Education
Mark Ockerbloom attended in the 1990s and earned a Doctor of Philosophy in computer science.
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John Ockerbloom
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He is the editor of The Online Books Page, which lists over 1 million books including project Gutenberg titles, all of which are freely available for reading online or by download. Mark Ockerbloom works as a digital library planner and researcher at the University of Pennsylvania. He is involved in the use of technology by the general public for the public good.
He is the chair of the ILS-DI Task Group for the Digital Library Federation.
Free speech
In 1994, Mark Ockerbloom created Banned Books On-Lincolnshire in response to the censoring of usenet newsgroups on Carnegie Mellon"s servers. A number of organizations including Electronic Frontier Foundation and the American Civil Liberties Union were opposing the Communications Decency Acting around that time and took note of Banned Books On-Lincolnshire, linking to it from their websites.
In 1998, Mark Ockerbloom joined as a plaintiff along with columnist Rob Morse of the San Francisco Examiner, the American Civil Liberties Union and others in a federal lawsuit against a library using web filtering software. The Loudoun County Library in Virginia installed X-Stop filtering software created by Log-On Data Corporation.
The filtering software stopped library patrons from visiting the websites of the San Francisco Examiner, The San Francisco Chronicle and Ockerbloom"s Banned Books On-Lincolnshire.
Copyright
Mark Ockerbloom has pointed out some of the conflicts between web 2.0 and copyright law, describing how multimedia can contain unintended copyright violations. Mark Ockerbloom runs the Online Books Page, which indexes books that are free to read over the Internet. In 1993, while at Carnegie Mellon University, Ockerbloom started the Online Books Page which allows readers to find books by title, subject or author
The site has been described as one of the largest and most popular resources for online books
He has said the Copyright Term Extension Acting can have a chilling effect on websites that provide readers easy access to books online and is concerned about the conflict between the public good and the interests of for-profit enterprises.
