rwmtest

(This is a letter in an ongoing dialog with a few members of federal parliament. This email was added to the list of submissions for the Copyright Board consultation.) David McGuinty, my MP in Ottawa South, David Graham, MP (Laurentides — Labelle), The Honourable Mélanie Joly, Minister of Canadian Heritage, The Honourable Navdeep Bains, Minister of Innovation, Science and Economic Development, Copyright Board Consultations I would like to thank David McGuinty for forwarding the September 8, 2017 letter from Minister Joly. This was a response to my May 1, 2017 letter titled “Myth: Fair use decimated educational publishing in Canada”. My letter highlighting some of what might colloquially be referred to as “fake news” being spread globally, primarily sourced from Access Copyright, a Canadian Collective Society. The National Copyright Unit of Australia felt this myth spreading required a response [1] As this myth primarily relates to an ongoing dispute between a collective society and pr...

Replying to a Letter to the Editor in The Varsity . It is taxpayers and authors that are paying the costs of this ongoing dispute, one way or the other. What we are effectively discussing is a government funding program masquerading as copyright, and because of the misdirection that this is a copyright issue we are allowing intermediaries like educational institutions, collective societies, foreign publishers, and all their lawyers, to extract the bulk of the money. If Mr. Degen was focused on Canadian authors getting paid he would be agreeing with me that we need to redirect taxpayer money misspent with the current regime towards a program similar to the Public Lending Right . The existing Public Lending Right funds authors based on their works being loaned by libraries, and a "Public Education Right" could directly fund authors based on specific uses of their works in publicly funded educational institutions. This would be applied only to that very narrow area o...

Back in April I noted Canadiana is working on adopting APIs from IIIF , the International Image Interoperability Framework. We did a small demo in May as part of our participation at Code4Lib North .  Today is the final day of the 2017 IIIF Conference hosted at The Vatican, and this is an update on our progress. What have we done so far? We have a Cantaloupe Docker configuration on GitHub that we used for the demo.  This has the delegates Ruby script which finds the requested image within the AIP stored on the TDR Repository node which Cantaloupe is running on. We have created a pull request for OpenJPEG to resolve an incompatibility between OpenJPEG and Cantaloupe . The fix allows Cantaloupe to offer access to our JPEG2000 images. We will be integrating the OpenJPEG fix and some cleaner configuration into our Cantaloupe Docker configuration soon, bringing this Docker image closer to being worthy of being installed on production servers. Our lead Application Developer, Sa...

As some of the links in recent articles suggest, we have started moving more of our software from an internal source control and issue tracker towards public GitHub projects.  While this has value as additional transparency to our membership, I also hope it will enable better collaboration with members, researchers, and others who have an interest in Canadiana's work. For the longest time the Archive::BagIt perl module was the only GitHub project associated with Canadiana.  Robert Schmidt became the primary maintainer of this module when he was still at Canadiana, and this module is still critical to our infrastructure. Added to the two IIIF related Docker images that I'll discuss more later are two PERL modules: CIHM::METS::App is a tool to convert metadata from a variety of formats (CSV, DB/Text, MARC) to the 3 XML formats we use as descriptive metadata within our METS records (MARCXML, Dublin Core, Issueinfo).  This is used in the production process we use to...

This article is based on a document written to be used at Code4Lib North on May 11’th , and discusses what we’ve learned so far with our use of JHOVE. What is JHOVE? The original project was a collaboration between JSTOR and Harvard University Library, with JHOVE being an acronym for JSTOR/Harvard Object Validation Environment.  It provides functions to perform format-specific identification, validation, and characterization of digital objects. JHOVE is currently maintained by the non-profit Open Preservation Foundation, operating out of the UK (Associated with the British Library in West Yorkshire). https://github.com/openpreserve/jhove Standard JHOVE modules for AIFF, ASCII, BYTESTREAM, GIF, HTML, JPEG, JPEG2000, PDF, TIFF, UTF8, WAVE, XML, MP3, ZIP. What is Canadiana doing with JHOVE? As of the last week of April we generate XML reports from JHOVE and include them within AIP revisions in our TDR.  At this stage we are not rejecting or flagging files based on the repo...

Some of the earliest groups on Flora.org Ask the Doctors, which was a real cool site managed by Rosaleen Dickson who I met from the Freenet. Involved in the publishing industry, she co-authored a book on HTML back in the early 1990's when it was such a new thing.  She hosted pages on Canadian Books, and following the work she did with the doctors ran a "Ask Great Granny" site. I believe Auto-Free Ottawa was the first community group I hosted, a group of people in the early 1990's envisioning an Ottawa that wasn't as dependent on the automobile. Canadian Homeschool is the last of the original groups to be hosted on FLORA.org Community Democratic Action KC. Maclure Centre MAI-not Ottawa District Committee of Ontario Special Olympics Peace and Environment Resource Centre -- still around, but has had their own domain name for quite some time. Pednet was a mailing list hosted by Majordomo, and then moved to Mailman. Visually Impaired was, I believe, information hosted...

FLORA Community Web was started in December 1994 (See Ottawa alternative community minded networking ) and the first domain name it used was flora.ocunix.on.ca. Later the name flora.ottawa.on.ca (date unknown) was adopted, and then FLORA.org (13-Oct-1996). It offered free websites and mailing lists for community groups from before these things were as easily available as they are today.  I haven't had time to spend on the server as I would like, and believe it would be best for me to admit that my interests have moved onward.   I'm in the process of helping the remaining groups hosted on FLORA.org to migrate to some other hosting. Thanks go out to the many volunteers who participated over the years, and the many friends I made through these connections. If you want to take a look at what the site looked like at various points in the past, Archive.org's Wayback engine has many snapshots.  The earliest list of flora.org organizations they have is a snapshot from 1998. ...