The U.S. Department of Justice has weighed in on Google Book Search Settlement 2.0, saying that despite "substantial progress, substantial issues remain." In a statement of interest filed on Thursday, the department said that the revamped agreement "suffers from the same core problem as the original agreement: It is an attempt to use the class-action mechanism to implement forward-looking business arrangements that go far beyond the dispute before the court in this litigation." As a result, it concluded, the deal "purports to grant legal rights that are difficult to square with the core principle of the Copyright Act that copyright owners generally control whether and how to exploit their works during the term of copyright."

As in its

Stanford University reaffirmed its commitment to Google Book Search today, announcing that it has a signed a new, expanded agreement that makes it a full partner library in the book-digitizing project. In a written statement, the university called the deal "a milestone in Stanford's commitment to the program and to the provision of public access to millions of its books." The university joins the Universities of Michigan, Texas, and Wisconsin at Madison in signing stronger participation agreements with the company.

Stanford also expressed strong support for the revised settlement in the Google Book Search lawsuit.  "We are highly supportive of the amended settlement,...

We hope you enjoyed a holiday break from news of the Google Book Search settlement. A month into the new year, though, it's time to check back in with the case. January 28 was the deadline to file objections to the revised version. Denny Chin, the federal district judge charged with reviewing the settlement, is scheduled to hold a fairness hearing on Settlement 2.0 on February 18th.

Here are some of the latest developments and reactions to catch our eye. If you have come across other useful commentary or reactions, please share those in the comments.

--A group of some 80 professors, led by Pamela Samuelson, a professor of law and information at the University of California at Berkeley,

Cornell University Library announced today that it wants the top institutional users of arXiv.org to help pay for the online scientific repository. "Keeping an open-access resource like arXiv sustainable means not only covering its costs, but also continuing to enhance its value, and that kind of financial commitment is beyond a single institution's resources," Oya Rieger, Cornell's associate university librarian for information technologies, said in a statement describing the new strategy.

The experiment is shaping up to be a test of how well multiple institutions can band together to support critical scholarly resources. For scientists in physics, mathematics, quantitative biology, statistics, computer science, and related fields, arXiv has become an...

... and you'll be surprised what he or she can do with it. That's what the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Department of Energy figured. Last year, they staged a competition for "computationally intensive" humanities projects that would draw on the DOE's High Performance Computing (HPC) resources at Nersc, the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Was the gamble worth it? Yes, to judge by the results on display at the Coalition for Networked Information membership meeting, held in Washington, D.C., this week. Several scholars involved in the HPC competition reported on their supercomputing experiences. Among them were Gregory Crane, editor in chief of the Perseus Digital...

Washington, D.C.—Don't de-accession those print materials yet. The digital research library is not quite ready for prime time, according to Lisa Spiro, director of the Digital Media Center at Rice University, and Geneva Henry, executive director of Rice's Center for Digital Scholarship.

At a session of the membership meeting of the Coalition for Networked Information, held here yesterday and today, Ms. Spiro and Ms. Henry talked about research they have done into how close we are to all-digital (or even mostly digital) research libraries. To find out, they did case studies of several libraries founded since 2000, including facilities at the University of California at Merced, Olin College, Soka University of America, California State University-Channel Islands, and New York University's Abu Dhabi campus.

Signs of the digital shift are everywhere....

New Orleans -- Now that so many archives have gone digital, it can be easy to forget that many collections exist only partly online, if they have a digital component at all. An interesting case is the William Ransom Hogan Archive of New Orleans Jazz at Tulane University. The Chronicle sat down with the archive's director, Bruce Boyd Raeburn, to talk about the collection, jazz scholarship, and how the brass-band tradition will not die.

The archive contains some 80,000 recordings and 60,000 titles' worth of sheet music as well as photos, rare film footage, and books about jazz. But its heart is made up of oral histories: the collected memories of some 700 people who were part of the New Orleans music scene from the early 20th century on. Interviewees included Professor Longhair, Jack Teagarden, Lil Hardin Armstrong, Pops Foster, and Kid Ory.

In the...

Fifty-three thousand 18th-century letters. Twenty-three thousand hours of digitized world music. The records of more than 197,000 individual trials held in Britain over 240 years. What can humanities scholars and social scientists do with such large tracts of raw material? This year the Digging Into Data Challenge invited research teams to submit proposals for big-scale, computer-enabled "cyberscholarship" or "data-driven inquiry."

On Thursday the National Endowment for the Humanities, one of the challenge's sponsors, announced that the first Digging Into Data grants have gone to eight international (mostly trans-Atlantic) teams. Other sponsors include the National Science Foundation, the Joint Information Systems Committee in Britain, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council in Canada.

So...

November 11 is Armistice Day, which marks the cessation of Great War hostilities in 1918. (Here in the United States, of course, this is now Veterans Day.) In honor of the day and the dead, the First World War Poetry Digital Archive, housed at the University of Oxford, chose today to unveil its Siegfried Sassoon Collection.

Although it contains photographs and other materials, the collection centers on manuscripts of Sassoon's poems, drawn from holdings at Oxford's Bodleian Library and at the University of Cambridge, the New York Public Library, and the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. A draft of Sassoon's poem "Standing With the Dead" turns up in a June 19, 1918, letter to his friend Robert Nichols.

Meet the latest acronym in the world of digital humanities: Chain, the Coalition of Humanities and Arts Infrastructures and Networks. Born at a meeting at King's College, London, in late October, Chain brings together eight digital-technology undertakings, several based in Europe (e.g., Dariah, or Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities) and a few stateside (e.g., Project Bamboo).The idea behind Chain, the organizers said, is to overcome "the current fragmented environment where researchers operate in separate areas with often mutually incompatible technologies."

No more "working on the highways and byways and wearing, wearing a frown," as Sam Cooke would say. Chain's...