Google Books has released a number of improvements designed to make reading and sharing their material easier. The Books blog, Inside Google Book Search lists seven changes:

1. embedding and links – From the new toolbar on a Books page you can copy a link to the source or the html necessary to produce an iframe in your blog or web page that will embed the source.
2. improved search – There’s now more context around your search terms, and you can rank your search results by relevance as well as page order.
3. thumbnail view – More useful, perhaps, where images are

I’ve been attending classes this week at the University of Victoria’s DHSI. From the website:

The Digital Humanities Summer Institute provides an environment ideal to discuss, to learn about, and to advance skills in new computing technologies influencing the work of those in the Arts, Humanities and Library communities.

Perhaps the only institute of its kind, attendees come from all over the world (in my class there are people from Europe, the US, and Thailand as well as Canadians from all parts). We have grad students, professors and librarians.

To get an idea of the content, have a look . . . [more]

The Florence Agreement of 1950 attempts to stem restrictions on the circulation of knowledge via books. In the Philippines, the government has recently given to the world a new understanding of the scope of the agreement, based on a more critical reading of the text. According to the Customs Undersecretary, the Agreement only applies to educational books, and, no surprise here, Customs is the body best able to make that determination. Perhaps they are well versed in the field. There seems to have been some interesting work done ((Such as HARSKAMP, E. and SUHRE, C. (1992). ‘Psychometrische kwaliteiten van meetinstrumenten . . . [more]

The NYT blog is reporting an odd intervention by the American Library Association, the Association of College and Research Libraries and the Association of Research Libraries expressing concern about the long-term impact of the Google settlement on research libraries and asking United States District Court Judge Denny Chin to exercise “vigorous oversight” over a class action settlement between Google, authors and publishers.

The groups did not oppose the settlement, but asked for continuing oversight, to ensure that the prices Google charges for subscriptions to its digital library aren’t artificially high because of a lack of competition. . . . [more]

Professor Larry Lessig’s recent book, Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy, has been released under a Creative Commons license and is available as a free download from Bloomsbury Academic. You can, as well, purchase a hardback version and an e-book version.

The book is divided into the following chapters (a more detailed TOC is available on the book’s website):

Chapter 1: The Cultures of our Past
Chapter 2: Cultures of our Future
Chapter 3: RO [Read-only], Extended
Chapter 4: RW [Read/Write], Revived
Chapter 5: Cultures Compared
Chapter 6: Two Economies: Commercial and Sharing . . . [more]

Announced Friday by the Prime Minister’s Office:

PM announces appointment of new Librarian and Archivist of Canada

24 April 2009
Ottawa, Ontario

Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced today the appointment of Daniel J. Caron as Librarian and Archivist of Canada, effective April 25, 2009.

Mr. Caron, currently Senior Assistant Deputy Minister, Corporate Management and Horizontal Integration Sector, Library and Archives Canada, replaces Ian E. Wilson, who is retiring from the Public Service after a very distinguished career.

The Prime Minister also announced that, upon his retirement, Mr. Wilson will hold the title of Librarian and Archivist of Canada Emeritus

Today (being both Shakespeare’s birthday and Shakespeare’s and Cervantes’ deathday) seems apt for some comment on World Book and Copyright Day.

Last month, at the Second Global eIFL-IP conference in Istanbul, librarians from thirty-nine developing and transition countries decided to highlight the importance of users’ rights for libraries and education to mark the occasion. eIFL.net is an international foundation, which supports national library consortia in approximately fifty transition and developing countries to negotiate and advocate for the wide availability of electronic resources to education, research and professional communities as well as governmental organisations and civil society. This global . . . [more]

Case citations exist primarily for the purpose of enabling a researcher to locate the full text of a judgment or the decision of an administrative tribunal. The primary purpose of a style guide for legal citation is to ensure that everyone can understand how various combinations of numbers, letters, brackets and punctuation make it possible for the reader to find the full text of a case referred to in a book, article or another case. There are other uses, such as case citators, but the main purpose of a case citation is to provide the means to easily locate a . . . [more]

As Slaw readers will know, one of the themes that recurs here quite frequently is the role of publishing and books in this culture of rapid technological change. Jason Epstein has a few thoughts on the matter, some of which he shared in the keynote at the recent O’Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing Conference 2009 in New York. Epstein is someone you would very much want to listen to on the subject: now 81 years old, he created the Anchor Book imprint in the early 50s, launching the trade paper format; in 1963 he co-founded the New York Review . . . [more]

As everyone knows by now, Amazon is poised to bring out Kindle 2 in the U.S. Apart from its other features, the Kindle 2 can read — out loud. This is, of course, no more than any competent computer can do nowadays, and in tones that are increasingly lifelike. But this ability to speak a book worries the American Authors Guild, which opines that an act of turning text to speech might violate copyright, or, more precisely, impinge on an author’s “e-book rights.”

(Most commentary you’ll read on this — WSJ, Boing Boing, and those quoted in . . . [more]

This story will warm the heart of any law librarian (or any other kind of librarian).

Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, the US Airways pilot who made a miraculous emergency landing on the Hudson River in New York on January 15, was worried about a book he had borrowed from the library at California State University.

The book happened to end up on the bottom of the river in the cargo hold of the aircraft.

But that did not stop our hero.

He contacted the library and asked for an extension. Pretty conscientious, eh?

The library, of course, waived the overdue . . . [more]

I’ve done a quick search of Google Books (“Canada” + “law”)(“canadian” + “law”) and have created a library of some of the resulting material. I chose books published in this century that had a limited preview available and came up with 57 volumes. As you’ll know, I’m sure, Google Books has four degrees of accessibility online: no preview available, snippet view, limited preview and full preview. Those in the last category tended to be the oldest material, typically published in the 19th century.

The books I’ve identified have what I believe is a substantial proportion of their text readable . . . [more]