proACTive

Number 240: November 2003

Trading books: publishing and selling books about Asia and the Pacific

APSIG lunchtime talk on Thursday 6 November, from 12:15pm to 1:30pm in the Ferguson Room, Mezzanine Floor, NLA. Speakers are Sally Burdon and Ian Templeman.

Sally Burdon is from the well-known family who have been selling books in Canberra for many years. The Asia Bookroom in Belconnen specialises in new and out-of-print books on Asia, the Middle East and Africa. Sally will be able to give us a unique perspective on the book trade. She will bring along some interesting items for us to see.

Ian Templeman is responsible for Pandanus Books, part of the ANU's Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies. One of his recent most remarkable successes has been White Butterflies by Colin McPhedran published last year by Pandanus. Ian established his credentials at the Fremantle Arts Centre Press and then at the NLA.

Refreshments will be served. Gold-coin collection. Enquiries to Marie Sexton (please remove '.nospam' from address) or Amelia McKenzie (please remove '.nospam' from address), ph 02 6262 1519.

The dead poets society: The copyright term and the public domain

Matthew Rimmer from the Australian Centre for Intellectual Property in the ANU Law Faculty will talk to URLs members and other interested people about some of the ongoing complexities of copyright law and the huge challenges libraries and cultural institutions face as proposals are made to extend the period of copyright.

In a victory for corporate control of cultural heritage, the Supreme Court of the United States has rejected a constitutional challenge to the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act 1998 (US) by a majority of seven to two. Matthew argues that the extension of the copyright term will inhibit the dissemination of cultural works through the use of new technologies by libraries and cultural institutions. It concludes that there is a need to resist the attempts of copyright owners to establish the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act 1998 (US) as an international model for other jurisdictions, such as Australia.

The talk will be in the McDonald Room, Menzies Building, ANU at 12:30pm. All are welcome - bring your lunch. Inquiries: to Nancy Clarke (please remove '.nospam' from address), ph 02 6209 1117.

Nancy Clarke
URLs secretary

New Australian publications

Have you ever wanted to find or keep up with newly published Australian material in your subject area? If so the Recent Australian Publications (RAP) service from the NLA will provide an essential tool to meet your needs.

The Library has redeveloped the service to produce monthly easy-to-use files of new Australian publications, including printed materials such as books, journals, maps, music, and newspapers; as well as multimedia material and electronic resources. RAP is published online each month, and files for 2003 are available now at http://www.nla.gov.au/kinetica/rap.html.

Over 42 000 new Australian titles were listed in RAP in the previous 12 months, demonstrating the rich range of resources available through this service. RAP includes everything published in Australia, from cooking to nanotechnology, as well as works published overseas by Australian authors or about Australia. You can browse each monthly file by subject or title.

The service obtains records from the Australian National Bibliographic Database, a co-operative catalogue of Australian library collections, and makes this information accessible in an easy-to-read form. Using the Internet, Australians can now access this valuable service anywhere.

If you have any comments or suggestions for further improvement to the RAP service please e-mail us at kinetica@nla.gov.au (please remove '.nospam' from address).

Roxanne Missingham

Who knew that someone owned the Dewey Decimal System?

Apparently not the owners of the Library Hotel, nestled in the shadow of the New York Public Library. Now the boutique hotel, which numbers its guest rooms and stocks them with books according to Dewey's century-old library classification system, is being sued for using it.

'The Dewey Decimal System is a product, a trademark, a brand name,' said Joseph R Dreitler, a lawyer for the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC), a nonprofit library co-operative that filed the suit last week in Federal District Court in Ohio. 'The idea here isn't to put the Library Hotel out of business. The idea is to protect Dewey and the Dewey Decimal System trademark.'

The hotel opened three years ago at Madison Avenue and 41st Street. From its imitation card catalogue in the lobby to its stately second-floor reading room, it is designed as a siren for book lovers. Each floor is devoted to one of the ten main categories of knowledge in the Dewey system: social sciences, languages, math and science, technology, the arts, literature, history and geography, general knowledge, philosophy and religion. (proACTive ran a short article on it by Helen Roberts in May 2001)

The hotel's general manager, Craig Spitzer, issued a written statement saying that the Dewey Decimal theme was Mr Kallan's 'original idea,' based on its proximity to the public library.

'We are not a library lending books, but rather we have created a unique hotel experience for book lovers to enjoy.' Mr Spitzer said, 'We do not believe that our guests or other consumers are confused into thinking the Library Hotel's hospitality services and the OCLC's information services come from the same source.'

The OCLC is seeking damages of three times the profits the hotel has made since it opened.

Dewey copyrighted his system and set up a company, Forest Press, to sell it. In 1988, the OCLC, a group created to help libraries share resources and costs, bought Forest Press and the Dewey Decimal System trademark.

(More details at http://usrlib.info/story/2003/9/22/93557/4272)

(from Helen Roberts)

Librarians love books

The Canberra Times, on 31 August, devoted an editorial to the cull of the Department of Immigration library - a 'drastic reduction', according to one immigration scholar. The department responded that the cull was being conducted by a professional librarian 'using a set of standard criteria'.

Hearing this, The Canberra Times commented: 'Even fresh reasons to fear the worst. A good many professional librarians today detest books, thinking that computers, and computer information systems, are the wave of the future, and that books, if such things are ever needed, can in any event be retrieved from holdings somewhere else.'

Fighting words, and Peter Clayton rose to the challenge a couple of days later with the following Letter to the editor:

'Your editorial writer on Sunday ('Taking an axe to our history') clearly knows no librarians, and very little about the profession.

The statement that 'A good many professional librarians today detest books, thinking that computers, and computer information systems, are the wave of the future', is simply ludicrous.

After a lifetime in the profession, and many years teaching new entrants to it, I know none who detest books. Quite the contrary: if I ask students why they chose the course almost without exception they refer to a love of books.

Of course, computer databases and the internet are of increasing importance, yet all acknowledge the continuing value of the book.

I know little about the cull of the Department of Immigration Library, where professional staff may have been required to cull down to a specified (and possibly inadequate) level. However, when a writer is careless and ill-informed about something you know, then you have to assume he or she may be equally careless and ill-informed about other matters.

Dr Peter Clayton

Library technicians

Some 15 interested people got together at Waldorf on London on 10 October for coffee and post-technicians conference discussion. A lively chat developed with ideas to be passed on to the Sydney committee for the neXt (no - Beth assures us that's not a typo!) Conference 2005. If anyone else has any ideas or suggestions, please send them to Beth (please remove '.nospam' from address). There is still time to forward them to the committee. And don't forget to check the events column for our end of year activity.

Beth Clary
Convenor, ACT Library Technicians

PEARLS

Dates for PEARLS meetings in 2004 are 9 February, 19 April, 21 June, 9 August, 11 October, all at 2:30pm in BOOKPLATE at the NLA. Anyone with library connections who has retired (or is about to retire) is welcome to join our informal group to enjoy delicious refreshments and conversation. For further information contact Beth Stone (please remove '.nospam' from address), ph 02 6247 7843 or Maxine, ph 02 6257 4342.

Research in the digital environment

Colin Steele has drawn our attention to this excerpt from John Houghton, Colin Steele and Margaret Henty, Changing Research Practices in the Digital Information and Communication Environment, Department of Education, Science and Training, Commonwealth of Australia, August 2003. Will this have a big impact on libraries of the future? Or are these changes quietly happening already? What do you think?

We find that there is a new mode of knowledge production emerging, changing research practices and bringing new information access and dissemination needs. Adjustments will be required to the existing research information and scholarly communication system to accommodate these changes, but new opportunities are emerging for more cost-effective and sustainable information access and dissemination... Open access digital repositories, operating in parallel with existing commercial publishing mechanisms, may provide a major opportunity to develop a sustainable information infrastructure for both traditional and emerging modes of knowledge production.

Together, they provide the foundation for more effective and efficient access to, and dissemination of, scientific and scholarly information.

(Thanks to Charles Bailey's Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog)

You are invited to: Children's literature - sharing with kids

A series of lectures presented by Professor Belle Alderman, University of Canberra

There were five free two hour sessions.

You can book for the remainder of the series or for individual sessions.

Books for babies and toddlers
Reaching reluctant readers
Books for teenagers
Series reading
Selecting books

Belconnen Library: 10:00am-12:00pm
Wednesdays 22/10, 29/10, 5/11, 12/11, 19/11

Tuggeranong Library: 10:00am-12:00pm
Thursdays 23/10, 30/10, 6/11, 13/11, 20/11

Bookings: ph 02 6205 9000

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