Author Archives: John Mark Ockerbloom

Unknown's avatar

About John Mark Ockerbloom

I'm a digital library strategist at the University of Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia.

Don’t shade your eyes

Posted on January 14, 2008 by John Mark Ockerbloom

Back in 2006, Paul Collins wrote an article in Slate asking “Will Google Book Search uncover long-buried literary crimes?” Now that we have large corpuses of texts searchable online, he argued, it will become much easier to find words lifted … Continue reading →

Posted in crimes and misdemeanors, online books | 1 Comment

Subjects are more than just facets (and an ALA talk plug)

Posted on January 10, 2008 by John Mark Ockerbloom

The Library of Congress’ Working Group for the Future of Bibliographic Control announced its final report today. I haven’t yet read over the final version, but I read an earlier draft, and was particularly interested in what it had to … Continue reading →

Posted in architecture, libraries, subjects | Comments Off on Subjects are more than just facets (and an ALA talk plug)

Copyright and Provenance: A paper and an example

Posted on January 4, 2008 by John Mark Ockerbloom

I’m happy to announce the publication of my paper “Copyright and Provenance: Some Practical Problems” in the latest issue of the IEEE Data Engineering Bulletin. I’ve also placed a copy in our institutional repository. [Provenance of the work: Created by … Continue reading →

Posted in copyright | 1 Comment

Public Domain Day gifts

Posted on January 1, 2008 by John Mark Ockerbloom

Quite the festive day today! All over the world, people who use the Gregorian calendar are celebrating New Year’s Day. Here in Philadelphia, it’s Mummer’s Parade day. And in my church, it’s a special day dedicated to Mary, the mother … Continue reading →

Posted in copyright, sharing | 17 Comments

Quick! While there’s still time!

Posted on December 19, 2007 by John Mark Ockerbloom

Folks interested in copyright information sharing may be interested in the following draft proposal for encoding copyright evidence in MARC records, the standard format used for library catalog records. It was published on December 17, just a couple of days … Continue reading →

Posted in copyright, libraries | Comments Off on Quick! While there’s still time!

Quick links of interest

Posted on December 17, 2007 by John Mark Ockerbloom

Some resources I’ve recently hear about that look like they deserve some attention (which I haven’t given them yet, but find worth noting now) The first issue of the Code4lib journal is out, with lots of interesting-looking articles on next-generation … Continue reading →

Posted in copyright, libraries, sharing | Comments Off on Quick links of interest

Kids on the lawn, and copynorms

Posted on December 14, 2007 by John Mark Ockerbloom

There’s an interesting discussion over in John Scalzi’s blog about a new organization called the Organization for Transformative Works, which essentially aims to legitimize fan fiction as first-class expressions safe from copyright challenges. As I write this, there are over … Continue reading →

Posted in copyright, sharing | 2 Comments

Notes (and Queries) about adopting serials

Posted on December 11, 2007 by John Mark Ockerbloom

The other night, Mary was researching the authorship of a memoir of the Battle of Waterloo, originally published under the by-line “An Englishwoman”. After searching online, she found a link to an article published in an 1871 issue of Notes … Continue reading →

Posted in open access, serials | Comments Off on Notes (and Queries) about adopting serials

We the mediators

Posted on December 9, 2007 by John Mark Ockerbloom

Back in early 2006, Peter Brantley (now the director of the Digital Library Federation) got a lot of interesting folks in libraries and publishing together in one room to talk about issues related to reading in the digital age. While … Continue reading →

Posted in meta, publishing | Comments Off on We the mediators

Copyright information sharing: An update

Posted on December 7, 2007 by John Mark Ockerbloom

I regularly get mail about the web pages I have on copyright registrations and renewals and the inventory I did on the first renewals of periodicals. Turns out a lot of folks, both inside and outside of libraries, are interested … Continue reading →

Posted in copyright, sharing | 4 Comments