Monthly Archive for September, 2004

http://www.bccampus.ca/Page93.aspx

It struck me that while there will be quite a few out there who have seen this before, I haven’t seen it make the rounds of the blogosphere and so maybe it is worthwhile…

The BCcommons Licence is a “open content” licence inspired by Creative Commons but aimed specifically at facilitating sharing of content created within the BC post-secondary system with the rest of that system. It has been developed by my employers (and my boss, Paul Stacey) at BCcampus. It’s a kind of middle ground between “closed” content and the full Creative Commons, a way for our provincial system to promote sharing between institutions but hopefully not pushing people as far out of their comfort zone as the full on Creative Commons might. The first content to be released under this licence should be coming along shortly so we will soon see if this fills the anticipated niche and has the desired effect. And a final note: in a cool twist, the BCcommons licence itself has been released under the creative commons, so if it somehow inspires you and you think it could serve as the basis for your own middle way, dig in! - SWL

http://www.openrepository.com/

As if additional proof was needed that there is legs to the value-added open source service model, another example in the field of ‘institutional repositories’ (in addition to the Fedora implementors, VTLS) is this U.K.-based company that is making a business of implementing DSpace.
In addition, the existance of not one but 2 commercialized Institutional Repository packages gives weight to the idea that the IR market is likely to become more well-formed, quicker, than the LOR market (whose budget do you think is bigger - the ed tech department’s or the library’s?) - SWL

http://creativecommons.org/projects/international/
ca/english-changes.pdf

Potentially of interest to Canadian readers, the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic has released a draft of a Canadian Creative Commons (cc-ca) licence.
The biggest difference - we spell ‘Licence’ different than Americans! But seriously now, there is value to having Canadian lawyers translate this into language used in our courts, and without being a lawyer myself, it seems like the biggest differences are sections on the notion of ‘Moral Rights,’ and one concerning Canadian’s right to copy material we already own for personal use (which I seem to think provided the some dubious lynchpin to the argument that p2p filesharing from one’s own hard drive was ‘legal’ in Canada.) The licence is set to be ‘launched’ this Thursday September 30 - SWL

http://www.digicult.info/pages/techwatch.php

Digicult is a fabulous publication aimed at the cultural and scientific heritage sectors funded by the European Union. In addition to their newsletter and thematic issues, they produce shorter documents called “Techwatches” that help to introduce a specific field of technology to their readers and draw out some of the implications for the future.

TechWatch 14 concerns the broad field of Natural Language Processing - which can variously include everything from text parsing software, to speech recognition, to automatic translation and knowledge mining. This paper starts out with a broad overview of the field and then moves on to draw out some of the potential uses for the technology. Well worth a read to get a sense of what this truly disruptive technology may hold (though with the caveat that this has long been an area that has over-promised and under-delivered). - SWL

http://www.intrallect.com/drm-study/

The final draft of a report on DRM produced by Intrallect on behalf of the JISC is now available. The report seems an improved version of an interim draft you may have seen back in June - the collection of use cases could be especially useful to other folks working on DRM issues in higher ed. - SWL

http://www.scix.net/

Via David Mattison came news of this ‘repository’ project from the European Union to enable open publishing of scientific literature. This is definitely more of the ‘institutional’ repository-type projects, but still lots of interesting stuff to learn from - check out the work packages they defined (who would have thunk to include “repository content” as part of the work) as well as a score of interesting papers they term their ‘deliverables.’

(P.S. Please forgive me if I end up posting a few things you’ve seen before over the next while - it’s tough catching up a month’s absence from the blogosphere). - SWL