The Library of Congress shook up the copyright world today with a major new round of exemptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or DMCA. Every three years, the librarian of Congress issues a list of what's exempted from the statute's ban on circumventing the digital-rights management technology that controls access to copyrighted material. In today's statement, James Billington, the librarian, listed six classes of works that will be subject to exemptions, depending on what users want to do with them.

The six classes include motion pictures on DVD's, as long as they're "legally made and acquired" and as long as the circumventing is done for educational, documentary, or nonprofit uses. That gives the green light to professors or film/media-studies students who want to incorporate "short portions of new movies into short works for the purpose of criticism or comment," Mr....

Helen Lucas's career in cataloging began with an IBM Executive typewriter. Fairfield University's library had just acquired the machine in 1960 when Lucas, then a new high-school graduate, landed a job there. Because most of her job involved typing call numbers, access numbers, authors' names, and book titles, Ms. Lucas and the Executive spent a lot of time together back in the day.

"I had a long relationship with that typewriter, believe me," she recalls. "It had proportionate spacing on it. Every letter took up a certain amount of space, and they were all different."

By the time Ms. Lucas retired from the university library this summer, the Executive had long since been superseded by computers. The Chronicle asked her to describe some of the other technological shifts she encountered in a half-century's worth of cataloging.

When Ms. Lucas started work at the university, in...

The Springer publishing company today announced that it is setting up a new open-access journal program. Called SpringerOpen, the program will initially include 12 new online-only, peer-reviewed journals in science, technical, and medical fields.

The Chronicle sat down with Eric Merkel-Sobotta, Springer's executive vice president for corporate communications, and Bettina Goerner, the company's manager of open access, to talk about the program. (They were in town for the annual meeting of the American Library Association.) They emphasized that all SpringerOpen journals will be published under a Creative Commons Attribution license, which allows reuse of articles as long as the authors are given credit. So if you're an instructor who wants to use a SpringerOpen article in a course you're teaching, "you can include it in course packages without e-mailing Springer's rights department," Mr. ...

Thanks to videoconferencing, literary criticism is playing a small part in the rebuilding of Iraq.

At the end of last year, Steve Wilson, a professor of English at Texas State University at San Marcos, got an email from a U.S. official working on provincial reconstruction in Iraq. Through contacts at Iraqi universities, the official had met some professors of English who wanted to find a way to talk to their U.S. counterparts about literature. So he went looking on the Internet for American professors who had experience that might be relevant and found Mr. Wilson, who had taught in a largely Muslim country, Malaysia.

Mr. Wilson and two of his Texas State English-department colleagues, Nelly Rosario and John Blair, were invited to talk with the Iraqi scholars via videoconferencing. The first conversation took place in March. To participate, the Iraqi scholars had to dodge curfews and be...

Can a new research library be all digital? How much does it cost a library to preserve a codex? What do large-scale text-digitizing projects mean for scholarship in the humanities? Those are driving questions behind a new report, "The Idea of Order: Transforming Research Collections for 21st Century Scholarship," released today by the Council on Library and Information Resources.

The report is presented as a trio of essays. In their contribution, Geneva Henry, executive director of Rice University's Center for Digital Scholarship, and Lisa Spiro, director of Rice's Digital Media Center, study the question "Can a New Research Library Be All Digital?" Ms. Henry and Ms. Spiro give an extended overview of experiments with going digital and obstacles that libraries have encountered, including technological shortfalls and librarian and faculty resistance.

They conclude that the all-digital...

The year 1871 was not an easy year for David Livingstone. Several years into his search for the source of the Nile River, the explorer came across a source of the Congo River instead, although he didn't know it. Stuck in an eastern Congo village called Nyangwe, Livingstone ran out of the notebooks in which he had been keeping a record of his travels. He also ran out of ink. So he turned to whatever materials he could find: He wrote on books and pages of old newspapers, and used the juice of a local berry to write with.

That was enterprising, given the circumstances. It also turned out to be a nightmare for future scholars. Newsprint is not known for its durability. Berry ink is not made for the ages either, especially when it's used in makeshift diaries created in hot and humid conditions. Livingstone also wrote across the newsprint at a 90-degree angle, creating what one scholar,...

Are you on Twitter? That tweet you sent this morning about what your cat ate for breakfast is now part of history. The Library of Congress announced today—first via its Twitter feed—that it will archive all public tweets posted since Twitter went live in March 2006.

"That's a LOT of tweets, by the way: Twitter processes more than 50 million tweets every day, with the total numbering in the billions," a news release from the library points out. Pity the future historians who might spend their careers sifting through billions of our 140-character blurts about weather, irritating co-workers, and the antics of pop stars.

But one man's Twitter flotsam is another man's cultual and historical gold, and Twitter has already made its mark as a way to spread word of signicant events. "Expect to see an emphasis on the scholarly and research implications of the acquisition," the library said. "Just...

That's Archivist with a capital A, as in the person who heads up the National Archives and Records Administration. The latest person to hold that position is David S. Ferriero, who became AOTUS (Archivist of the United States) in November 2009. Mr. Ferriero used to be the director of the New York Public Libraries, and it looks like he has brought some of that public-outreach sensibility to his new role.

He's blogging, for one thing. (Imagine his predecessors doing that.) AOTUS: Collector in Chief debuted last week with the tagline "The Archivist's Take on Transparency, Collaboration, and Participation at the National Archives."

In his first post, Mr. Ferriero lays out (a little drily, it must be said) his aim to have NARA "reclaim its records management role." He emphasizes that "we understand that electronic records are now a fundamental part of our documentary record." And, he says, ...

The domestic history of the American civil-rights movement is well known to scholars. Less familiar is the movement's international side, especially as it played out in Germany, where African-American GI's stationed after World War II helped spread its ideas. The transatlantic influence worked in the other direction, too, as those soldiers brought their experience in fighting for democracy home to the United States.

Two historians—Maria Höhn, an associate professor at Vassar College, and Martin Klimke, of Heidelberg University and the German Historical Institute in Washington—wanted to call attention to this underappreciated chapter of American history. So they established The Civil Rights Struggle, African-American GI's, and Germany, an online archive dedicated to gathering and digitizng primary-source material from the period. As they explain on the project's Web site, more than three...

The February 18 fairness hearing on the revised settlement in the Google Books lawsuit has come and gone, and the world now waits for word from Denny Chin, the federal judge in charge of the case. It could be a long wait. At the Association of American Publishers meeting held in Washington this week, there was talk that we might not hear from the judge for a couple of months. (He could issue a ruling anytime, of course.)

One question on the minds of everyone following the settlement is : What happens after the judge rules? Jonathan Band, a specialist in technology law and policy, has created a nifty chart of possible paths the settlement might take, depending on what Judge Chin decides. Called "GBS March Madness: Paths Forward for the Google Books Settlement," the chart lays out a many-branched tree of appeals or litigation, all the way up to the Supreme Court.

In a note, Mr. Band...