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Digital library of the commons

January 14th, 2009

Last semester this excellent site would have belonged in a “thinking about collections” post: this semester, I think I’m headed more towards posts on “shrinking the public domain.” Which leads to me ponder why the ALA has provided a “copyright slider” and not a “map of the public domain”? Pamela Samuelson has the makings of a very useful one in her 2003 article, “Mapping the Digital Public Domain: Threats and Opportunities”, so it’s not as though it couldn’t be done. And artifacts do have politics, as Langdon Winner famously noted back in 1986. Hmm.

It might help to demonstrate that the map is gradually shrinking.

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