Open Access News points out that the Open Archives Initiative is seeking public comment on their specification for conveying copyright metadata on Open Access content. Such a specification is critical to the aforementioned goal of assembling course packs out of Open Access materials. (more…)
Tag: Furl
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Open Access, Furl, and Course Packs
I just took a quick look at The Learner’s Library As far as I can tell, the service breaks down as follows:
- LL contains a collection of academic journal articles that have been pre-cleared for copyright.
- There’s a search interface to that collection that includes what appears at first glance to be pretty decent natural language search.
- Searches return results including an appropriate excerpt, a full, formatted citation, and a link to the full text of the article.
- Professors can assemble “course packs” of articles, essentially Furling the collection for one-click access by students.
I bet we could assemble equivalent service for open access journals using free, loosely-coupled pieces. (more…)
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Furl Follow-up: Mike Giles Responds
As a follow-up to my earlier post, I’m happy to report that I’ve had a satisfying email exchange with Furl’s Mike Giles. On the PDF front, Furl is planning to index both .pdf and .doc files in the “near future.” (No, he didn’t give me a timeline.)
Even more interesting is the possibility regarding Creative Commons. Currently, Furl only makes cached copies available to the account holder for personal use; you can only share the original URLs. But Mike is open to the possibility of working with CreativeCommons.org to allow Furlers to share content that has the appropriate machine-readable CC metadata. (Of course, he couldn’t make me any promises at this point.)
This is potentially a huge step forward. I believe that Furl could provide a major boost to CC license usage on the web (and vice versa). If this is a feature that would make you more likely to use Furl, then I encourage you to contact Mike with your use case.
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Furl, PDF's, and Creative Commons
I have started to use Furl to create an archive of articles (mostly PDFs) that I find on the web related to informational cascades for myself (and eventually for my blog readers as well). So far I’m finding two significant limitations.
First, Furl apparently doesn’t do full text search for PDF’s yet. That’s too bad; there are OSS libraries available that would allow them to index these documents. Maybe they’ll get around to it.
More worrisome, though, is the IP problem that can’t be fixed by simply adding a standard feature. If I Furl somebody’s PDF and then share the link to the archive (Furl copies and saves web content), am I violating copyright? I’m not sure when or if that happens. It would be great if Furl the ability to read Creative Commons metadata and guide users on any potential Furling-related IP issues.