The THALI here at Libraries Interact have been receiving a lot of spam lately via some email addresses that we have been using for the administration of the Libraries Interact blog. Early last month I put in place some changes to the way we received email in an effort to reduce the amount of spam that we were getting.

Unfortunately the changes were too effective and legitimate email was being blocked as well. Therefore if you’ve emailed us, or used the contact us form, and haven’t heard from any of us please send your message again.

The prefered method of getting in contact with us is via the contact us form, but you can also email us at the address below if you prefer a direct email.

Registering as a contributor…

As well as these changes we’ve also disabled the ability for anyone to register as a contributor to the blog. While we encourage people to contribute, an unfortunate side effect of allowing anyone to register is that unscrupulous people use automated software to make as many accounts as possible. We were being inundated with bogus requests.

We’re putting in place a new form for people to use for those who wish to register and contribute content and until that is ready we encourage you to use the contact us form to let us know that you want to contribute.

Please remember that you don’t have to register to comment on posts and we certainly do want you all to continue to comment on posts here at Libraries Interact. Commenting on posts gives us the feedback that we need to keep posting.

The “Stop Sign” photo was uploaded to Flickr by Phil Gilbert and used under the terms of a Creative Commons license.

Some of the work that the THALI has put into the Libraries Interact blog is featured in a chapter in the just released Library Mashups: Exploring New Ways to Deliver Library Data published by Information Today, Inc.

The chapter focuses on the three plugins that we have developed to extend the Libraries Interact blog and have released to the WordPress community. WordPress is the software that runs our blog.

The three plugins were developed by me working closely with the THALI. The plugins are:

1. Blogroll to Google CSE plugin
   A plugin that allows users of the WordPress system to manage links to websites that are automatically used to construct a Google Custom Search Engine. We use the plugin here for the Aussie Library Blogs page.
2. Citation Aggregator
   A plugin that aggregates links (citations) from various social bookmarking websites. The links can then be used to construct a post that list the links automatically. We’ll be using this plugin shortly for a series of Reading Room posts.
3. Diverse Group Tag Cloud
   A plugin that aggregates posts from a specified list of blogs and uses content analysis to construct a tag cloud. We use this plugin for the THALI Tags page.

The book is supported by the Library Mashups website managed by the editor of the book Nicole C. Engard. The site has a list of chapters and lists of links relevant to the topics covered in the book.

This morning I’m pleased to report that an updated version of our popular THALI Tags page has been released. This new version is using the Diverse Group Tag Cloud plugin that we’ve been developing.

The THALI Tags page is a tag cloud that is generated by using content analysis of posts on our individual blogs, as well as Libraries Interact. The results of the content analysis, undertaken using a Yahoo! Pipe, are fed through a stop word list and the number of posts associated with the remaining tags determine the size of the tags.

Other aspects of the page new in this version include:

• The page is directly integrated with our WordPress blog
• The tag cloud is updated approximately twice a day
• If you click on a tag a list of posts associated with that tag are displayed
• A widget is displayed in the sidebar listing the top 5 tags
• You can now use the plugin on your own WordPress powered blogs if you like

We value your feedback and would welcome any thoughts you may have on the new THALI Tags page, either as a comment or via our Contact Us form.

The photo “King Cloud” was uploaded to Flickr by Karen Ka Ying Wong and used under a Creative Commons license.

The topic of Australia’s proposed Internet Filter has been mentioned here on Libraries Interact before. Recently there were three interesting views of the issue that I came across.

First was the Web of secrecy article on the Unleashed by Mark Pesce:

It began with a blacklist. The Australian Communications and Media Authority has one – URLs pointing to web sites and web pages deemed too offensive for Australian eyes.

Fair enough: as the Government regulator they have the statutory authority to block content which wouldn’t receive a classification in Australia. But here’s the thing – no one except ACMA knows what URLs are on the blacklist. In other words, not only are the URLs censored, but the list of censored URLs is itself censored.

Welcome to the rabbit hole.

Next was the recent Blocking the Net episode of SBS Insight.

The Federal Government wants to block the internet, filtering out extreme material hosted offshore like child pornography and extreme violence. Under the proposal a Government-approved black list would be given to internet service providers, who’d then be forced to block the offending sites. The idea is to make the internet more family-friendly and protect kids. Sounds pretty straightforward – well, not quite. Recently leaked black lists show some oddly irrelevant sites caught up in the existing system. And will mandatory blocking of the net work?

Lastly was the more recent Western internet censorship: The beginning of the end or the end of the beginning? editorial on the Wikileaks website. The same Wikileaks website that posted the laked list of banned websites.

Over the last two years, Wikileaks has exposed detailed secret government censorship lists or plans for over eight countries, including Thailand, the United Arab Emirates, Australia, and Germany.

Although Wikileaks’ main site has been censored by the Chinese Public Security Bureau since early 2007, last week saw the site placed onto a secret list of sites “forbidden” by the Australian Media and Communications Authority, or ACMA.

The pro-censorship governments exposed by Wikileaks can be divided into three broad categories:

1. Countries with a mandatory censorship system in place: Thailand, the UAE, and Lebanon (films).
2. Countries proposing a mandatory censorship system: Australia and Germany.
3. Countries in which the internet censorship system is an unregulated agreement between several large ISPs and the police: Norway, Denmark and Finland.

Australia and Germany are the only liberal democracies proposing a mandatory internet censorship regime.

Each view presents the issues in a slightly different light and shows just how complex the issue really is.

Readers of the Libraries Interact blog will know that we’ve written before about the plans that the Australian Government has for filtering the Internet. Some of us have written about it on our personal blogs, and I’ve collected some news stories and put them up on Delicious.

Today I came across this post by David Weinberger, of Everything is Miscellaneous fame, about the Enhancing Child Safety and Online Technologies report.

I’m yet to read the report fully, but the synopsis by David in his post makes interesting reading, including the one comment there at the moment. Also available is an interview on the MediaBerkman website that David has had with two of the authors of the report.

Those interested in the debate surrounding the proposed filtering of the Internet may find these interesting.

Long time readers of our blog will remember that we started the Virtual Libraries Interact blog back in late 2006 as a sister site to our blog.

Unfortunately due to a number of reasons the Virtual Libraries Interact blog has been languishing for a while and no new posts have been added.

It with some regret, and a tinge of sadness, that we have decided to merge the Virtual Libraries Interact blog into the main blog. Do not worry, all of the content has been imported into the Libraries Interact blog.

The posts are still available and they have been aggregated into a new Virtual Libraries Interact category. Also preserved are Australian Libraries in SL and SL Avatar list pages.

In the new year we look forward to posting more information here about libraries and second life. Also, don’t forget that those of us using second life and other virtual worlds may be writing about their experiences on their own personal blogs.

Anyone who has spent any time near the information desk in an academic library has heard about the EndNote software. Those of us who have been looking for alternatives generally choose the Zotero Firefox plugin for a whole range of different reasons.

Whilst reading my RSS feeds this morning I came across a post entitled “Thomson Reuters Takes Virginia to Court over Zotero” on the OStatic blog.

The post briefly outlines court action that has been brought against the makers of Zotero by Thomson Reuters due to some new functionality in the latest Zotero beta.

From the post:

George Mason University’s Center for History and New Media distributes Zotero, an open source Firefox extension that helps users collect and manage citations found on the web. It performs a similar function as Thomson Reuter’s EndNote software. The lawsuit is based on the premise that Zotero’s newest beta is able to convert the proprietary EndNote format to the open CSL (Citation Style Language) format.

The post concludes that the case would appear to be weak, see the full post, and I would have to agree that it feels frivolous as well.

I can’t help but wonder what, if any, damage this will do to the Zotero image. Particularly in the typically risk averse senior management levels of academic libraries. My instinct tells me though that Thomson Reuters is about to find out what it is like to take on a community of passionate users.

What are you thoughts about the case?

I originally posted this on the blog at MPOW. I’m interested in the thoughts of readers here at Libraries Interact and in particular anything you may have heard about the debate currently underway in Australia about mandatory open access policies.

A recent article on the ars technica website entitled “Congress’s copyright fight puts open access science in peril” outlines some challenges to the open access movement. In particular legislation has been introduced into the House of Representatives in the United States which may end up challenging the ability for institutes such as the National Institute of Health to continue their open access policies. From the article:

Under existing law, the products of federally funded research belong to the scientists that perform it and institutions that host them. Academic journals have traditionally had researchers transfer the copyright of publications resulting from this research to the journals. The current NIH policy requires that authors they fund reserve the right to place the text and images of their publication in an NIH database hosted at PubMed Central (PMC).

…

The House of Representatives has seen the introduction of legislation, HR 6845 that, depending on its final format, may significantly curtail or eliminate the NIH’s ability to continue its open access policy. The current bill would prevent any arm of the federal government from making research funding contingent upon “the transfer or license to or for a Federal agency of… any right provided under paragraph (1) or (2) of section 106 in an extrinsic work, to the extent that, solely for purposes of this subsection, such right involves the availability to the public of that work.” Those Section 106 rights include the reproduction of the work.

This is particularly interesting given the discussions in research management circles surrounding the possibility of our major funding agencies introducing similar clauses to that which the NIH currently has.

It will be interesting to see how the debate unfolds in the US and more importantly the results of the debates currently underway here in Australia.

The WordPress blogging platform is, I believe, one of the most popular platforms for blogging. I know many places use the WordPress.org version (including Libraries Interact), individuals use the WordPress.com version, and some institutions are using the WordPress MU version as well.

My place of work is one of them, using it to host a blogs service for the university and a service for teaching & learning purposes.

The WordPress team recently announced a survey that they are using to help in the development of the navigation used in the dashboard area of the next version WordPress.

If you use WordPress I encourage you to take the poll and help in the development of this important feature.

If you don’t use WordPress, apologies for the noise.

Yesterday the article “ISP filtering gains momentum” was published in the Online edition of The Australian IT section of The Australian newspaper. We’ve posted about this initiative before.

From the article:

“As part of the federal budget, the Government allocated $125.8 million for a range of internet security initiatives, including the filtering program, over four years.

About $49 million of the allocation has been slated for online law enforcement, but it remains unclear how much has been set aside solely for web filtering, as the budget includes research, international collaboration and education programs.

But the actual cost of internet censorship to taxpayers has yet to be quantified.”

The other interesting snippet was:

“In June, Enex TestLab completed a closed trial of web filtering products at a Telstra laboratory in Tasmania.

Twenty-six ISP-based web filtering products were submitted for review but only six made the final cut.

The trial was conducted within parameters set out in June 2007 by the previous government, when Helen Coonan was communications minister.

About a month later, Senator Conroy hailed the Enex trial a success, within the closed-environment test conditions.

However, the results were broadly negative. It showed that most filters could not identify illegal or inappropriate content — as defined by the Australian Communications and Media Authority — using most non-web protocols.”

It will be interesting to see how this develops.