100 years of the first sale doctrine

Posted on June 1, 2008 by John Mark Ockerbloom

On June 1, 1908, 100 years ago today, the US Supreme Court decided Bobbs-Merrill v. Straus, a case that established what would become known as the “first sale doctrine”. This doctrine, now codified as part of the US Copyright Act, says that in general the owners of books or other copyrighted works have the right to dispose of them as they see fit (such as by reselling them, giving them away, or lending them out). The copyright holder can still control the right to make copies, make public performances, or other derivative works. But once a reader has bought a book, they can pass it along as they see fit. (Or keep it, or fold it into little origami shapes for their own amusement. They own it, after all.)

This right exists even in the presence of notices to the buyer that claim to conditionally license the work, rather than sell it. Indeed, those kinds of licenses, familiar now to most computer users, were also at issue in the Bobbs-Merrill case. (For historical background, including some examples of old-time “end user license agreements”, see a post of mine from a few months ago, “The right to read, circa 1906.”)

Despite attempts by many software, music, and ebook publishers to extend control over their products to their buyers, the first sale doctrine is still salient today. Just last month, for example, a federal judge cited the first sale doctrine to uphold the right of an eBay merchant to resell used software. An article in Ars Technica has a link to the decision, and an excellent explanation of the case and the importance of the principles it upholds. Ultimately, as the article points out, the first sale doctrine is what “makes libraries and used book stores possible” without needing the permission of publishers to exist or carry out their missions.

The free access to literature that libraries provide, and the freedom to provide access to literature that the first sale doctrine provides, promote the literacy and education of all our citizens. So this is an anniversary well worth remembering for its contribution to society. Happy First Sale Day!

Posted in copyright, libraries | 5 Comments

Views of possible future architectures of cataloging

Posted on May 29, 2008 by John Mark Ockerbloom

PALINET convened a symposium today here in Philadelphia on the future of cataloging. There was a full turnout, with over 150 library professionals attending. It appeared that the organizers had to scramble a bit to distribute lunch to the large crowd. I waited for a few minutes in a line that hardly seemed to move at all, and then some logjam cleared, enabling us all to get our food in short order. (I did notice that by the time I picked up my own box lunch, no one was checking the tickets that specified what food we were entitled to take.) Would that all our cataloging projects could resolve their workflow and backlog issues so quickly.

The opening keynote was by Karen Calhoun, now at OCLC, whose controversial 2006 report for the Library of Congress touched off a fierce debate among librarians over what kinds of changes should take place in library catalogs. Her address at this symposium was less controversial, and dealt with transitions in the work of the folks that catalog and manage collections. My Penn colleague Beth Picknally Camden took part in the followup panel, remarking on the “perpetual beta” viewpoint that we’re encouraging in our library as we shift to new responsibilities and strategies. Also on the panel were Diane Hillmann (at Cornell until recently), and Christine Schwartz, whose blog, Cataloging Futures, is well worth following if you’re interested in future directions of library catalogs. (Besides the ongoing posts, its “key resources” column gives a useful overview of many of the current debates on cataloging.)

The symposium also provided an opportunity to learn more about the Library of Congress’s 2007 recommendation on the future of bibliographic control (in a presentation by Nancy Fallgren), as well as FRBR and RDA, two bibliographic standards proposed to become the new basis for bibliographic description (and featured in a presentation by John Attig.) I would have loved to go to both talks, preferably one right after another– if nothing else, the contrasting points of view would have been interesting. (The LC report recommended that work on RDA be suspended, in part due to concerns about the practicality of FRBR.) Alas, they were at the same time, so I attended Attig’s talk, which covered material less familiar to me than the contents of the LC report.

I also had to miss Christine di Bella’s talk on special collections cataloging to give my own talk. I’m not firmly settled into any established camp in the cataloging debate, but I’ve noticed that architectural issues– information architecture, systems architecture, and social architecture– underly many of the ongoing cataloging debates, and aren’t always explicitly considered or fleshed out. So I tried to address some of them in my talk, using projects I’m involved with such as subject maps, ILS discovery interfaces, and PennTags, as examples of designs that aim for a more robust catalog architecture. The slides I’ve used, which include pointers to more information about all these projects, are now posted on my Selected Works website. PALINET also intends to put the audio and slides of all of us who spoke on their website (though I’m not quite sure where they will end up, or whether they will be all accessible to the general public.)

I was happy to see several people raise the importance of freely sharing cataloging data, something that’s all too often hindered by existing contracts, and which severely impairs the community’s ability to improve the catalog collectively. Diane Hillmann was particularly eloquent on this issue, urging people to consider open source-like business models that support themselves by providing the best services, not by hoarding data. My talk also touched on “open data” issues. (And Karen Coyle recently blogged on an example of the kind of damage we’re inflicting on ourselves by not agreeing to share.) I did hear some encouraging hints suggesting that some aggregators might be moving towards more open sharing of commonly managed catalog records, as well as easier ways for the cataloging community to refine and improve on these records. We’ll see what happens.

This was my first PALINET symposium, and the first conference I’ve been to that focused specifically on cataloging issues. I’m very glad I went, and I thank PALINET for inviting me to speak (and running a smooth and enjoyable conference, lunch lines notwithstanding). If you’re interested in these issues, I hope you’ll find my talk slides of interest, and hope we’ll see more materials from the speakers online as well before long.

Posted in architecture, sharing | 2 Comments

An implementation of the DLF’s Basic Discovery Interfaces recommendation

Posted on May 16, 2008 by John Mark Ockerbloom

The DLF’s ILS-Discovery interface recommendation work, which I’ve been leading, continues. We’re now in the process of producing the official recommendation, which I hope will be out soon. (Especially since I fully intend it to be out there before I head off to the great white North in early June.) And the May Library Gang podcast features a conversation with me and various other folks in libraries and the commercial world about the ILS-DI work and its implications.

You don’t have to wait until the official release, though, to start experimenting with the interfaces. I’ve now implemented the Level 1 recommendations for The Online Books Page, so folks can see what an implementation can look like to an application. (And you’re also free to just use the interfaces if you find the data and services useful, though I reserve the right to limit access to them if out server gets overloaded.) I’ve also put up a page with more information on the interfaces and how to use them.

I’m hoping we’ll see ILS-DI interfaces for standard ILSs as well before long (whether they’re provided by ILS vendors or library developers working on top of vendor interfaces.) We have some interest in having the interfaces on top of our Voyager catalog, though that would take a while longer to implement. The Online Books Pages implementation, though, shows how the interfaces aren’t just for ILS’s, but can also use data and services from other online digital collections.

If the recommended interfaces become sufficiently widely and uniformly supported, a discovery application could draw on a wide range of sources, both in a local library and beyond it, and let its users discover resources from any or all of them in a largely seamless fashion. Which I think is a great way to help readers take full advantage of the library resources we all make available for them.

In the meantime, I hope you find this example implementation useful. I’ll be happy to hear and answer questions and comments about it, and about the ILS-DI work in general.

Posted in architecture, online books | Comments Off on An implementation of the DLF’s Basic Discovery Interfaces recommendation

Everybody’s repositories (first of a series)

Posted on May 7, 2008 by John Mark Ockerbloom

The library where I work has decided to think long and hard about its digital repository strategy. Your library may be doing this too, or may have recently done so and is now working on carrying out that strategy. If it’s not, it probably should be.

Libraries have for a long time hosted repositories of content in paper form; indeed, such repositories account for a large portion of both the budget and the floor space of many libraries. But many of them have been slow to take on responsibility for digital repositories, or have only done so in a very limited way, compared to their physical repository investments.

But while established libraries have often hesitated in taking up digital repositories, the rest of the world has not. As folks in research libraries have known for a while, a lot of the money we now spend on content pays for electronic resources held in publisher repositories. In typical arrangements, libraries no longer own this content (as they owned the print content the electronic versions supplant) but lease it. And even if a library has a “perpetual access” contract that lets it download publisher content after ending a subscription, for practical purposes many libraries are not ready to host it or make it available as readily and seamlessly as their patrons have grown to expect.

However, even if publisher repositories, or scholar-run discipline repositories like the social scientists’ SSRN, aren’t directly run by traditional libraries, those libraries are among their primary customers. Therefore, the folks who run those repositories have incentives to provide the kinds of services that those libraries need to carry our their missions (at least, if the libraries know to ask for them).

Increasingly, though, people are using new kinds of repositories that have little or no connection to traditional libraries. Some of these repositories are on their users’ own computers– their digital music collection and photo library, managed by programs like ITunes, IPhoto, and Picasa. Some of these repositories are on Internet sites like YouTube, Flickr, Google Docs and Google Base, and the various WikiMedia sites. We often don’t think of all of these as “repositories”, but that’s how people are using them: to manage and provide access to information in a stable way, potentially over a long period of time.

I’m not using “repository” here to mean just “glorified filesystem or website”. The everyday repositories I mention above typically put substantial effort into managing metadata, supporting discovery, providing for access control (and often backup and version control), and supporting long-term access and use of the content. They tend to do all these things much more quietly and unobtrusively than the repositories typically designed for and marketed to libraries, but that’s a feature, not a bug. We who work in research libraries need to consider these “repositories for everybody” very carefully. A lot of the digital content that libraries will want to include in our own collections will come out of those repositories. And those repositories can potentially teach us a lot about how to design and run our own.

That’s one big reason why I want to discuss my library’s strategic thinking about repositories in open forums like this one. True, the Penn Libraries don’t have exactly the same uses and needs for repositories as other people and groups. But I think there are a lot of repository issues where we and many others share common interests, or have common questions we all need to answer. Over a series of posts, I hope to discuss repository purposes, infrastructure, technologies, ingest, workflow, labor allocation, lifecycles, legal concerns, integration, policy, and community, all of which are relevant to our repository plans. The strategies and issues most salient for Penn may or may not be the same as yours. But if repositories matter to you, I hope that discussing our issues in a broader context will give you useful things to think about for your own situation. And I hope that we will learn from you as well.

Lots of other people have already written thoughtfully on repositories. I hope to stealreuse and build on their ideas wherever I can. A good introduction to many of the issues can be found at JISC’s Repository Support Project, a website to help institutions planning repositories, starting from “What is a repository, anyway?” and working from there. (It’s not a given, by the way, that libraries should always run their own repositories for their digital content– but more on that later.)

Repository planners should be familiar with both the theory and practice of repositories. You don’t have to know all the details of the OAIS reference model, for instance, but it’s helpful to know the general principles it sets out, both for issues to think about in running a repository over a long term, and for a conceptual vocabulary for understanding and interacting with other repository initiatives. Likewise it helps to at least be conversant with standard metadata schemas, protocols, recommended procedures, and the like. But you also very much need to know how repositories are working, or not working, in practice. The JISC site I mentioned earlier has an interesting case studies section, where folks who have run repositories describe their experiences, and how they may have differed from expectations. Some repository managers also run blogs where they talk about their day-to-day experiences with repositories, good and bad. Les Carr’s RepositoryMan and Dorothea Salo’s Caveat Lector are two blogs that I find must-reads, for keeping track of new developments repository maintainers can use and practical problems that repository planners can’t afford to ignore.

Future installments in this series will be posted under the “repositories” category. In the meantime, if you’re interested in these issues, I recommend you check out the resources above. And I’d be very interested in hearing about particular issues that should be discussed here.

Posted in repositories | 1 Comment

Acknowledging the public domain

Posted on April 30, 2008 by John Mark Ockerbloom

Many online publishers, particularly those that have been around for a while, now have large quantities of material that is in the public domain. The reasons vary: Some material was produced by US government agencies, such as NASA. Some material was published before 1923, too long ago be copyrighted in the US. There’s also a fair bit of later material that’s public domain due to lack of maintenance of the copyright. For instance, US-originating copyrights before 1964 had to be renewed with the Copyright Office, or they would expire after 28 years.

Some publishers are reluctant not only to provide this material openly, but even to acknowledge its public domain status. So it’s refreshing to see some of them starting to do so, even when the public domain status is not obvious.

This morning, for instance, I was happy to see, via Alex Golub and Open Access News, that the American Anthropological Association openly acknowledges on its permissions page that “AAA article content published before 1964 is in the public domain and may be used and copied without permission.” The reason for this appears to be non-renewal. As is the case for most periodicals (see a 2006 presentation of mine on this point), the AAA’s flagship journal, American Anthropologist, had no copyright renewals, a fact which I’ve now recorded in my inventory of periodicals renewals. I suspect that the AAA was generally not renewing copyrights for any of its publications at the time, and that its acknowledgement above reflects this.

The AAA does ask (politely, not as a legal demand) for acknowledgement and backlinks to their AnthroSource archive in web reproductions of public domain articles. But they’re otherwise happy to allow people to copy them.

That doesn’t necessarily mean the articles are easy to copy. The AAA relies on JSTOR for providing its older issues online. JSTOR has the American Anthropologist back-run going to the very first issues in 1888, but it won’t actually give me access to the articles in the public domain issues unless I use my institution’s subscription. (And even then, JSTOR’s standard terms and conditions, which institutions normally agree to when they subscribe, prohibit downloading and redistributing full issues, whether or not they’re copyrighted.) It would be nice if JSTOR’s policies were liberalized for their public domain content, but at least AAA has acknowledged that their articles can be reproduced once obtained by legitimate means.

Some other institutions appear to be liberalizing their policies for access as well. Yesterday, I heard Michael Edson of the Smithsonian talk at the Digital Library Federation spring forum (where I am now), where he mentioned that the Smithsonian was planning to put many of its digital resources onto image sharing sites under open access arrangements such as Creative Commons licenses, so folks could openly reuse, repurpose, and enrich them. This will be a welcome change from the policies of many Smithsonian units, whose terms of use sometimes prohibit use of their public online images even on a personal web page, without permission, “even in the absence of copyright”.

This policy change was not necessarily natural or inevitable. I suspect the challenge from Public.Resource.org last year, where they cited a Yale law prof calling the Smithsonian’s rights claims “nonsense on stilts” and downloaded thousands of their images anyway, may have had something to do with it. And the Smithsonian is sufficiently large and decentralized — Michael in his talk said they had at least 150 different web teams among their 12,000 staff and volunteer workers — that they may continue to have a range of open access policies in their various units.

So while American Anthropologist and the Smithsonian images are not yet as fully openly accessible as they could be, their publishers are making significant moves in the right direction. We can help them and other publishers keep moving in that direction, by asserting the rights of the public, and by crediting publishers when they acknowledge them.

UPDATE (2 pm): After looking around the Web some, I’ve found 6 years worth of American Anthropologist freely available online, all from before 1923, scanned by mass digitization projects. I’ll add this collection to The Online Books Page listings tonight, and would be very interested in hearing of more volumes I can add. The mass digitization projects have usually stopped at 1922, but as we see above, public domain digitizers don’t have to.

Posted in copyright, open access, sharing | 1 Comment

ILS-Discovery interoperation: New recommendation draft, last call for comments

Posted on April 24, 2008 by John Mark Ockerbloom

The new draft of the ILS-Discovery recommendations I mentioned in my last post is now out. You can download it, and read more about it, on our task force wiki.

As I mentioned previously, we intend this draft to be the last release before the official final version. We don’t expect to change the basic recommended functions in major ways in the final draft, though there’s a lot more that can be said and done to promote interoperability beyond these first steps we’ve taken.

We are very interested in correcting and clarifying anything that is erroneous, ambiguous, or unclear, particularly in the Level 1 functionality we recommend. Comments can be emailed to me (“ockerblo” at “pobox.upenn.edu”) between now and Friday, May 9; I’ll pass them along to the task force working on this. We hope to do our final revisions and then release the official recommendation not long afterwards.

The task force will also be conducting a birds-of-a-feather discussion session at next week’s DLF Spring Forum in Minneapolis. The session will be held at 2:30 on Tuesday, April 29, in Greenway B on the second floor of the conference hotel. Topics of discussion include the Berkeley accord (the agreement with vendors and developers that informed this draft), the draft recommendation and its upcoming finalization, implementing the recommendation, and how to continue and build on efforts to promote and standardize interoperation between the ILS and discovery applications.

I’m still working on an example implementation of the Level 1 functions, but have been busy enough with the draft not to finish it yet (or blog about much else lately; there are some other topics in the pipeline, though!) I hope to point to that soon. And if you’re interested in our recommendation or what it’s trying to accomplish, I hope to hear from you. And maybe I’ll see you in Minneapolis next week.

Posted in architecture, libraries, Uncategorized | Comments Off on ILS-Discovery interoperation: New recommendation draft, last call for comments

ILS-Discovery interoperation: It’s happening; more details coming soon

Posted on April 16, 2008 by John Mark Ockerbloom

As Peter Brantley, executive director of the Digital Library Federation, announced last week, we have an agreement with many of the developers and vendors of integrated library systems and discovery applications to support a basic set of functions to allow ILS’s and discovery applications to interoperate. (I’ve written about this effort previously here and here.)

This basic set is a subset (what we’re calling “Basic Discovery Interfaces” or “level 1”) of the full set of functions we will be recommending, and we still have to specify some of the details about how the Level 1 functions will be invoked by discovery applications. But it’s a very important first step. The functions it includes should enable an interesting array of discovery applications to work with a variety of ILS’s. And I hope that our work will result in some useful implementations soon, and help encourage further interoperability and standards to develop, based on our recommendations.

The functions, in summary, are

  • Harvesting bibliographic and, when requested, expanded records from an ILS, in full or incrementally. (Expanded records also include information on holdings, availability, and other data relevant to discovery not in the bibliographic record proper.) This allows independent search indexes to be made for a library’s cataloged content. The recommended technology (or “binding”) will involve OAI-PMH. (Someone asked whether this would just export Dublin Core, the only metadata format OAI-PMH requires. Our answer: it’s supposed to include, at minimum, all the data in the bibliographic record that’s relevant for discovery. So for an ILS with MARC records, for instance, simple unqualified Dublin Core would not suffice, but MARC-XML records using a suitable XML schema like marc21 could.) [Editor note: this paragraph was changed 17 April, after re-reading Peter’s announcement]
  • Querying for availability of items in real time. This allows users to see if they can obtain information they’ve discovered in the library’s collection. Our recommended binding will involve a simple REST interface, with a URL request and a simple, expandable XML reply. (There are other ways of querying availability, including through NCIP, but given how difficult it’s been to get full implementations of NCIP, we want to make the basic required functionality as simple as possible. There’s been some discussion of what would be desirable on the ILS-DI Google group, which is open to the public.)
  • Linking back to any item in the OPAC, in a stable way, so that users can make requests on the item using the native OPAC/ILS interface interface if desired. We plan to allow ILS’s to declare a URL template, which would include the appropriate bibliographic or item identifier from the harvested records, for links back to the item. (Someone asked whether an OpenURL should be used here. It could be used, and we’d love to see an OpenURL-based suggested template. The basic functionality required here, however, doesn’t need the sophisticated features of the OpenURL, so while OpenURLs could well be a particularly useful way to formulate both this simple linkback and more sophisticated, detailed OPAC linkback requests, we don’t plan to require OpenURL at Level 1.)

We’ll be releasing a new draft with more detail on the Level 1 functions within the next week, in time for people to read it before the next DLF Forum in Minneapolis, where we’ll be having a Birds of a Feather session to talk about implementing and building on our recommendations. I’m also hoping to have a sample implementation of the Level 1 functions very soon for The Online Books Page, and have implemented some of the functions already. (The OBP is not an ILS, but like an ILS, it manages bibliographic records and mediates access to texts; and the functions we specify in Level 1 can also be useful for interoperating with the Online Books Page collection.) I hope to see other implementations for ILS’s and other systems before long.

We’re hoping that this pre-Forum draft release can be the last full release before the official recommendation is released later this spring, to give folks the opportunity to point out any errors, ambiguities, or confusing aspects of what we recommend and specify. We hope to make any necessary corrections in short order, release the final recommendation, and then go sit on the beach and drink tequilas implement these functions, build cool new discovery applications, and help develop a community for using ILS data and services in productive and innovative ways.

I’m excited about what lies ahead, and if you are as well, I hope you’ll be a part of that community.

Posted in architecture, libraries | Comments Off on ILS-Discovery interoperation: It’s happening; more details coming soon

Coursepack sharing: An idea whose time has come?

Posted on April 16, 2008 by John Mark Ockerbloom

For years, there’s been an uneasy truce between publishers and universities about the inclusion of copyrighted materials in universities’ online course web sites and “courseware” systems. Publishers and universities have been arguing for years over when posting such materials for courses is fair use, and when it requires permission and payment. While legal threats have sometimes been made or implied, involving universities like Cornell and UCSD (see this Library Journal article from October for background), the parties involved have tended eventually to either climb down or settle. (Cornell, for instance, negotiated an agreement with publishers in 2006.)

That general truce broke down this week, though. Three major academic publishers, with the backing of the Association of American Publishers, have sued Georgia State University officials over GSU’s postings of parts of their publications in their campus Blackboard and WebCT courseware systems. The plaintiffs contend that the posting of full chapters and lengthy excerpts in GSU’s courseware system is copyright infringement, not fair use, particularly when the Copyright Clearance Center offers licenses for many of those readings. I have not yet found a response from GSU.

At the same time, there’s been an increasing movement for university scholars, the authors of many of these course readings, to make their works freely available online, open for reading and reuse. Open Access News has recently posted summaries of recent open access mandates from bodies like NIH and Harvard, and of open textbook initiatives. The open courseware movement, where professors freely share their own course materials with the world, is also gaining steam, with many universities now offering open courseware sites, and a conference being held in China later this month to further extend the scope and reach of free course materials.

These two trends, combined, could lead to some interesting outcomes. If schools, for whatever reason, want to eliminate or minimize payment and permission requirements for course materials, and a growing body of literature potentially useful for course materials is openly available, then we can expect to see schools move towards building coursepacks made entirely, or mostly, of open access materials. They are therefore motivated to find, and build, systems for easily compiling such coursepacks.

Right now, it can be difficult to find suitable open access readings for a class you’re planning on teaching. Tools like OCWFinder help, but they’re more geared towards finding specific existing courses with open access materials (which might be no more than a syllabus and a few assignments in some cases) than finding specific open access readings that might be suitable for a planned course.

But in a world that’s brought us global content sharing systems like Flickr, CiteULike, and PubMedCentral, it’s not that much of a stretch to imagine systems that would let instructors provide and share open access course readings more readily. A well-designed, browsable and searchable repository of such readings could provide a convenient way for professors to upload, organize, and disseminate open coursepacks for their students (“Just go to the OpenCoursePacks website, and type in the name of my course”, they could say). The same site could also let profs could tag, annotate, and recommend their readings, thereby making it that much easier for other professors to find and include suitable open access content in their own coursepacks. With a good design, and suitable scale and interest, a coursepack sharing site could make a lot more good instructional material widely and freely used and shared.

Will that happen? I don’t know. But it’s an intriguing idea, I think, and perhaps someone could run with it, or something like it. Perhaps someone already is.

Posted in copyright, open access, sharing, teaching | Comments Off on Coursepack sharing: An idea whose time has come?

Making your content findable

Posted on March 18, 2008 by John Mark Ockerbloom

The best library collections don’t do much good if people who may be interested in the content don’t find it. That’s why it’s so important to provide good discovery tools for your collection. But even if you do that, lots of folks are going to find your content not through your own discovery interfaces, but through links from the outside. A large proportion of the visits to our institutional repository don’t come through the front door, but from Google and other search engines indexing papers in the repository.

There’s a whole industry set up around search engine optimization, by means both fair and foul. The basics are pretty simple, though: make it easy for search engines to find content that you want indexed, and make it easy for interested people to link to your content. (Not only will people follow those links, but search engines will typically favor content with more links to it.)

Seems pretty simple, but there are still lots of sites in the digital library world that don’t have clear persistent URLs for their content, that use Javascript, Flash and other extras for navigation that crawlers (and many users) can’t follow, require traversing too many links to get to important content, or that only make their content findable via searching (which crawlers won’t do) and not via browsing.

A new article in D-Lib, “Site Design Impact on Robots: An Examination of Search Engine Crawler Behavior at Deep and Wide Websites”, gives some empirical support to some of the common-sense tips for getting sites indexed. Not surprisingly, they find that “wide” websites (those that make their content reachable through a relatively small number of clicks) are more readily indexed than “deep” websites (those that require a large number of clicks to get to some of their content). They also report that Google crawled their sites much more thoroughly than MSN and Yahoo (one reason, I’m sure, why folks doing obscure searches tend to prefer it). I was a bit surprised, though, to find that their .com sites were crawled more quickly than the same sites in a .edu domain. (The authors speculate that advertising revenue considerations may have something to do with this.)

One kind of useful page that the authors don’t mention is a “new content” page, which I’ve found helps get my Online Books Page indexed very quickly. Based on cache dates I’ve seen in search results, Google seems to check my new books page every day or two, and crawls the new links it finds there. Since every book I list appears there at one time or another, this provides very thorough indexing for virtually the entire site.

I suspect that Google and other crawlers pay special attention to pages like these, particularly if they’re updated frequently. This might also explain why blogs tend to get particularly highly ranked in Google and other engines compared to other sites, since they also are frequently updated, and show all their new content prominently, in reverse-chronological order.

You can find many other useful tips for getting indexed and linked in Cory Doctorow’s article “17 Tips for Getting Bloggers to Write About You“. The title may sound off-topic, but the article is mostly about making your content easy to link to. Most of the tips also work for making your content easy to index.

The more links there are to your content from other interesting places, and the more your content gets indexed by search engines, the more interested readers will find and use your content when you put it online. Making your content link-friendly and crawler-friendly, then, can help your library serve lots of new readers.

Posted in discovery, libraries | Comments Off on Making your content findable

Hurry, hurry! Free books, going fast! (And new site feature)

Posted on February 28, 2008 by John Mark Ockerbloom

Okay, it’s a trend:

The news here isn’t so much that are people are putting their books online for free. Some folks have been doing that for years, and I’ve been listing recent permanent, no-strings-attached free online books on The Online Books Page since the 1990s. (See, for instance, Daniel Solove’s The Future of Reputation, a current book posted last week, or Baen Books’ long-running free library.) What’s new is the number of large trade publishers who have almost simultaneously decided to try offering complete, free, in-print books online for the first time, with the expectation that this could well improve sales. The “limited time” offers let them be careful about it to start with, metaphorically dipping their toes in the water before diving in. They can also potentially compare the effects of short-term free ebook offers to either no free ebook offers or permanent free ebook offers. If the experiments work out well, this may be the first of a lot more current literature that becomes available online for free.

(Or it could just be this year’s publishing fad, forgotten or laughed about by next year. We’ll see, but some of the early reports above sound promising.)

I’ve read and enjoyed a number of the books that I mention above. I’m not listing them on The Online Books Page at present; that site is really designed for permanent titles rather than books that are here today and gone tomorrow. (Though many libraries have “current bestsellers” sections that work that way, using rental programs like McNaughton.) I do find number of these book offers worth noting somewhere. I don’t necessarily want to devote a full post to each one I hear about, though.

So I’ve introduced a new feature to this site that can hold quick links to temporarily-free ebook offers I find of interest, as well as links to other news and stories that are interesting and relevant enough to mention here, but not in a full post. You can find these links in the right column, under the heading “Everybody’s Library Tags”. (I’m using PennTags, our local social tagging system, to collect and manage these links.) The Tags feature has its own RSS feed separate from that of the blog, in case you’d like to put it in your aggregator. If you’d like to limit the feed to just the free books tags, and not the other links I post there, use this feed URL instead.

I haven’t tried this feature before (though I’ve seen it used to good effect on other blogs), and I’m not positive at this point whether I’ll keep it up. (If I find it too hard to keep reasonably current stuff in there, I’ll just discontinue it.) But, as the publishers above are doing with their free book offers, I’ll try it out, and see what happens.

Posted in online books, publishing | 1 Comment