English Short Title Catalogue goes online

The British Library in partnership with over 2000 institutions worldwide has announced that it is to make the English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC) available online and free.

The ESTC is a comprehensive source of printed material from around the world dating from1473 to 1800 with the British Library supplying over half of the content. Containing primarily bibliographic information of books and periodicals it also includes many separate print materials such as adverts within that period,  with extra imagery being added in early 2007.

This is the first time that the public can access the information through a web interface without charge.

In partnership with the University of California, Riverside, the British Library share information daily and are in contact with over a thousand registered contributors around the world to create the database.

While the ESTC is used principally by scholars there are commercial applications.  When a publications value often depends on its availability and scarcity the facility allows users to discover if they own a unique copy of work, which will be useful to book dealers and information professionals.

Furthermore, it is estimated that between 10% to 15% of late 18 century English language books are no longer in existence nor with any accompanying record, Neil Wilson, Project Manager for the ESTC web launch believes that because the public can use the facility to check any old inherited books they may have received, there is the possibility some of the lost works may re-emerge through public interest. Since the digitisation and web implementation process began the sketchy coverage of book location outside of the UK and USA leapt from a handful of printed materials to tens of thousands due to the collaborative efforts of the affiliated institutions, Wilson firmly believes that ESTC can help us reclaim our heritage.

http://estc.bl.uk 
 

Think tanks demand “private right to copy”

In a move this weekend to protect individual mp3 users from criminalisation the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) has called on Chancellor Gordon Brown to change UK copyright law, writes Daniel Griffin. As it currently stands the 300 year old laws mean that anyone who copies content from their legally bought CD’s and DVD’s to their personal computers or other multi-media devices face possible prosecution.

The IPPR recommends in its latest paper, Public Innovation: Intellectual property in a digital age that private individuals beallowed to make copies of their own content, as currently millions of UK residents are breaking the law. A recent survey of 2135 British adults conducted by the National Consumer Council (NCC) discovered that over half of British consumers were infringing copyright law by following this practice, with an additional 59% who weren’t aware they were breaking the law.

Whilst the report cites that the music industry as a whole pursues widespread illegal distribution rather than prosecuting individuals for personal copying, Dr Ian Kearns, Deputy Director of ippr states “It is not the music industries job to decide what rights consumers have. That is the job of Government.”

The forthcoming Gowers Review of Intellectual Propert, which was set up in the 2005 pre-budget report by Chancellor Gordon Brown and headed by former FT editor Andrew Gowers will analyse the UK’s current Intellectual Property structure. Public Innovation: Intellectual property in a digital age states that the government will need to consider current Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology and be sure it does not affect the preservation of electronic content in libraries, suggesting the British library be given access to DRM-free copy of any new digital content.

http://www.ippr.org.uk

Google's Custom Search Engine

Google reminds me of an atomic explosion. When these bombs go off, they suck everything in sight into a giant mushroomn cloud which then rains radioactive particles in its shadow. Google seems to suck in all the innovation it can and then spatter the world with an endless array of 'free' services. A bit frightening, but jolly good for users and advertisers alike.

This week, it announced another useful facility, its Google Co-op Custom Search Engine which you can embed straight into your web pages or blog (same thing, I know). If you have a Google account, you create a search box which restricts (or prioritises, but I haven't made that work yet) searching to your favourite sites or parts of sites. Instead of an unfocused deluge, your users have a good chance of finding what they want at the first attempt.

If you have multiple websites, forums, blogs and so on, then you can cast a net around them and provide access to any of this content through a single Google-style search box.

Or, if you are part of a special interest group, you can give the group a one-stop-shop for searching all the relevant websites. Not only that, but you can give colleagues permission to add their own suitable sites.

You can also provide 'refinement labels' to help users further filter their results. You can customise the result pages to reflect your own house style. But,  you won't be surprised to learn, you will be obliged to carry a Google graphic and allow advertisements to appear.

It's neat. It's easy to use. And it provides Google with even more fissionable material.

PS It's English-only at the moment.

Thomson to drop Learning – it's goodbye to education and library operations

Yesterday's bombshell from Thomson Corporation was a humdinger - it's finally saying goodbye to Thomson Learning. OK, there were intimations of it earlier this summer in comments made by ceo Richard Harrington. But now we have a timetable for departure.

Thomson is exiting the education market, selling off all the various operations in the Learning division (bidding starts in Q1), and reorganising its remaining operations (effective 1 January 2007). This time next year it will be quite a different company.

Thomson execs say that the money generated from this refocusing of its business could be more than $5bn, and this would help it expand into fast-rising markets like China and India. More significantly, it will help with bottom line profitability, as the education markets remain steadfastly wedded to less profitable print products, and government budgets continue to be squeezed.

To get a measure of how significant this announcement is, take a look at this Thomson chart of its 2005 corporate structure. Learning is the second biggest division, with revenues of $2.18bn. It's dwarfed only by Tax & Regulatory, although the contribution of the Financial division is thought to have overtaken it recently.

In yesterday's reorganisation, Thomson said it is creating six divisions: North American Legal; International Legal & Regulatory; Tax & Accounting; Financial; Scientific; and Healthcare. The aim is to continue to focus on developing electronic workflow solutions – a trend that is growing across the industry.

Thomson has already agreed to sell the continuing education and elearning operation netG to Skillsoft for $285m, with the remaining assets to be put under the hammer early next year. Assets available are: the testing and assessment business Prometric, higher education operation Wadsworth, the career skills specialist Delmar Learning and the library reference operation, Thomson Gale.

An obvious buyer for the latter is arch-rival ProQuest, although its accounting wobbles this year may mean it's in no mood (or position) to pay out big bucks for sometime. Will the other operations have any eager buyers with deep pockets?

Anyone vaguely familiar with Thomson's history (it once owned the UK newspapers The Times and Sunday Times, as well as assets in the travel and energy industries) will know it often makes hard-headed decisions to exit markets where performance or prospects are faltering. Whether it will be able to raise the kind of cash it hopes with this "let's get the hell out of Iraq" kind of exit strategy will be well worth watching over the next six months.

What future for Factiva?

What are we to make of the Factiva deal reached last week between Dow Jones and Reuters? The erstwhile partners in the joint venture are competitors once again – though these Ts&Cs suggest Reuters' hands have been well tied. Reuters must now watch and see what happens with its abandoned offspring, while being highly restricted in how it can compete with Dow Jones as it tries to re-focus Factiva on some more profitable activities.

Let's try to put the deal in context – for a start it gives a public valuation of the business - $320m to be precise, as Dow Jones is paying $160m for a half share. Factiva's operating revenue in 2005 was $281m, with profits in "double-digit figures". That means this valuation is probably a little over what the company's annual earnings are. Is that a great return on seven years of investment and expensive global infrastructure and brand building?

Compare that with what Google just paid for YouTube - $1.65bn. That's five times what Factiva's worth, and the YouTubers hadn't even worked out ways of making money.

Reuters' Tom Glocer, in comments made last week, seems to be well aware that news aggregation is a busted flush in light of the launch of Google News Archive. He seems to be well-pleased that he's washed his hands of Factiva. What does that say about other – possibly dead - ducks in the water like NewsNow, Verisign's Moreover division, or Thomson's confusingly bifurcated Dialog operation?

Dow Jones, meanwhile, seems to be the partner that has seen Factiva's future more clearly. There's no doubt that Factiva has been influenced by Reed Elsevier's LexisNexis Butterworth operation, which has been cleverly tacking with the winds in a squally, changeable market. LNB has been working on Client Development applications, which help big professional organisations with embedded sales and marketing services – and note the emphasis here is not on information professionals at all, but on reaching a different set of people in a corporation.

Similarly, Thomson One has been making headway by embedding financial information services into workflow applications on City desks – "whatever that job may be". Factiva knows where the money is – in workflow integration and among finance professional users. Whether Dow Jones wants to keep it running as a separate operation, or use its undoubted internet expertise to beef up Dow Jones services, is an altogether different question. Certainly the Dow Jones name has serious cache. My view is that Factiva as a brand may be going the way of Reuters Business Briefing. Into history.

Products and winners from the Office 2.0 conference

The Office 2.0 conference ran a product demo blitz in which 15 products were put through their paces in 5 minutes each. It was fast and furious, and the audience cast votes for the top three through their mobile phones. Vyew won the demo blitz, Wufoo was second and Koral third. Joyent walked off with the Office 2.0 suite prize. And, somewhat controversially, EchoSign, a document signature management service grabbed the best product award. (They got an unlikely 4666 votes against their nearest competitor's 6 votes. So well done to second-placed Coghead, a drag and drop web-based and hosted application builder/server.)

To give a flavour of the event, here's a quick (okay - less than quick) run-down on the demo's with those likely to interest you most at the beginning:

Vyew is web-conferencing with collaborative markup which runs through the browser. A little slow, but no client installation needed. It's free and it maintains a trail of activity. Nice.

SystemOne provides enterprise collaboration and search. SystemOne watches as you create or edit documents, showing related links from info sources such as the web, the intranet, corporate databases, blogs, emails, rss feeds, cms and so on. $95/seat but this may change.

Eighty percent of content is in docs (documents, emails, web pages and folders) and most of it isn't managed. Drag and drop documents into Koral for stunning management capabilities. Filter document views by person or tags. Full text indexing. Be notified of changes. Changes in one place can be mirrored elsewhere - eg if a PowerPoint slide has been reused. From free.

Preezo unveiled its web-based PowerPoint competitor at the event. Access presentations from anywhere. Slimmer files than PPT but it lacks animations at the moment. The product is still in development but it shows promise.

BEA's Builder is also work in progress. It's a wiki/blog based collaboration support system. Good for supporting unstructured teamwork processes.

Ninety percent of team/task management in done in Excel. Smartsheet is web-based and enables people to share a project view. Field update requests can be submitted by email. Changes trigger email alerts and a full audit trail is maintained. $20/month personal, $75/month for 5 users.

Wufoo is an HTML form builder - error checking, validation, confirm details etc. It's simple, easy to use and good for building surveys, application forms etc. It's free for low usage volumes.

Caspio Bridge is a web database/application creation program. Add forms and searches, recognise permissions. It can be run inhouse or hosted. Used by small and large organisations. From free to $600/month.

Approver tracks regular or web-based document development with email alerts, RSS or a desktop widget. Simple workflow with monitoring to show when things arrive and are looked at.

Etelos provides a powerful application builder, the results of which can be self- or externally-hosted. Sales and marketing systems, for example, with bookings, forms, drip marketing, contact management, activity monitoring and reporting can be created usine the English Application Scripting Engine (EASE) or php, jsp, AJAX etc.

Now for something completely different: The Techdirt Insight Community acts as a broker between Fortune 500 companies and expert bloggers. The bloggers are paid for their opinions. And the company bills one of the benefits as "create relationships with bloggers". Hmmm.

Design and build business-ready websites with SiteKreator. Hosting, forms, blogs, discussion forums etc. Aimed at SMB and individuals, not enterprise.

Trovix provides intelligent search for companies seeking job applicants. It cuts through misspellings and different terminology to get at meaning. The search engine itself is from MIT and sounds interesting.

Freshbooks offers speedy, painless billing, tracking and collection by email or US post. An API lets developers hook in.

Synthasite is a storefront builder. It's in closed beta.

That's it. No more Office 2.0. On to other things now. Unless you want more...

Darwin's complete works go digital

Charles Darwin's complete collection of works is now available online for free, writes Daniel Griffin. Digitised and run by Cambridge University; Darwin Online is sponsored by the Arts & Humanities Research Council and The Charles Darwin Trust. The resource is intended for an academic audience but it is available to anyone with an interest in Darwin or his famous theory of evolution.

Currently there are 50,000 searchable pages of text and an additional 40,000 high resolution images with more content to be added regularly until 2009. The collection can be viewed as a plain text transcript, or the original image text as a scan. There is also an impressive array of digitised images of the illustrations that are associated to his works. Cambridge University has also created MP3 audio files of the transcripts.

Highlights from the new online collection include first editions of Journal of Researchers, The Descent of Man and The Zoology of the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle. There are also never before published manuscripts including Darwin’s field notebooks.

Speaking to the BBC Radio 4 Today Programme this morning, Dr John van Wyhe, Project Director explained why the work was undertaken “The idea is to make these important works as accessible as possible; some people can only get at Darwin that way.”

http://darwin-online.org.uk

Reuters sells Factiva share

News service Reuters has sold its 50% share in news aggregation service Factiva to its partner in the project US news group Dow Jones  & Company. The deal, which is expected to be completed by the end of this year will give Dow Jones 100% control of Factiva. 

"The acquisition will nearly double the size of our Enterprise Media Group," said Rich Zannino, chief executive officer at Dow Jones, adding: "This reflects our determination to reduce our reliance on print publishing." 

Alan Scott, Chief Marketing Officer at Factiva believes the technology and information specialists Factiva has will compliment the news resources Dow Jones has.

"Reuters content will remain on Factiva until mid-2010," Scott said, under the terms of a current agreement between the London based news provider and Factiva. A statement from Factiva states that this agreement will release the aggregator from "certain jont venture conditions that limit Factiva's business opportunities". Scott said news sources from Reuters rivals could be seen on Factiva in the future.

"The time is now right for Factiva to have one owner," Zannino said. Factiva will now become part of Dow Jones Enterprise Media Group, which is headed by former Factiva boss Clare Hart.

Dow Jones said in a statement that it was paying $160 million for the stake and that Factiva was expected to generate a revenue of "approximately $290 million."

LexisNexis focuses on Intellectual Property

Legal information provider and publisher LexisNexis, part of the Reed Elsevier empire, has produced a new service and publication for those looking for information on intellectual property.

LexisNexis Global IP Law Service provides access to primary sources of intellectual property (IP) information, as well as related news and updates. Users can access information on patents, trademarks, utility models and industrial design. Information is sourced from over 220 countries. 

LexisNexis has also recently announced Intellectual Property Management: Strategies and Tactics, a title that provides members of the intellectual property community with real-life examples of how IP cases have been handled and how professionals can understand the legal and business issued surrounding the protection of IP.

Ebsco preferred by London Unis

Subscription agents Ebsco has won a prestigious contract in London, having been chosen as the preferred supplier of periodical subscription services for the London University Purchasing Consortium (LUPC).

The consortium is an independent organisation founded to provide its member universities in
London and the surrounding area with purchasing services.

Ebsco was subjected to an evaluation process that included tests by both purchasing and technical experts from five London area universities.

This deal is a continuation of an existing relationship between Ebsco and LUPC.

www.ebsco.com

National Blog Day

Today is national blog day. The National Trust has asked the nation to record a diary of today, a run of the mill Tuesday as if a diary entry or blog posting and send it in. The aim is to create an online archive of a day in the life of country, by which they mean the people of this country.

Historian Dan Snow wants details of "run-of-the-mill days" to create an account of how ordinary people live. A not so ordinary person who has joined the quest is Richard Charkin, boss of Macmillan.

Recent studies have shown an increase in digital creation, but a decrease in the amount of saved material, which could create a gap in our national archives and cause problems for historians in the future.

Office 2.0 Conference: the outcome

The Office 2.0 conference, while lively, invigorating and interesting, left visitors with more questions than answers.

The idea of Office 2.0 is simple enough: browser-delivered computer software. In practice, it is a can of worms. What, for example, if the user is offline? What data will be available and what programs will be there to work on it?

A hybrid approach would keep some application functionality at the desktop. But there's a decision to be made on the advantages of receiving software as a service. We're not talking about the death of Microsoft, sudden or otherwise. Far more likely that web-delivered applications are going to interoperate with Microsoft's programs.

The user interface will need to be similar to existing applications, otherwise users won't move, not unless they're forced to. It's unlikely at the present stage of play that C-level or IT professionals are going to head in that direction.

Some of the value of Office 2.0 derives from the fact that applications and data are hosted outside the organisation, thereby diminishing the IT workload. The hosting company can also watch what's going on (emails or files opened) and send alerts or reports, depending what they're looking for. They could even, suitably anonymised, provide aggregate information across their users.

The elephant in the room is the fact that Office 2.0 programs and their relatives are not very good at working together, certainly not to a common set of document or process standards and, of course, they look nothing like each other.

Vendors talk of "Work in Progress", "First Wave" and "Early Days" to suggest that things will improve real soon now.  Perhaps they're hoping they'll get bought and then merged into suites.  Although, through use of extreme programming, which rapidly improves software through user feedback, the services on offer are likely to mature rapidly.

At Office 2.0, enthusiasm was in abundance. Having seen several other IT revolutions in the past, I sense that this is another that cannot be ignored. But pick your way through the minefield carefully.

PS (2pm October 16) I see that the conference organiser has summarised what he learnt from the event. If you're interested in the subject, it (and its comments) are well worth a read.

Andrew McAfee on Office 2.0

Andrew McAfee, associate professor at Harvard, gave the keynote address at Office 2.0.

Using an illustration reminiscent of a Mercedes logo, he divided technologies into three groups: Structured Interactions (orders, expenses etc); Unstructured Interactions (such as email or firefighting activities); and Tasks (spreadsheet, drawing etc). The segments were labeled Enterprise IT, Network IT and Function IT respectively.

Until now, he pointed out that these three things existed in isolation with not much boundary spanning. The advent of things like blogs, wikis and tags means that not only are the boundaries breached, a 'footprint' of activities can be left behind. Patterns and structures emerge as users collaborate and the barriers become porous.

Of course, whether collaborative technologies are adopted depends on the individual, the management and the organisation. A punishment culture, for example, would prevent users risking exposure. A hoarding culture would prevent managers from sharing the information in their departments. McAfee talks about the difficulty of sustaining fiefdoms should the new technologies be adopted.

Other issues include the present technical 'endowment' - organisations with an existing large scale Notes or knowledge management system will look askance at the new stuff. Old economy companies will be scratching their heads more than newer organisations.

McAfee offers no answers, that's not his job. What he does (and I'll revisit it in a column or a feature) is to pose questions and suggest a structured way of thinking about the issues.

As he said to the conference "We are at a very early stage and the crystal ball is not clear."

Esther Dyson examines groupware mkII

The opening session of the Office 2.0 conference featured CNET/ZDnet editor Dan Farber interviewing industry pundit Esther Dyson. We first met her in the UK when she was a keen advocate for groupware in the mid-80's.

Dyson seemed a good choice for a keynote on "Office 2.0". But, when she confessed to being at about "Office 0.8" herself, one wondered if she was such a good choice after all.

In fact, she had a refreshingly global view of the subject, based on her extensive foreign travels. For a start, ubiquitous access to Office 2.0 applications is restricted to those with continuous and reliable access to power and internet access. How many global companies can even claim that?

Some of the later demonstrations proved her point when access was so slow, the presenters mumbled about "the Regis St Francis Hotel wifi network" and quickly changed the demonstration focus. I've never seen so many rotating "waiting" icons.

She predicts "a long long time" before mass adoption. She also pointed out that the focus of the successful applications would be different to today's: they will focus on tasks and collaboration, not just documents. She said, "I want an activity manager not a data manager."

She advocated a "spreadsheet version of workflow", which must have been music to the ears of exhibitor itensil which is currently beta-testing its combined wiki and very-easy-to-use workflow application with companies like McDonald's in Canada.

She believes that synchronisation of tasks will be the real benefit of 2.0. "Where is it, who has it, where's it to go?"

One of her best quotes, and one that should strike fear into Microsoft detractors, was ""the biggest anti-Microsoft force is inside Microsoft - Ray Ozzie." The very man that started the groupware revolution.

I asked her if she would be evangelising Office 2.0 as she once evangelised groupware.

Her answer? "No."

Day 1.0 of Office 2.0 conference

Before getting into specific posts about the Office 2.0 conference, here are some broad thoughts about the first day.

Ismael Ghalimi from IT|Redux and Socialtext's Julia French put in masses of work organising the conference, including the dishing out of iPods for all delegates. This contained the conference programme which many of us promptly destroyed by plugging the iPods into our PCs. By the time Ghalimi warned of the problems, it was already too late for many of us.

One thing became clear early on and that is that Office 2.0 applications, including their close relatives from Enterprise 2.0, are not going to replace regular office applications any time soon. Too many issues mitigate against them. Professor Andrew McAfee nailed it when he said that, for an application to displace an incumbent, it would need to be ten times better.

He cited John Gourville for this insight. Fundamentally, we put an artificially high value on what we curently use and a correspondingly low value on what is being proposed as a replacement. Multiply the two factors together - for email versus collaboration software, for example - and you hit a factor of nine. Hence the 'ten times better' to be sure of a move.

Many of the speakers and demonstrators were up front about the fact that, in terms of functionality, their programs were not yet a match for today's powerful desktop products. However, they do exist as low cost browser-only products with rapid development cycles based on user feedback, rather than long development cycles and technology-led developments.

Speakers talked, and sometimes argued, that coexistence with existing office applications was better than replacement. The fault lines in the Office 2.0 world started to become apparent. But opportunities started to emerge as well. I'll examine some of these in my next post.

Will latest Sony Reader spark ebook tipping point?

Sony launched an ebook reader the size of a paperback, with a six-inch screen, in the US last week. The Sony Reader was unveiled alongside a new online e-book shop called Sony Connect, which has inked deals with major publishers (from Penguin to Random House) to provide e-book content.

The moves emulate Apple's iPod and iTunes services – you buy an ebook from Connect and download on to your PC, then transfer it, via a USB link, to the Reader itself. Sony's system will allow an eBook to be transferred to up to six devices.

But Sony's Reader may not have iPod levels of uptake - the high price of the Reader ($350) and uncertainty around digital rights management issues generally, may still produce consumer resistance.

A Sony spokeswoman told me that there are absolutely no plans to launch the Reader in Europe, let alone the UK, and that it might be some time before Sony evaluates the success of the new products in the US before even deciding to give them more global roll-out – if at all.

So, while this latest news has been hailed by some as the beginning of the ebook revolution, I think it's far from likely to create a tipping point for wider acceptance of ebooks.

Sony has, however, delivered solutions to some headaches. The Reader benefits from using screen technology from E-ink Corporation, which has developed a more paper-like reading experience – a real bugbear for many early adopters. Power consumption is also much lower – Sony says the Reader battery will last for up to 7,500 page turns.

But it's digital rights management issues that still remain unresolved, and until they do, the ebook industry is unlikely to take off. Consumers will want to be able to move ebooks around, swapping a book from one device to another – which could open up the way for Napster style peer-to-peer "piracy" to emerge.

There may be some scope for developing DRMs that take into account library loans or time-limited "browsing" of a title, but in general the publishing industry and digital book consumers are at loggerheads. And that isn't going to change soon.

SeeWhy and Confirmit dashboards improve organisational performance

Strange how things go in waves. This week seems to have been the week of real-time dashboards.

SeeWhy Software has helped Guinness improve the timeliness of its deliveries to North America by 60 percent. FIRM's Confirmit survey and reporting software spots problems that might otherwise be ignored or overlooked.

Neither program is new. But both are interesting in the sense that they are probes into the real world and both 'tip off' their users of problems through a dashboard in real-time. SeeWhy does it by comparing operational data with historical information, alerting users to significant deviations. In the case of Guinness (no pun intended), the events are stages in the delivery process from Dublin to the US seaboard (via an intermediate deep water port). SeeWhy can, of course, work with much higher frequency events.

With Confirmit, surveys can be built, executed and reports delivered very quickly. APIs enable other programs to pick up information. In a new development, the company is working with 'attitude' surveys based on users' reactions to specific events, such as a customer support call. Within a very short time they are asked about their satisfaction and earlier indicators of problems can rescue a potentially failing relationship. In this case, Confirmit describes the events as "key moments of truth"

In both cases, continual monitoring means that problems can be spotted instantly and organisations are able to intervene in real time. So much better than traditional reporting which focuses on what's happened in the past. Both companies choose the same analogy for this: "It's like driving a car by looking in the rear-view mirror."

Tory party backs commercial IP rights

In the debate about copyright law and access to information, the Conservative party has leapt to the defence of the commercial interests of the music and creative industries, writes Tracey Caldwell. The British Library opened the debate at the recent Conservative party conference by calling for a balance between the rights of creators and public interest access to information.

                

British Library chief executive Lynne Brindley told IWR, “There has always been a balance but unless we push this balance there is a danger that laws will be skewed in a commercial direction.”

Conservative spokesman John Whittingdale, chairman of the Department of Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee, says, “ All parties are now much more conscious of Intellectual Property issues.

“As our manufacturing industry was replaced by our service industry which is now going overseas, the focus is on the creative industries – music, electronic games etc - which we are extremely good at, but this requires a framework of law from government.”

He added, “We need to make sure people can get a reward for their efforts yet a large number of people do not understand why copyright matters. The survival of the creative industry depends on copyright.”

He disagreed with the British Library’s recommendation to keep the term of copyright for sound recording as it is and not extend it to 95 years, citing the rights of the musicians and music industry to protect their copyright.

There is concern that the sledgehammer of new copyright laws being brought to bear to protect commercial sectors such as the music industry may have adverse effects on innovation in other areas.

Libraries benefit from “fair dealing” exemptions in copyright law that allow them to offer access to material for private study and research but these rights are being eroded by technologies such as DRM tools preventing access to digital materials that was previously allowed under copyright law. Brindley says “We must push to maintain fair dealing rights for research and educational purposes and to allow creativity in science.”

Whittingdale told IWR that the Conservatives would seek to protect libraries’ rights as well as the commercial interests of the creative sector. “It is important to keep the UK economy protected. However, the scientific community is different in that they have an interest in publishing and sharing their material. The role of the library will be protected and access to research that has traditionally been provided by the library will be protected.”

BBC joins BL in Microsoft content partnership

Software giants Microsoft has today made a second move towards becoming a major power in the British information sector with the announcement that it has signed an agreement public service broadcaster the BBC. This deal follows an agreement last November that saw Microsoft agree to fund the digitisation of 25 million pages of out of copyright British Library held material.

The deal with the BBC is to investigate new ways of developing digital services, including Web 2.0 technologies and ways of sharing online content. According to its own website, the BBC said the deal is non-exclusive.

Controversial BBC director general Mark Thompson has made it his mission at the Beeb to develop new technologies for delivering BBC content and has announced a strategy of setting up technological partnerships with technology service providers. The BBC reports that its director general has been in the US and signed the agreement in person with Bill Gates.

Together the two corporations will look into  new search, navigation, distribution and content enablement systems. The BBC confirmed that it is also in discussions with online audio and video service provider Real Networks, computer infrastructure provider IBM and the online game Second Life.

The last 18 months has seen Microsoft put considerable efforts into building relationships with content providers. Throughout this year Microsoft has been busy digitising 25 million pages of out of copyright material held by the British Library which will appear on its MSN BookSearch web service. Microsoft is also a partner with the library in developing the National Digital Library which will capture electronic content to archive for future access. And 12 months ago Microsoft joined web search rivals Yahoo as a member of the Open Content Alliance (OCA) to digitise books and the world libraries. MSN BookSearch will deliver academic material, as well as periodicals online.