Tag: Information access

Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies (GRBS) goes open access

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The Editors of Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies (GRBS) [ISSN 0017-3916] have issued the following announcement:

Volume 49 (2009) will be the last volume of GRBS printed on paper. Beginning with volume 50, issues will be published quarterly on-line on the GRBS website, on terms of free access. We undertake this transformation in the hope of affording our authors a wider readership; out of concern for the financial state of our libraries; and in the belief that the dissemination of knowledge should be free.

The current process of submission and peer-review of papers will continue unchanged. The on-line format will be identical with our pages as now printed, and so articles will continue to be cited by volume, year, and page numbers.

Our hope is that both authors and readers will judge this new medium to be to their advantage, and that such open access will be of benefit to continuing scholarship on Greece.

– The editors

The editors are to be congratulated for grasping the nettle.  But they are doing the right thing, and in the emphasis on wider access and scholarly quality are taking precisely the right approach. 

For the world is changing, and older methods of knowledge dissemination must change too.  Today I received an email from the French National Library, inviting me to take part in a survey and stating that they were rethinking all their services for the supply of reproductions.  Here too, we can hear the wind of change.

As the poet wrote (read the words aloud, as with all verse):

Say not the struggle naught availeth,
The labour and the wounds are vain,
The enemy faints not, nor faileth,
And as things have been they remain.

If hopes were dupes, fears may be liars;
It may be, in yon smoke conceal’d,
Your comrades chase e’en now the fliers,
And, but for you, possess the field.

For while the tired waves, vainly breaking,
Seem here no painful inch to gain,
Far back, through creeks and inlets making,
Comes silent, flooding in the main.

And not by eastern windows only,
When daylight comes, comes in the light;
In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly!
But westward, look, the land is bright!

— “Say Not The Struggle Naught Availeth” by Arthur Hugh Clough

Thanks to C.E. Jones at Ancient World Online for the tip.

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Cambridge University Library — no, the incunables are NOT going online

Posted on by Roger Pearse

We all know what we want — we want library holdings on the web, where we can all see them.  So I was rather delighted to see a news article yesterday that Cambridge University Library were going to put their collection of pre-1500 printed books on the web. 

This would be quite a first — the obscurantism of UK libraries has to be experienced to be believed. The Andrew Mellon Foundation, who have done so much for the world in funding online initiatives, have granted them 300,000 GBP to do the job; not a huge sum, but probably enough.  The BBC article here gives the impression that the incunables will go online.

But then a revealing aside:

Over the next five years the University library will produce detailed records for each item.

This made me look twice at the glowing claims, and look further.  There’s no information on the library website at all, which is not good news.  History Today magazine has an article here.  This tells the real story:

Cambridge University announced, today, the beginning of a new project to catalogue, for the first time, the University Library’s celebrated collection of incunabula, pre-1501 printed books. The term incunabula literally means swaddling-clothes, or cradle, in Latin and was adopted to describe a book printed at an early date, in the first infancy of printing.

Very few records of the Library’s 4,650 treasures are currently in its online catalogue. Records will begin to be catalogued this autumn and, over the next five years, the University Library will produce detailed records for each item, which will be accessible through its Newton Universal Catalogue. …

Although the project does not involve a complete page-by-page digitisation of the Library’s incunabula, the Gutenberg Bible has been fully digitalised …

As if anyone has any use for yet another Gutenberg online. 

So, the real intention is to have one or two staff members sit there for five years writing little card indexes (or whatever).  Digitisation?  Am I too cynical, to suppose that they’ll merely do a handful of books, as a sort of fig-leaf for what they really wanted to do?

Not that cataloguing is bad; but what we need, desperately need, is ACCESS TO THE BOOKS!!!  Not more catalogues.  Compiling a catalogue was the excuse used in the 19th century by Vatican libraries for denying scholars access to the library, and refusing them sight of what catalogue existed.  I don’t know if that ever-so-complete catalogue ever appeared, indeed.  But the obstruction of access was real enough.

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Germans attack Google books

Posted on by Roger Pearse

From The Register today:

Google’s ongoing effort to create a vast digital library is set to come under fire at the EU from countries who fear it will violate copyright and stymie competition.

German diplomats plan to raise the issues in Brussels today, EUobserver reports, with support from France, Austria and the Netherlands.

Google controversially began scanning and indexing books in the US in 2004, without copyright approval. In October last year it cut a deal with American authors and publishers to pay them a slice of the profits it makes matching text advertising to book searches. US authors who do not want their work scanned and published online have until September to opt out.

That deal is now the subject of a Department of Justice investigation on antitrust grounds, because it grants Google exclusive rights to republish “orphan” (out of copyright) books online. It will also allow Google to resell rights to other digital libraries.

Both intellectual and market power concerns are now exercising politicans and officials on this side of the Atlantic, who hope their action today will put Google’s book project on the agenda of regulators at the European Commission.

The German government also plans to offer its opinion to a New York court which is set to consider Google’s US books deal. “It is not about participating as a party in the legal dispute but making the court aware of certain legal aspects,” the country’s justice minister said.

An unnamed EU diplomat said Google’s plans “are not entirely in the interests of European authors” and that Google would have to “ask European copyright holders for permission first [before scanning their work]”.

For its part, Google maintains its line on copyright issues that it merely wants to make knowledge more widely available

 Note the absence of any consideration of the interests of anyone but the publishing industry.    Nor does it seem that the ordinary German, or Frenchmen, will be asked whether he wants to be prevented from reading this material.

The unelected eurocrats have the reputation of being corrupt.  Here we see them, apparently in the pocket of big business, to try to ensure that people in the EU have to pay to see what is freely available in the USA.

Truly sickening. 

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More on “copyright” of the Greek New Testament

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Still quite angry about the actions of the German Bible Society in claiming copyright of the work of the apostles.  I’ve been looking around the web for comment. 

The best comment I have seen is that the text can only be copyright if the scholars who produced it did their work badly.  Their intention was NOT to create an “original creative work”!

If the German Bible Society believes that it is not issuing the work of the apostles, but of Mr. Aland — to the extent that it is an original, creative work — and that no-one else has the work of the apostles, then I would like to see them say so!

But the most interesting comment was by Stan Gundry of Zondervan, here.

I am not a copyright attorney myself, but I have had lengthy phone conversations with a lawyer who is credited with being the best in the USA. Here’s the deal, at least according to USA copyright law. Ancient texts such as those we are dealing with in the OT (Hebrew/Aramaic) and NT (Greek) are in the public domain and are not protected by copyright. In fact (and this is controversial), even the critical texts as reconstructed by textual critics cannot be protected by enforceable copyrights. The textual critical apparatus has a somewhat better claim to copyright, but to the extent that such an apparatus is a catalog of information, my sources tell me that any claim to an enforceable copyright is weakened. “Sweat equity” in the recreation of ancient texts is not sufficient to establish copyright. It takes sweat equity to create a phone book, but you cannot copyright a phone book. This is not something that the United Bible Society or the German Bible Society wants to hear or agrees to, this is what our lawyer consultants have told us.

Peter Kirk has two posts full of common sense on this also.  Among other things he points out that the Germans have not actually issued take-down demands, and we shouldn’t act as if they have until they do. 

 

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Flame the German Bible Society

Posted on by Roger Pearse

These greedy bastards are claiming that they own the text of Greek New Testament, and anyone who wants to use it must pay them. In the meantime they’re forcing MorphGNT and zhubert.com offline. So why not tell them politely but firmly what you think of their evil scheme? Make sure that they know that they are injuring thousands of people, in their greed? Email addresses are here

After all — the same claim would affect every classical text online.

Isn’t it typical that it’s a German business who tries to screw us all over?  They contribute almost nothing to the web, yet here they are, trying to seize the work of others for their own profit?

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MorphGNT busted by “copyright”

Posted on by Roger Pearse

This is something that makes me rather cross.  It seems that the MorphGNT project, run for years and years by Jim Tauber, has fallen foul of a sudden claim of copyright by the German Bible Society.  This in turn has torpedoed the ReGreek site, which used MorphGNT. 

For those who don’t know, MorphGNT is a text file, containing the “Morphologised Greek New Testament”.  The file contains loads of rows like this:

010101 N- ----NSF- βίβλος βίβλος
010101 N- ----GSF- γενέσεως γένεσις
010101 N- ----GSM- Ἰησοῦ Ἰησοῦς
...

The first column is book/chapter/verse, the next one part of speech (all nouns here), the next specifies the tense, Nominative, Genitive, Singular, Feminine, Masculine, the fourth column the word that actually appears in the NT (in whatever form), and the fifth column is the headword or lemma — the dictionary form of the word.

There are updates on the Open Scriptures blog, linking to a discussion group where surrender seems to be the only option under consideration.  They should, instead, seek legal advice.

I confess that I don’t understand how the German Bible Society have any claim or rights over this.  How can they claim copyright over any of this?  Are they claiming that the NT is *their* copyright?  What is needed, I feel, is a good lawyer to tell them where to get off.  I’ve submitted this story to slashdot.org.  Anyone got any suggestions?

Thanks to Mark Goodacre for the tip.

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What to do about offline Origen?

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The homilies of Origen are all offline.  This is because the 19th century translators of the Ante-Nicene Christian Library (repackaged as the Ante-Nicene Fathers later) were selling their translations by subscription, and couldn’t get enough subscribers to translate these works.  Of 574 homilies, only 186 have survived, mostly in Latin translations by either Rufinus or Jerome.

Quite a few have been translated in various series during the 20th century.  But under our accursed copyright laws, these remain offline and inaccessible to ordinary mortals.

From time to time, I wonder what to do about this.  What can be done, I wonder?

I suppose that I could commission someone to make a translation.  But this would be costly, and also wasteful.  I hate the idea of spending my hard-earned to produce a translation of Origen’s homilies, when so many ancient texts remain untranslated.

I’ve toyed with the idea of getting someone who knows Latin to take a modern critical edition of the Latin text, and whatever translations exist in English, and produce a copyright-free version that way.  It’s always quicker and easier to translate something when someone else has done the heavy lifting and produced a first version.  I wouldn’t care whether the result was of publishable quality, so long as it was fairly true to the original.  But… who would I ask?  I could make such a thing myself fairly easily if laboriously, if I had time, but I don’t.

If I were a billionaire, of course, I would just buy the companies that own the existing versions, give the texts away, and then sell on the companies.  But I am not.

Are there any other alternatives?  It is deeply frustrating.  What can be done?

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Carry your library in your pocket

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Let’s face it, we all have too many scholarly books.  We can’t work without them, and we end up with piles of books, often read only once, and piles of photocopies.  When we’re on the road, we can’t access them.  And who has not realised, with a sinking feeling, that some most interesting observation is in that pile of data somewhere, but that we cannot quite recall where?

The answer is to convert our books into PDF files.  Easy to say, I know.  But technology has come on, and what would once have taken forever no longer does.

This afternoon I took three books, each of 200+ pages, and made PDF’s of them all.  It took about half an hour each.  How did I do it?

First, you need a modern scanner.  The old ones groaned slowly as they scanned each page.  The modern ones can do a scan in 5 seconds.  I was using a Plustek OpticBook 3600, and even that is not bang-up-to-date.  It’s far faster than my old one, tho.  I controlled it from Abbyy Finereader 8, but really any bit of software would do.  I set the scanner to scan grey-scale, at 300 dpi (quite enough to be readable), and adjusted the page-size down from A4 to whatever the book size was, by trial and error.  I scanned an opening at a time, without splitting the pages.  I set the software to scan multiple pages, so that I didn’t have to hit a key each time (I really didn’t want to hit Ctrl-K 300+ times today!), and I set the interval that the software waits between scans to 5 seconds.  And then I went for it. 

The result was a bunch of images of the twin pages.  These I saved as a PDF.  I then passed them through Finereader 9 (which has excellent OCR) to create a PDF with page images and text hidden under the images (because the text won’t be perfectly recognised by the software anyway).  This means that the PDF is now searchable, and that I scan search a directory of files for keywords. 

I didn’t proof any of the OCR, tho — no time.  The idea is not to upload digital text, but merely to allow me a better chance of finding things.

I used Finereader, but probably other software would be better.  I noted that the PDF sizes varied alarmingly between 200Mb and 20Mb!  So I think Adobe Acrobat would be good for this, from what I have heard.

The end result is that I have three searchable PDF’s which I can stick on a key-drive (flash drive), slip into my pocket and look at anywhere.  I can look at them at lunchtime at work, for instance.

Unscrupulous people might be tempted to borrow books from the library, scan those, and save themselves the purchase price.  Of course I can’t advocate that you break the law in this way; still less exchange them online, as I hear some people do.  But we need to be able to manage our own libraries this way, I think.  Paper books have their uses, but scholarly books need this feature, as do their users.  We need a change in approach from copyright holders to make it possible.

I admit that my sympathy for the copyright industry is not as high as it might be, since their sympathy for those who use their products seems non-existent.  Why else do we have laws that criminalise anyone who makes a personal copy of an out-of-print and unavailable book?  Why do we have laws that create copyright for a century, but print-runs of 200, other than to create a dog-in-the-manger?  Why else do they campaign to increase the scope and reach of copyright, year upon year, while making it impossible for scholars to access out-of-print and obscure texts and even 1937 obscure theses? (a sore point, this last one, as regular readers will know).  But really we need better law, and we need better products from textbook manufacturers. 

In the mean time, I hope these notes will help people convert their libraries into a usable form.  The key thing to remember is that we are not trying to produce something perfect; just something usable, and produce it quickly.

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More fun with a thesis

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’ve already blogged on how Boston College library demand that I get permission from a religious order before they will supply me with a copy for research purposes of a 1937 thesis written by a nun. 

The nun belonged to the Sisters of Mercy, and the library have sent me a link to their website.  So I duly wrote and asked permission.  I got back an email saying that they had no record of any such nun.  The library have sent me a PDF of the first couple of pages of the thesis, which says that she was a member of that order.  So I have forwarded it to the order.

What a pathetic paper-chase!  All over the supposed copyright status of a long forgotten thesis.  It highlights that our copyright laws are now actively working against the interests of scholarship.

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Fun with PhD thesis access

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Seventy-two years ago a nun submitted a PhD thesis to Boston College in the USA which contains an English translation of the Peristephanon of Prudentius.  The work was never published and is rare.  So I wrote to the college and asked for a copy.

My request was declined.  Apparently it might be in copyright.  Shock! Call the lawyers!  “Do you have permission to see this item, sir?” The librarian demands that I write to this now-deceased nun’s order and ask for permission, before she will make me a copy.  I’ve been chuckling about this all evening.

I mean… I have to ask the Pope (or his representative), before they will send a copy of a 72 year old thesis to a scholar to use for research purposes?  It’s pretty daft, isn’t it.  And if I can find someone with “authority” to allow me to look at this, I shall have to be careful how I ask, in case they wonder if I’m taking the mick. 

Ah, libraries…

Of course it may be that the environment in which the library has to work is more risky than I think.  UK television depicts Americans as people who go around either sueing each other or blowing each other’s heads off on a daily basis.  Obviously it must be true — the TV programmes are mostly made in the USA.    If so, no wonder the library is a bit gun-shy.  No wonder they want to waste my time, and that of the recipient, just in case. 

But I had not realised that gangs of nuns might be so much of a threat to them as that.  Rampaging gangs, equipped with semi-automatics and a hot-line to a law-firm; man, it’s dangerous out there in Boston.

I’ve written back and shifted the onus on them, by asking to whom I should write.  That will cost them something to find out, although not much.  Once this nonsense makes work for them, rather than just me, they may see sense.

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