Selecting Research Collections for Digitization: Applying the Harvard Model

published or submitted for publicatio

Sharp dimension free quantitative estimates for the Gaussian isoperimetric inequality

We provide a full quantitative version of the Gaussian isoperimetric inequality. Our estimate is independent of the dimension, sharp on the decay rate with respect to the asymmetry and with optimal dependence on the mass

Abracadabra! - Why Copyright Protection For Magic Is Not Just An Illusion

In early 2012, a Dutch magician did something unthinkable within the secretive and tight-knit magic community: he posted a YouTube video of himself performing a fellow magician’s illusion, and offered to reveal the secret to his viewers for a $3,050 fee. The illusion, however, was not just any old trick; it was the signature move of Raymond Teller, one half of the famous magic duo “Penn & Teller.” In April 2012, Teller took the unusual step of filing a lawsuit in federal court, alleging copyright infringement and unfair competition, to protect the secret behind his illusion. It is not clear, however, that magic is a copyright-protectable category of work. Neither the United States 1976 Copyright Act nor the United States’ Copyright Office’s working compendium addresses magic. No federal court has held magic protectable since the Copyright Act was amended in 1976. Still, magic meets the constitutional and statutory requirements for copyright-protectable work. The Teller court should hold that magic illusions are eligible for copyright protection, regardless of whether it finds there was infringement in this particular case

Long-term planning versus short-term planning in the asymptotical location problem

Given the probability measure $\nu$ over the given region $\Omega\subset \R^n$, we consider the optimal location of a set $\Sigma$ composed by $n$ points \Om in order to minimize the average distance \Sigma\mapsto \int_\Om \dist(x,\Sigma) d\nu (the classical optimal facility location problem). The paper compares two strategies to find optimal configurations: the long-term one which consists in placing all $n$ points at once in an optimal position, and the short-term one which consists in placing the points one by one adding at each step at most one point and preserving the configuration built at previous steps. We show that the respective optimization problems exhibit qualitatively different asymptotic behavior as $n\to\infty$, although the optimization costs in both cases have the same asymptotic orders of vanishing.Comment: for more pictures and some movies as well, see http://www.sissa.it/~brancoli

Outcome-Based Evaluation for Digital Library Projects and Services

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In Harmony: Sheet Music From Indiana: A Collaborative Digital Library Project

In October 2004, the Indiana University Digital Library Program received a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services to fund IN Harmony: Sheet Music from Indiana (see the project website at http://www.dlib.indiana.edu/projects/inharmony/). This is a three-year project to catalog and digitize sheet music from the collections of four partner institutions, Indiana University's Lilly Library, the Indiana State Museum, the Indiana Historical Society, and the Indiana State Library. The purpose of the project is to create an online sheet music collection that will demonstrate how museums and libraries with complementary materials can work cooperatively to create shared digital resources. By concentrating initially on the collections of American sheet music owned by each of the partners, the project will accomplish two highly adaptable goals: 1) it will demonstrate how approximately 10,000 digitized pieces of sheet music and their attendant metadata can be presented on a single website, offering federated searching of all collections or access to one or more selected collections; and 2) it will demonstrate how collaborative digital library development can provide online access to the important regional collections of museums, libraries, and historical societies. These collections may, in fact, be sheet music, or they may be important materials in other formats, such as photographs, maps, manuscripts, or artifacts