Library News

The Authors Guild’s decade long lawsuit against Google came to an end April 18th when the Supreme Court declined to hear the Authors Guild’s Appeal of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals decision from October 2015. By declining, the Supreme Court affirmed the Circuit Court’s ruling that Google’s digitization of library collections, the creation of search functionality, and display of snippets are all non-infringing fair uses. If one takes into account the fair use findings in other similar cases, there are now four argued rulings which affirm that the work undertaken by participants in the Google Library Project to convert library collections to digital form constitute fair use as defined by U.S. Copyright law, a victory for fair use, libraries, scholars, researchers, and the public alike.

The University of California has been in partnership with the Google Library Project since 2006. As result, close to 3.8 million volumes from UC Library collections have been converted to digital form and are in HathiTrust and Google Books. These digitized volumes (the majority of which are long out of print), can be discovered, searched, and located by anyone using traditional metadata or search terms. Half a million of these volumes are in the public domain and are open access, which means the full text is available for reading.

Why is research data management important and what is the impact of good data management practices? An introductory video released by the UC Libraries addresses these questions by incorporating the voices and testimonials of UC faculty.

The video is the first of a proposed series developed by the UC Libraries Data Curation Common Knowledge Group. It features UC Merced Vice Provost and Graduate Dean Marjorie Zatz and was produced by the UC Merced Communications video production team.

Viewership and feedback will be used to assess and inform future development of the series. Questions or feedback can be submitted directly to the project leads, Head, Digital Assets, Emily Lin (elin@ucmerced.edu) and UC Riverside Engineering Librarian, Kat Koziar (katherine.koziar@ucr.edu).

If you are a principal investigator preparing a grant proposal or developing your research project and would like help with data management planning, contact curation@ucmerced.edu. The Library would be happy to provide consultation for your needs.

UC Merced Library’s Deputy University Librarian, Donald Barclay, follows the upwards and download trends associated with libraries and reveals how they have reinvented themselves to meet users’ needs.   See “Has the library outlived is usefulness in the age of Internet? You’d be surprised” in The Conversation.

Flying bees, North Korean propaganda, and Catholicism in Los Angeles are just some of the subjects represented in the more than 41,000 new items recently added to Calisphere. The 56 new collections from Loyola Marymount University, Orange County Public Libraries, UC Irvine, UC San Diego, and the University of the Pacific are now available on the site. Calisphere’s new metadata infrastructure has made it possible to provide access to more digital content than ever before. This time last year, on the old platform, Calisphere provided access to approximately 250,000 digital objects; today, the new site has almost double that amount and is now approaching half a million items.

Follow this link to see a full list of the new collections.