Collaborative Academic Library Digital Collections Post- Cambridge University Press, HathiTrust and Google Decisions on Fair Use

Academic libraries face numerous stressors as they seek to meet the needs of their users through technological advances while adhering to copyright laws. This paper seeks to explore one specific proposal to balance these interests, the impact of recent decisions on its viability, and the copyright challenges that remain after these decisions

Shared Collection Development, Digitization, and Owned Digital Collections

While library models already exist for sharing physical materials and joint licensing, this paper envisions an aspect of future collections involving a national digital collection owned, not licensed, by libraries. Collaborative collection development, digitization, and digital object management of owned collections can benefit societies in multiple ways, from expanding access to users otherwise unable to reach these materials, to preserving content even when disaster strikes, to reducing duplication of effort and expense in collection or digitization. This article will explore both the benefits of and the challenges to this type of collaboration

Piece by Piece Review of Digitize-and-Lend Projects Through the Lens of Copyright and Fair Use

Digitize-and-lend library projects can benefit societies in multiple ways, from providing information to people in remote areas, to reducing duplication of effort in digitization, to providing access to people with disabilities. Such projects contemplate not just digitizing library titles for regular patron use, but also allowing the digitized versions to be used for interlibrary loan (ILL), sharing within consortia, and replacing print copies at other libraries. Many of these functions are already supported within the analog world (e.g., ILL), and the digitize-and-lend concept is largely a logical outgrowth of technology, much like the transitioning from manual hand duplication of books to printing presses. The purpose of each function is to facilitate user access to information. Technology can amplify that access, but in doing so, libraries must also be careful not to upset the long established balance in copyright, where authors’ rights sit on the other side of the scale from public benefit. This article seeks to provide a primer on the various components in a digitize-and-lend project, explore the core copyright issues in each, and explain how these projects maintain the balance of copyright even as libraries take advantage of newer technologies

Why Print and Electronic Resources Are Essential to the Academic Law Library

Libraries have supported multiple formats for decades, from paper and microforms to audiovisual tapes and CDs. However, the newest medium, digital transmission, has presented a wider scope of challenges and caused library patrons to question the established and recognized multiformat library. Within the many questions posed, two distinct ones echo repeatedly. The first doubts the need to sustain print in an increasingly digital world, and the second warns of the dangers of relying on a still-developing technology. This article examines both of these positions and concludes that abandoning either format would translate into a failure of service to patrons, both present and future

Building a Collaborative Digital Collection: A Necessary Evolution in Libraries

Law libraries are losing ground in the effort to preserve information in the digital age. In part, this is due declining budgets, user needs, and a caution born from the great responsibility libraries feel to ensure future access instead of selecting a form that may not survive. That caution, though, has caused others, such as Google, to fill the silence with their vision. Libraries must stand and contribute actively to the creation of digital collections if we expect a voice in future discussion. This article presents a vision of the start of a collaborative, digital academic law library, one that will harness our collective strengths while still allowing individual collections to prosper. It seeks to identify and answer the thorniest issues - including copyright - surrounding digitization projects. It does not presume to solve all of these issues. It is, however, intended to be a call for collective action, to stop discussing the law library of the future and to start building it

Effects of channel cross-sectional geometry on long wave generation and propagation

Joint theoretical and experimental studies are carried out to investigate the effects of channel cross-sectional geometry on long wave generation and propagation in uniform shallow water channels. The existing channel Boussinesq and channel KdV equations are extended in the present study to include the effects of channel sidewall slope at the waterline in the first-order section-mean equations. Our theoretical results show that both the channel cross-sectional geometry below the unperturbed water surface (characterized by a shape factor kappa) and the channel sidewall slope at the waterline (represented by a slope factor gamma) affect the wavelength (lambda) and time period (Ts) of waves generated under resonant external forcing. A quantitative relationship between lambda, Ts, kappa, and gamma is given by our theory which predicts that, under the condition of equal mean water depth and equal mean wave amplitude, lambda and Ts increase with increasing kappa and gamma. To verify the theoretical results, experiments are conducted in two channels of different geometries, namely a rectangular channel with kappa[equivalent]1, gamma=0 and a trapezoidal channel with kappa=1.27, gamma=0.16, to measure the wavelength of free traveling solitary waves and the time period of wave generation by a towed vertical hydrofoil moving with critical speed. The experimental results are found to be in broad agreement with the theoretical predictions

Evolution of long water waves in variable channels

This paper applies two theoretical wave models, namely the generalized channel Boussinesq (gcB) and the channel Korteweg–de Vries (cKdV) models (Teng & Wu 1992) to investigate the evolution, transmission and reflection of long water waves propagating in a convergent–divergent channel of arbitrary cross-section. A new simplified version of the gcB model is introduced based on neglecting the higher-order derivatives of channel variations. This simplification preserves the mass conservation property of the original gcB model, yet greatly facilitates applications and clarifies the effect of channel cross-section. A critical comparative study between the gcB and cKdV models is then pursued for predicting the evolution of long waves in variable channels. Regarding the integral properties, the gcB model is shown to conserve mass exactly whereas the cKdV model, being limited to unidirectional waves only, violates the mass conservation law by a significant margin and bears no waves which are reflected due to changes in channel cross-sectional area. Although theoretically both models imply adiabatic invariance for the wave energy, the gcB model exhibits numerically a greater accuracy than the cKdV model in conserving wave energy. In general, the gcB model is found to have excellent conservation properties and can be applied to predict both transmitted and reflected waves simultaneously. It also broadly agrees well with the experiments. A result of basic interest is that in spite of the weakness in conserving total mass and energy, the cKdV model is found to predict the transmitted waves in good agreement with the gcB model and with the experimental data availabl

Propagation of solitary waves through signicantly curved shallow water channels

Propagation of solitary waves in curved shallow water channels of constant depth and width is investigated by carrying out numerical simulations based on the generalized weakly nonlinear and weakly dispersive Boussinesq model. The objective is to investigate the effects of channel width and bending sharpness on the transmission and reflection of long waves propagating through significantly curved channels. Our numerical results show that, when travelling through narrow channel bends including both smooth and sharp-cornered 90°-bends, a solitary wave is transmitted almost completely with little reflection and scattering. For wide channel bends, we find that, if the bend is rounded and smooth, a solitary wave is still fully transmitted with little backward reflection, but the transmitted wave will no longer preserve the shape of the original solitary wave but will disintegrate into several smaller waves. For solitary waves travelling through wide sharp-cornered 90°-bends, wave reflection is seen to be very significant, and the wider the channel bend, the stronger the reflected wave amplitude. Our numerical results for waves in sharp-cornered 90°-bends revealed a similarity relationship which indicates that the ratios of the transmitted and reflected wave amplitude, excess mass and energy to the original wave amplitude, mass and energy all depend on one single dimensionless parameter, namely the ratio of the channel width b to the effective wavelength [lambda][sub]e. Quantitative results for predicting wave transmission and reflection based on b/[lambda][sub]e are presented

Brief of Amici Curiae 116 Law Librarians and 5 Law Library Organizations in Support of Respondent, Georgia v. Public.Resource.Org, Inc., No. 18-1150 (U.S. Oct. 16, 2019)

Due process and the rule of law require that the public has meaningful access to “the law.” Every major modern society since the Greeks has recognized the importance of this principle. Roscoe Pound, Theories of the Law, 22 Yale L.J. 114, 117 (1912). In the United States, “the law” largely comes from appellate courts, legislatures, and administrative agencies who have been granted rule-making authority. As every first year law student learns, those law-making bodies have developed highly specific methods for communicating their pronouncements of law through official publications, such as the Official Code of Georgia Annotated (“OCGA”). Those specific methods and their resulting official publications serve a number of important functions that are intrinsic to the underlying purpose of supporting democracy and of fair notice of the law. Official publications of the law assure the reader of the reliability and currency of the text, as well as its acceptance for use in other parts of the legal system, such as for citation before a court. Access to official publications is also critical for conducting and supporting legal scholarship, teaching legal research, preserving state legal materials, and providing equal and equitable access to legal information. A critical feature that enables those uses is that the government has identified the publication as holding special weight as an official, authoritative source. The major point of this brief is that when a state gives official status to a publication containing binding legal pronouncements, the contents of the whole of that publication must be freely and fully accessible by the public. Assertion of copyright over even portions of the publication effectively renders access and use of the core statutory text meaningless. In addition to the logistical difficulties of disentangling binding edicts of law from ancillary materials published with it, if the publication must be disassembled into its component parts for reuse-annotations protected and filtered out, while the statutory text may be copied - the remaining pieces are no longer the “official” publication and unusable for their intended purpose. A state should not be allowed to assert the broad and powerful coercive rights granted by copyright over an official publication of law by interweaving clearly uncopyrightable edicts of law with otherwise copyrightable ancillary materials, such as annotations. Granting copyright protection over even portions of the OCGA would harm law librarians and by extension the public, while granting a windfall to publishers and states who should need no copyright incentive to fulfill their constitutional obligation to publish official copies of their laws. Accordingly, this Court should affirm the decision of the 11th Circuit

\u3ci\u3eHachette\u3c/i\u3e, Controlled Digital Lending, and the Consequences of Divorcing Law From Context

This article will look at the recent Hachette decision against the Internet Archive, analyzing how the court’s reliance on past authorities with insufficient context distorted their meanings. It will focus only on the controlled digital lending (CDL) aspect, not discussing the other claims in the suit or exploring the specific implementation of CDL by the Internet Archive (IA). Since CDL programs can vary widely, IA is better situated than others to identify missing context related to the analysis of the unique components of their efforts. And other libraries engaging in CDL should be able to easily see where their programs differ from the judge’s description of IA’s. For that reason, the analysis below only delves into the language that might be used to chill all CDL programs or innovation more generally