but it's sad that this patron was told that "I'm sorry we can't help you," by several others before she even talked to him, even by the patron's "home library" which is supposed to support this service wasn't much help.  It is their player and their service and nobody there seems to know how it works.

At my library we use NetLibrary's service, it's somewhat similar only it does not require additional software to be installed on computers (which I would prefer).  I also forget to try it out with my new MP3 player though (now that I'm thinking about it I'll try it at work today).  Lately I've been obtaining the CD version of the audiobook and putting those on my MP3 player, there appears to be no DRM or compatibility issues with this method and my sanity is preserved.

As for my adventures in DRM this semester, I can honestly say that I've learned a lot...and none of it good for libraries.  The DMCA is a horrible mess and content providers don't seem to care that they inconveniencing consumers and locking citizens out of content despite rights granted under fair use and even blocking public domain works.  The sad thing is that most of these content providers don't even own the copyrights themselves, but since they're controlling the technology they're also controlling the content.  There's a lot of good literature on DRM in libraries though, once I settle down from the end of the semester I will probably put up my bibliography on the topic.  I believe that this is an important issue for librarians, they need to understand how DRM works and why it's working, the future of information access for their patrons is at stake...no joke.

Technorati Tags: drm, libraries, librarians, audiobooks, dmca

I recently restored my computer and when I went back to reinstall Office from the school server I noticed that they had 2007 for download...so of course I installed it!  Anyway, I should have known if I was going to write a paper or do a PowerPoint presentation on the new version that there might be problems opening them at school.

It turns out my school lab does have some 2007 applications but PowerPoint isn't one of them (weird).  I couldn't open my paper in Word either so there must have been a problem with that too.  Luckily I had my computer and I was able to plug that in to the projector.

If you're giving a presentation using PowerPoint 2007 you might want to consider different formats.  I haven't really checked it out but there might be a way to save a PPT in 2003 version from 2007.  I know old versions of Access had this option, of course I didn't consider this come crunch time.  There's always creating a web version of your PPT, they're just not very compact but you could use the web page locally from a flash drive or upload it to a server (if an internet connection is available).  It just goes to show that you can never be too prepared for presentations...every problem you didn't think of will probably happen when you're up there.

Anyway, if you're thinking about upgrading, have upgraded, or manage public computers you should probably consider this.  Office 2007, as usual, does not open in Office 2003.  There is a conversion option that 2003 users can download, but I was in my school lab and installing things wasn't really an option (the file they direct you to is a .exe).

This is also something you don't think about when you've upgraded, but if you send a 2007 version in an email to somebody who has 2003 then it may be a minor annoyance to them, especially if they don't have the option to download the conversion either.

There might be some conversion issues the other direction too, I didn't have any problems opening old files, but one Excel file would keep trying to send error reports to Microsoft after I converted it and then tried to close it.  There's nothing wrong with the data in the file though, it's just annoying.

I just don't understand why Microsoft can't release applications that are backwards compatible...grrr.

Oh and I just wanted to throw this out there because I'm proud of it...after I restored my computer I decided that I was no longer going to install any "questionably obtained" software on my computer.  For the applications that I really wanted I was able to find some decent open source alternatives for them...especially Dreamweaver, which is the one that I really didn't want to get rid of.  Instead of Dreamweaver I've been trying out Aptana.  I've used it a few times to finish up my class website project but I really like it.  I even prefer how it handles ftp over Dreamweaver.  For Photoshop I installed GIMP, but I haven't played around with it at all yet.  I also just completely gave up on Acrobat, I use PDF Converter to print PDF and I use Foxit Reader to read PDF.  Those are the major ones, most of the other applications I had installed for the Adobe and Dreamweaver suites I just didn't use so I haven't gone out looking for alternatives for them.

Technorati Tags: office 2007, microsoft office, office, microsoft, open source, dreamweaver, aptana, adobe, photoshop, gimp, pdf converter, foxit reader, acrobat

ALA | New data on U.S. libraries shows almost two billion served

Way to go libraries!  It's really no surprise to me, we're constantly busy at my branch and our circ stats keep going up. 

Also, I'm trying out blogging using my Diigo toolbar for the first time...crossing my fingers that it works.

Somebody sent this to me via a forward, I almost didn't read it because it was a forward but my husband told me to do it.  Anyway, it's real quick, try it if you haven't seen this before:

1.  Go to maps.google.com
2.  Get directions from new york to paris france
3.  Read step number 23

I love that people at Google have a sense of humor :)

The really sucky thing about citing blog posts in journal articles is that come 3 years later there's a chance you might not be able to find it anymore.

Just reading an article from a journal that cites a blog post from Socialtext.  Sounds interesting but it's no longer archived on their website.  It also happens to fall in a huge chunk of blog posts that are not on the Wayback Machine Internet Archive.

This is certainly something to consider for the future of publishing your ideas both in print and on the internet.


Technorati Tags: publishing, blogs, journals, research

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I went snooping around for some Firefox extension that allowed me to highlight text on a page (you know, like I've actually taken a real highlighter to my screen). I've been doing a lot of research (and should be doing some now), while I normally like to print pages (and this will sound incredibly lazy), I didn't want to walk the 5 steps to my desk to plug in the printer and print some articles. I know that Scrapbook does some stuff like that, but I tend to use Scrapbook for other things. Scrapbook is wonderful but it saves files to your computer, I wanted something more web based. That's when I came across Diigo...wow what an awesome extension! I can highlight text and it will automatically save it on their servers so I can access my work anywhere online. You can also add comments to your highlights and those items will be available each time you visit the page. I know there's a lot of similar tools out there but I absolutely love Diigo. If you do a lot of web research I think this one is a must have.

There's a lot of talk about Tumblr lately, I decided to check it out. I imported the feeds from my major online precenses and here it is . I kind of like the idea of all of that stuff going to one place and the site is really nice and clean.

I also tried iStalkr, it does basically the same thing but I think the output is not a inspiring as Tubmlr. At any rate, my new iStalkr site is here. The nice thing about iStalkr is that you can see who is "stalkin" you, you're not able to do that with Tumblr.

And can I just ask, what's up these Web 2.0 names lately? Just because Flickr decided to drop and 'e' in their name, everybody has to do it? Oh well, we still sign up for this stuff so somebody is doing something right...

This past week I have been in researchdom. My favorite part of research is discovering new cool things from the cool things I already discovered. I was thinking as I was looking up various books and articles at just how awesome Google Scholar is! I can search a journal article across many different databases and in most cases it saves me the step of looking up the journal title in our catalog (which I can't deny is also useful), accessing the database this way and then searching for the article. Google Scholar is so simple! To make my life even easier Wayne State provides a link to Google Scholar that automatically authenticates each journal article I click on through their search (linked on the library's front page even...how wonderful!).

Google Book Search is also pretty cool. Find in a library links will open to Open WorldCat, but just typing the same search in Open WorldCat, MelCat, or one of my other library plugins for Firefox is also pretty easy. Although I was very surprised to find that one of the books I was looking for in Google Book Search is available almost completely in digital form on there. It was a new book too, ironically about copyright law. I knew we had it in my library so Iopted to request it from there but it's good to know it's there.