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Ramblings about library technology, open source software, and other adventures!

 

PaperSprint to be held in Paris 2011 March 21

Filed under: libraries,technology — ecorrado @ 17:03:05

On the Association of Internet Researchers e-mail list there was an interesting announcement about a PaperSprint to be held at Fabelier in Paris, France.

Some of you that follow this blog may know what a Code Sprint is. For those that don’t, a Code Sprint is according to Wikipedia, “A sprint is a time-boxed period of software development focused on a given list of goals (but with variable scope). Sprints have become popular events among some Open Source projects.”

A PaperSprint, or at least how Fabelier is describing it, is the same basic idea, except the end result is not code, but instead is an academic paper. The goal of this particular PaperSprint “is to explore the possibility of writing from scratch a (reasonably good) research paper within 4 hours” from start to finish. This sounds like an exciting experiment and if it was closer, I’d try to participate. It will be really interesting to see how it turns out. If the results are positive, maybe it is something to try in the library and information science environment. Anyone interested?

 
 

University of Florida MARC Records avilable as CC0 2011 March 18

Filed under: libraries,technology — ecorrado @ 13:03:11

Eric Lease Morgan and Peter E. Murray brought my attention to a new MARC record licensing method for MARC records implemented by the University of Florida. In short, the University of Florida is making their original MARC records available under the Creative Commons CC0 license which basically is a “tool for freeing your own work of copyright restrictions around the world. You may use this tool even if your work is free of copyright in some jurisdictions, if you want to want to ensure it is free everywhere.” As Peter points out, this follows the University of Michigan which has made there records available using CC0 as well.

This is an interesting development. Peter Murry ponders if this is “redundant since some think that MARC records, as a recitation of facts, cannot be copyrighted anyways?” I am not sure what other countries copyright laws are, and while I believe the copyright-able-ness of MARC records in the US is dubious at best, even if it is redundant around the globe, it is good to make it clear.

University of Michigan makes there records available for download. At this point, I think the University of Florida only marks them in the catalog. It would be nice to see a downloadable version of Florida’s records as well but I applaud this move with or without a nice zip file.