Anti DRM technology stance

After careful consideration, MIT Libraries have cancelled a subscription to an online database that demands access is controlled by a Digital Rights Management plug-in. In a related story, authors are given guidance on retaining rights in their published work to allow reuse in teaching or deposit in Open archives.

The Open Access march moves on...

Meanwhile parts of the music industry are also emerging with a firm anti DRM stance, such as this story about Musicload and this open letter from Apple's Steve Jobs

ISKO UK

The British Chapter of the International Society for Knowledge Organization has recently been established, and ISKO UK held its inaugural meeting on 26th March 2007. The association aims to promote understanding of Knowledge Organization practices across diverse domains, aiming to share good practice and enhance information skills amongst all users of information.

They are welcoming new members who are interested in sharing experiences and perspectives of KO in all sectors in a collaborative manner. ISKO UK provides an excellent forum for topics of interest to information professionals.

Exploring Metadata

I continue to trawl around finding resources about metadata - you can never have enough descriptions of descriptions about stuff, or data on data about data - can you?

Anyway, just a couple here:

A useful page of resources from the University of Virginia. Ignore everything if you like and head straight for Metadata Fun and play Guess-the-Google! Addictive, but also a useful lesson in the problems with descriptive metadata for images.

Conrad Taylor's thought-provoking article on Metadata's many meanings and uses attempts to unite understanding across communities.

Creative Commons

In case you haven't spotted the links on the right, I'll just start off by mentioning Creative Commons (CC) licensing. It's basically a really simple way to let people know how they can use your work, while still giving you copyright protection and attribution. The licences come in several shapes and sizes, but all of them have versions that humans, computers and lawyers can understand! This means you can search for content with CC licences and be safe in the knowledge you can legally share or reuse it.


Creative Commons is being used for sharing photos in places such as Flickr, and in education, for example MIT OpenCourseWare and Connexions Repository.



Sites like Geograph British Isles revolve around user generated content, with contributors licensing their work with CC.

See this picture on the Geograph site

The day job (and how to describe it)

Most of the gathered thoughts and links I post here will relate to my job, but in some ways that doesn't really narrow things down! I am (was?) a librarian so there will be stuff about information management, metadata, organising knowledge, digital libraries and repositories... I work in education so there will be musings on e-learning, institutional culture, learning objects... I am doing research so I will gather links to useful and interesting stuff by other people... and the central focus of my current post, as 'Digital Rights Research & Development Assistant' for the JISC-funded TrustDR project, is managing Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) in e-learning material so lots of stuff about copyright, DRM, Open Content, Creative Commons...

So basically, I'm interested in the material that people create, find, use and share primarily for teaching and learning, and the related challenges, opportunities and barriers.

The official version of me can be found at the UHI and everything about TrustDR on the project website

First post

Well, I've finally got round to putting pen to paper, or rather fingers to keyboard, and entered the world of blogs. Bit of a late starter on this occasion! I wite so much in other places that it seemed an odd thing to do, but you never know, it might prove useful.

I have good intentions, but with a day-job, studying part time and a house to renovate my posts may be rather infrequent. I'm also not used to talking to 'no-one in particular' so ~I'll have to get my head round that too.

Anyway, it was pretty easy to get started, lets see if I continue...