Reposting eBook User's Bill of Rights

I am reposting this eloquent post in support of, and with permission from The Librarian in Black:

"The eBook User’s Bill of Rights is a statement of the basic freedoms that should be granted to all eBook users.

The eBook User’s Bill of Rights

Every eBook user should have the following rights:

• the right to use eBooks under guidelines that favor access over proprietary limitations
• the right to access eBooks on any technological platform, including the hardware and software the user chooses
• the right to annotate, quote passages, print, and share eBook content within the spirit of fair use and copyright
• the right of the first-sale doctrine extended to digital content, allowing the eBook owner the right to retain, archive, share, and re-sell purchased eBooks

I believe in the free market of information and ideas.

I believe that authors, writers, and publishers can flourish when their works are readily available on the widest range of media. I believe that authors, writers, and publishers can thrive when readers are given the maximum amount of freedom to access, annotate, and share with other readers, helping this content find new audiences and markets. I believe that eBook purchasers should enjoy the rights of the first-sale doctrine because eBooks are part of the greater cultural cornerstone of literacy, education, and information access.

Digital Rights Management (DRM), like a tariff, acts as a mechanism to inhibit this free exchange of ideas, literature, and information. Likewise, the current licensing arrangements mean that readers never possess ultimate control over their own personal reading material. These are not acceptable conditions for eBooks.

I am a reader. As a customer, I am entitled to be treated with respect and not as a potential criminal. As a consumer, I am entitled to make my own decisions about the eBooks that I buy or borrow.

I am concerned about the future of access to literature and information in eBooks.  I ask readers, authors, publishers, retailers, librarians, software developers, and device manufacturers to support these eBook users’ rights.

These rights are yours.  Now it is your turn to take a stand.  To help spread the word, copy this entire post, add your own comments, remix it, and distribute it to others.  Blog it, Tweet it (#ebookrights), Facebook it, email it, and post it on a telephone pole.

To the extent possible under law, the person who associated CC0 with this work has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to this work"

Tutorials, macros, and catalogs, oh my!

During the last two weeks I got caught up in creating online tutorials using Wink. I wanted to add audio narration to the tutorials I created and I was thinking of buying an inexpensive USB microphone to add to my gadget arsenal. I also began to use Wink to create an online manual for the procedures I use to ftp and import MARC record files into the online catalog. All good maven-y things to do.

Like the macros I've written to edit records in OCLC that take milli-seconds to run and add a handful of fields to a record, the tutorials take hours to edit, but play for a minute or less. Sometimes when I step back and think about all the lines of code in a macro, and all the time I've spent in the last ten years creating them, I wonder about costs versus the benefits. The benefits are not to be undervalued. The macros help to reduce errors and increase efficiency. One of the fields added by the macros is "patron-facing." It is a local field that contains a single subfield with a single-character value that drives the format icon and search filter/limit option. It's a pretty important bit of data. When someone searches for a popular work such as "The girl with the dragon tattoo," the pretty icons match the right records because the macros I created helped ensure the integrity of the data. If a patron limits their search to the DVD of the movie, they will be able to find it. The tutorials I am creating will help my co-workers learn how to save, edit, and use the macros. The end result makes a better experience for the patron who use the catalog to get what they want.

But it got me to thinking on this Sunday day, why do we need to add another local field to the record with an arbitrarily-assigned one-character code to drive format icons and search filters? Why can't the online catalog use the same MARC data my macros use? My macros assign the format value based on data found in various parts of the MARC record, and all I use is an OCLC-version of BASIC computer programming language to do it. As elegant as my macros are, and as much as I love, love, love creating them, tinkering with them, and getting thanks and accolades when they work for other people, in the end, it would be cleaner if the programs that display and index catalog information could extrapolate from the MARC data to drive the format icon display and search filters. More thoughts about the online catalog development in my next post. I might buy the microphone anyway, and I am still the Macro Maven.

Tutorial software

I've been comparing Wink and Jing for creating short tutorials to explain how to import, save, and change macros. Both programs are free, although TechSmith offers a Pro version of Jing as well. Jing is very easy to use. Wink has more features for customizing presentations and offers more playback options. Jing could be useful for situations when we find a bug and we need to show the developers exactly what we are doing when something goes wrong. Wink should work very well for creating and sharing the tutorials that I have in mind.