Car News

Standard disclaimer: IANAL. This may be legal information, but it
certainly isn't intended to be legal advice.

We can certainly make annotated bibliographies that can allow users to
find items by type, subject, and/or keyword and read summaries and/or
commentaries that will let them know what they say and what we think
about that. Now that we're in the digital age, we can make an online
database that does that for everything we have, not just the short
"Lit List" we publish now. (We could still mark some items as
recommended, though.) Those items that we have permission to
distribute, we can make digital copies of and link to from the bib
entries in the database.

Here's where it gets a bit tricky: Those items that we don't have
permission to distribute, we can probably legally make a single copy
of for preservation purposes, so we might be able to at least make a
backup of them. (That is how it works under U.S. copyright laws for
individuals using the works for private purposes, anyway.) If we
continue to distribute those under the limited circumstances that we
have been, it's possible that we won't get in trouble, but I wouldn't
bet on it being legal. Certainly we couldn't put them online in their
entirety for all to see. Creating a full-text index that is searched
but not displayed is probably also a no-go, since that's where
Google's gotten into trouble before, and we don't have an opt-out
mechanism to protect us.

I'd love to see a mechanism that responds to OAI-PMH requests and is
registered with places like OAIster so our documents are findable
through WorldCat and other mainstream and scholarly library/archive
search engines. But I'd also be the only person here capable of
understanding or maintaining the underlying system, assuming I even
could, and lack of portability and survivability is one of the
problems we need to solve, not add to. Unless someone else here has at
least a minimal programing background and would like to help with
this?

http://www.openarchives.org/pmh/ is the OAI-PMH website, in case
anyone's wondering. There are some existing tools, but I haven't
looked at them. Given my minimal programming background, I could
probably program a minimally-compliant backend for responding to
requests, given time, but I'm not sure how well I could understand or
implement anyone else's system. We'd also need some system for guiding
whomever's doing the metadata through writing up unqualified Dublin
Core (http://dublincore.org/), although DC's surprisingly simple.
Well, compared to some formats that I know of; I REALLY don't want to
write up a system that will respond to remote z39.2 searches (MARC
records)!

Anyway, there's my 2 cents.

In service,
M. Alan Thomas II

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