This had an extremely loose and broad definition of what a database was and was seen by many as a potential major obstacle to future free access to public domain material. A press release issued December 24 by the American Library Association cited legal counsel Adam Eisgrau's sense that the treaties recognized the necessity of the extension of limits on copyright, including fair use, into the digital environment. Meanwhile the domestic NII Copyright Protection Act will also be under consideration. The time and location have not yet been finalized, but this newsletter will bring you details when available. The Collection as a whole is one of the largest and most important collections of printed ephemera anywhere in the world, containing over a million items in 700 subject headings, from 1508 to the present.
Visitors can browse the material by topics as well as search by key words.
Lou Burnard, of the Oxford University's Computing Services, has posted an interim, personal account of the weekend conference held at Studley Priory, in the depths of the Oxfordshire countryside. Briefly, the meeting moved from reports of current practices through demonstrations of related digital projects and presentations on MARC, TEI, EAD and the Dublin Core to a collaborative identification of a key set of descriptive categories that could be used in an SGML markup of medieval manuscripts. Next steps will involve considering whether to map these categories against MARC, TEI and EAD, for example, or to produce a new set of guidelines. Details about an official report on the meeting will be forthcoming. The project will ensure that instructional software developers will have a technical standard that allows modules to be shared among institutions and across a wide range of technical environments.