Librarian of Congress announces six classes of works exempt from digital copyright

The Librarian of Congress has announced the classes of works subject to the exemption from the prohibition against circumvention of technological measures that control access to copyrighted works. Persons making noninfringing uses of the following six classes of works will not be subject to the prohibition against circumventing access controls (17 U.S.C. § 1201(a)(1)) until the conclusion of the next rulemaking. According to Nate Anderson of ars technica, "This time, the Library went (comparatively) nuts, allowing widespread bypassing of the CSS encryption on DVDs, declaring iPhone jailbreaking to be "fair use," and letting consumers crack their legally purchased e-books in order to have them read aloud by computers."

The Nation's Largest Libraries by number of volumes

The American Library Association recently released an updated fact sheet listing the 100 largest libraries in the United States by volumes held.

The Top Five include: The Library of Congress, Harvard University, Boston Public, Yale University, and University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Auburn University at number 95 is the only Alabama library to make the top 100.

Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan

If you are interested in the Supreme Court of the United States and current nominee, Elena Kagan, check out this resource from the Law Library of Congress.

Library of Congress Joins YouTube

Last year, we brought you the news that the Library of Congress had established a Flickr account. The Library announced today that it has joined YouTube, starting with more than 70 video clips. The launch collection of videos are divided into several categories including:

2008 National Book Festival author presentations, the Books and Beyond author series, Journeys and Crossings (a series of curator discussions), “Westinghouse” industrial films from 1904, scholar discussions from the John W. Kluge Center, and the earliest movies made by Thomas Edison, including the first moving image ever made (curiously enough, a sneeze by a man named Fred Ott).

LC Director of Communications Matt Raymond promises that the library will soon follow with more videos. For now, enjoy one of the classic Edison recordings of boxing cats! I don't think that he could get away with this one nowadays...



Related on Carmichael blog:

• Library of Congress Places 3,000 photos on Flickr

Related on the Web:

• Offical Library of Congress channel on YouTube
• YouTube, and Now We Do Too - Library of Congress blog

Library of Congress Places 3,000 Photos on Flickr

Last week brought the news of an exciting development from the photo sharing website Flickr and the Library of Congress. The Library of Congress has uploaded over 3,000 photos to Flickr. The photos have been placed into an experimental pool of images called The Commons; all of these photos have a designation of "no known copyright restrictions."

I was encouraged to read what LC Director of Communications Matt Raymond had to say about this project: “The real magic comes when the power of the Flickr community takes over. We want people to tag, comment, and make notes on the images, just like any other Flickr photo, which will benefit not only the community but also the collections themselves. For instance, many photos are missing key caption information such as where the photo was taken and who is pictured. If such information is collected via Flickr members, it can potentially enhance the quality of the bibliographic records for the images."

From statements like these, it's clear that Raymond and others at the Library of Congress understand what Library and Web 2.0 are all about. In the case of Flickr, it's all about empowering the individual to tag content and organize images in a way that's meaningful to them. See these historic photos for yourself! Check out Photos from the Library of Congress on Flickr.

Poets Laureate

In the past month or so, two poets have have been appointed laureate positions. In August, the Librarian of Congress appointed Charles Simic as the 15th Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry. Click here to read more about Simic and his work.

MTV recently appointed John Ashbery as the MTVU Poet Laureate, a new position to MTVU. More of Ashbery's work can be found here.

You can use Lion and Literary Reference Center, two of our literature databases, to find more works by these authors (not to mention criticism, reviews, essays, and bibliographies concerning them). (You'll have to log in using your UM i.d. if you're off campus. )

If you 'd like to check out books by Charles Simic, we have The World Doesn't End and The Metaphysician in the Dark.

Hopeflully, we'll have a few books by John Ashbery soon. In the mean time, you can see Ashbery read over 20 of his poems in Lion's Poets on Screen section.