Expect Resistance & Library Autonomous Zone

The Faith-Based Encyclopedia
by Robert McHenry, TCS: Tech Central Station, 11/15/2004.

An interesting article. As McHenry, a former editor in chief of the Encyclop¾dia Britannica. notes:

Then comes the crucial and entirely faith-based step:

3. Some unspecified quasi-Darwinian process will assure that those writings and editings by contributors of greatest expertise will survive; articles will eventually reach a steady state that corresponds to the highest degree of accuracy.

Does someone actually believe this? Evidently so. Why? It’s very hard to say.

McHenry’s argument goes to the heart
of much of the problem our users face when using
the Internet for information. When it is good, it is very very, good and when it is bad it is, well, very, very bad, if not horid, misleading, inaccurate, etc.
How do you tell the difference? What is the role of the library?

Enjoy! A-and a tip of the hat to /. where the usual discussion (of what value…?) ensues…

ACNM library - what’s new! : ACNM free journals information guide

The Australian College of Natural Medicine provides this lists of “Lists Of Free Full-Text Journals Online.”

The term “information commons” is used in different ways in different contexts.
One idea “…draws on the historical existence of the English commons–pieces of land to which members of a community had specific rights of access to meet important human needs…” (From the Editor Inaugural Issue, June 2002, info-commons.org). This leads to “commons” as places where information is “… maximally accessible to everyone in a society….” So called, “intellectual property” may conflict with this idea, but
the info-commons.org hopes for a society in which
“commercial uses of information are balanced with effective public access to information.”

Another use of the term “information commons” refers to places, often hosted by college or university libraries, that provide
services that combine computer access and research assistance. Such commons have the potential for being more than computer labs and more than warehouses of information. They can be places where information is used, not just delivered; where scholars collaborate using specialized tools. ARL has a new
SPEC kit,
SP281 The Information Commons, July 2004 (PDF of Table of Contents and Executive Summary) that describes implementations at almost a dozen universities.

Should publically funded research be freely available to the public? The House Appropriations Committee has directed the National Institutes of Health to develop a policy of requiring that a complete electronic text of any manuscript reporting work supported by NIH grants or contracts be supplied to the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed Central.

Twenty-file Nobel Prize winners have signed an open letter to Congress praising the plan.
(U.S. Newswire : Releases : “An Open Letter to the U.S. Congress…”)

Pat Schroeder, head of the Association of American Publishers, doesn’t like the plan, though. She says that, it “would threaten the continued survival of many scientific, scholarly and medical publications and professional societies.”
(Scientists want research papers freely available
By Dan Vergano, USA TODAY 8/29/2004)

ALA and ACRL, along with AALL, ARL, MLA and SLA, have joined with a number of other organizations in a new coalition of taxpayers, patients, physicians, researchers, and institutions to support open public access to taxpayer-funded research.
(Libraries join new coalition to support public access to research, Sept. 2, 2004.)

P2P Congress

The problem: Congress doesn’t do a very good job of making video of its hearings available. One solution: citizens using “p2p” technology! “The more friends, neighbors and other citizens choose to share each hearing the faster shared delivery costs drop to almost nothing.” The new problem:
New legislation (the INDUCE Act) is designed to outlaw the very P2P networks that have the collective power to promote learning and democratic participation.

Washington, D.C. - August 4, 2004 - A diverse coalition of citizens, activist groups, academics, entrepreneurs and fledgling technology companies today announced their support for a project to share digital recordings of government hearings on peer-to-peer (P2P) networks.

Open Access News (Formerly: FOS News)

…Peter Jacso reviews three search utilities in his Picks and Pans column (p.57), and calls Citebase Search “the crown jewel of the Open Citation Project,” … [and] dismisses Google’s interface for searching scholarly archives (consisting of material from nine scientific publishers,)

House of Commons - Science and Technology - Tenth Report

The report, entitled “Scientific Publications: Free for all?” is a result of the UK House of Commons Science & Technology Committee’s inquiry into scientific publications that has investigated pricing, access and availability issues.
Read the rest of this entry »

Open Access
Association of College and Research Libraries,
Association of Research Libraries,
SPARC,
SPARC Europe. [PDF. 6pp]

The Open Access brochure presents a more specific approach to change, by describing the benefits of open access to authors, readers, teachers, scholars, and scientists.

Facts and figures demonstrate how open access to scholarly research capitalizes on Internet connectivity to increase a research article’s use and impact.

The brochure suggests steps authors of journal articles can take to provide open access to their work. This action can be at the local level in providing access to their own journal articles, and at a broader level to support open access publishers.

Here is an interesting idea: blog a famous work of literature, full text, one day at a time. Three examples:

• The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci
  started at page 1 on May 30th, 2004
• The Diary Of Samuel Pepys
  This site is a presentation of the diaries of Samuel Pepys, the renowned 17th century diarist who lived in London, England. A new entry written by Pepys will be published each day; 1 January 1660 was published on 1 January 2003.
• James Joyce’s Ulysses: One Page Every Day. In honor of the 100th anniversary of the date that Ulysses is set, this lauded book will be presented here page by page starting with page one on Bloomsday, June 16, 2004 ending with the last page on June 14, 2006.

The Free Expression Policy Project
By Nancy Kranich
Senior Research Fellow, 2003-04 and the FEPP and past president of the American Library Association.

In the last decade, mass media companies have developed methods of control that undermine the public’s traditional rights to use, share, and reproduce information and ideas. These technologies, combined with dramatic consolidation in the media industry and new laws that increase its control over intellectual products, threaten to undermine the political discourse, free speech, and creativity needed for a healthy democracy.

In response to the crisis, librarians, cyber-activists, and other public interest advocates have sought ways to expand access to the wealth of resources that the Internet promises, and have begun to build online communities, or “commons,” for producing and sharing information, creative works, and democratic discussion. This report documents the information commons movement, explains its importance, and outlines the theories and “best practices” that have developed to assist its growth.

Also available in PDF.