Expect Resistance & Library Autonomous Zone

Science — Brown 290 (5497): 1701 by James Robert Brown, professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto.

This is a classic article from December 2000, well cited, and worth revisiting today.

Teaching and research at universities is increasingly funded from private sources. In this essay, Brown highlights the problems associated with this approach and calls for a return to largely public funding. He argues that the public, rather than corporations or individual scientists or even secretive governments, should own the results.

American-Scientist-E-PRINT-Forum: UC’s Richard Atkinson in Chronicle of Higher Education

Stevan Harnad, the most vocal proponet of open access to scholarly journal literature, replies here to
“A New World of Scholarly Communication” By Richard C. Atkinson, The Chronicle Review Volume 50, Issue 11, Page B16 [available to subscribers at http://chronicle.com/weekly/v50/i11/11b01601.htm].

Harnad comments on toll-access and research-impact, library journal budgets, and open access, scholarly-society/university-presses and commercial-publishers,
peer review, self-”archiving”, DSpace and EPrints, and more!

On the Web, Research Work Proves Ephemeral
By Rick Weiss,
Washington Post,
Monday, November 24, 2003; Page A08.

Another newspaper article about the problem of changed URLs, papers removed from the web, etc.
It notes that “of the 2,483 British government Web sites, for example, 25 percent change their URL each year, said David Worlock of Electronic Publishing Services Ltd. in London.”

Al-Ahram Weekly | Books Supplement | Vegetal and mineral memory: The future of books

“The city of Alexandria played host on 1 November to the renowned Italian novelist and scholar Umberto Eco, who gave a lecture in English, on varieties of literary and geographic memory, at the newly opened Bibliotheca Alexandrina. Al-Ahram Weekly publishes the complete text of the lecture.”

Libraries, over the centuries, have been the most important way of keeping our collective wisdom. They were and still are a sort of universal brain where we can retrieve what we have forgotten and what we still do not know. If you will allow me to use such a metaphor, a library is the best possible imitation, by human beings, of a divine mind, where the whole universe is viewed and understood at the same time. A person able to store in his or her mind the information provided by a great library would emulate in some way the mind of God. In other words, we have invented libraries because we know that we do not have divine powers, but we try to do our best to imitate them.

EDN - The war on copying
By Nicholas Cravotta
EDN Magazine 10/16/2003.

This magazine that deals with electrical design has a thoughtful cover story on Digial Rights Management (DRM) that discusses the social issues as much as the technical issues.

Many companies mistakenly focus on the technology when trying to understand DRM and fail to consider the real social issues that managing content involves. For example, DRM schemes that tie content to a single PC fail to address the needs of, say, a child of divorced parents who lives in two homes. Even more common is the person who wants to play music at home, at work, in the car, on a portable player, and at a friend’s house. The killer app for digital content is the connected home, yet most DRM schemes undermine consumers’ ability to easily move content between devices. Protection isn’t just about security; you need to consider convenience, as well.

Over at Slashdot there is one of those seemingly endless
discussions of this article.

The Register
“Will December make or break the Internet?”
By Kieren McCarthy
Nov. 24, 2003.

In December,
the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) will bring together the heads of over 60 governments to discuss governance of the Internet. “The United States, Europe and English-speaking partners such as Australia favour the existing private-company organisation, ICANN. Whereas developing nations, China, India, Brazil, South Africa and others all want a recognised international body to run the show, ITU.”

Will the Internet be run by a private, California company that has a history of making decisions that affect public policy based on commerical interests, or by an international governmental organization? This article outlines the players and what is at stake.

NARA | JFK Assassination Records | Warren Commission Report
National Archives provides a web verson of the Warren Commission report. “Web version based on Report of the President’s Commission on the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1964. 1 volume, 888 pages. The formatting of this Web version may differ from the original.”

beSpacific: The Real Price Associated With Free Web Applications

Senate Passes Bill to Curb Spam (TechNews.com)
Washington Post. November 25, 2003.
By David McGuire.

Ready to have your mind blown? Here’s an interesting annual study done by Peter Lyman and Hal R. Varian for the UC Regents entitled, “How Much Information?”. The study found that:

–Print, film, magnetic, and optical storage media produced about 5 exabytes of new information in 2002. Ninety-two percent of the new information was stored on magnetic media, mostly in hard disks. (five exabytes of information is equivalent in size to the information contained in half a million new libraries the size of the Library of Congress print collections!!!)

–the amount of new information stored on paper, film, magnetic, and optical media has about doubled in the last three years.

–Information flows through electronic channels — telephone, radio, TV, and the Internet — contained almost 18 exabytes of new information in 2002, three and a half times more than is recorded in storage media. Ninety eight percent of this total is the information sent and received in telephone calls - including both voice and data on both fixed lines and wireless.

What does this really mean for our society(ies)? This study is particularly interesting in light of the movement by several organizations (RIAA, WIPO etc.) to constrict citizens’ freedom of and access to information in all its guises. Food for thought.