Expect Resistance & Library Autonomous Zone

Haymarket books is a non-profit, progressive book distributor and publisher, a project of the Center for Economic Research and Social Change.

hamletworks
“Hamlet Works is based on the materials of the New Variorum Hamlet Project. It contains sets of entries (not yet complete) detailing the textual and critical history of every line of the play. ”

An article in the CHE describes the project as
“every piece of scholarship and criticism about the play” linked “line by line, to the text in an online database.”
(Online Database Will Hold the Mirror Up to ‘Hamlet,’ Gathering Every Commentary on the Play
By JEFFREY R. YOUNG.
Chronicle of Higher Education, Tuesday, May 10, 2005.)

Open Government: a journal on Freedom of Information

Here’s a new open access journal to keep track of. The inaugural issue includes articles about the UK freedom of information act (which amazingly didn’t come into force until January, 2005!), and a conference report on the 3rd intl conference of information commissioners. One of the exciting things to come out of that conference was the “Declaration of Cancœn
Transparency and Accountability: A Commitment to Democracy” signed by a long list of NGOs. The PDF of the declaration is linked from another organization to track called Statewatch.

Congratulations on this new and exciting endeavor!

Scope:
¥ Freedom of Information legislation and information provision for citizens
¥ Comparative views of international freedom of information legislation
¥ Freedom of information legislation and the open government debate
¥ The impact of Freedom of Information on public administration
¥ Case studies from public authorities by FOI practioners
¥ Information Systems for managing records and FOI requests
¥ The relationship of Freedom of Information legislation and other access to information legislation

Yahoo! Search

Yahoo now has a search that limits results to materials covered by a Creative Commons license instead of copyright.

Why is this search different?

This Yahoo! Search service finds content across the Web that has a Creative Commons license. While most stuff you find on the web has a full copyright, this search helps you find content published by authors that want you to share or reuse it, under certain conditions.

BBC - Radio 4 - Publish or Be Damned

Open access in the news!

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.