My Scattered Thoughts

This story came out a couple of weeks ago (more? less?), but Confessions of a Mad Librarian provides a great deal more detail.

What Google will provide to the public —

* Works in copyright won’t be fully available

* For copyrighted works — there will be a click-through to the appropriate OCLC WorldCat record

Approximately 10% of Stanford’s overall collection is clearly out of copyright; other material in the public domain (such as U.S. government documents) will be included in the project Google will be responsible for determining what’s in copyright and what’s not if there are any questionable materials and copyright will drive what will be fully displayed There’s no special provision to fully display material in the last 20 years of copyright

Bruce Sterling unleashed.

Bollywood is actually a wounded cinema in a lot
of ways… it seems to have lost touch with its
traditional audience and its revenues have been
severely disturbed by changes in the means of
distribution. The real key to the glory days of
Bollywood were that cinemas were a place to
get out of the Indian heat, so you could sell
tickets to the air conditioning while presenting
the movie as a kind of billboard.

With better electricity services in India and
home DVD players, Bollywood hit the rocks.
But I enjoy watching its enterprising struggle;
I think it’s got a good chance to become
the first truly post-national cinema, a
form of expression by global emigres
for global emigres.

I really just cannot get enough of this guy. You can check out Bruce Sterling’s regular weblog here.

Alex Steffan over at Worldchanging writes about my new hometown: Seattle.

He’s got a head on his shoulders, that one. I’m still in the staggering around blindfolded stage of living in a new city. We haven’t even found a good breakfast spot yet!

A vasty science fiction short story archive.

I may have linked to this before, once upon a time, but it’s still very impressive.

trust that harbory mackeral to kype the… oh, who’m i fooling.

and to be sure it’s all locked up in a FLASHy gizmo, or i’d point to a specificker one me ownself.

[Attention conservation: it’s about libraries and content distribution]

The digitizing and dissemination of content presents an extreme problem.
The digitizing and dissemination of content presents an extreme opportunity.

People involved in this issue are up in arms (like you do) screaming bloody murder about, you know, the other guy. Meanwhile, content producers keep merrily producing away, often with little to no compensation for it.

What is even more insane than the musical situation is the madness of academic journals, which are mostly now distributed in electronic format. This is something that drives academic libraries crazy, because the price of electronic journals have skyrocketed in the last decade. (We’re talking 500% price increases and the like.)

Some context:

Content for academic journals is produced, for most part, by academics who are employed by universities and such. Academics write articles as a result of the work they are employed to do. (Tenure is often contingent on being published repeatedly.) So academics mainly write for the prestige of being published with the understanding that they will NOT be paid for their articles. These articles, prior to being published, are peer-reviewed by other academics, who are also not being compensated monetarily. Academics review their colleagues’ work because they need their own work reviewed when the time comes. Academics do not get paid for ANY of the work which they do in relation to academic journals.

The only thing which academic journals do is content distribution. In the bad old days of print-only text–when it took large amounts of money and huge, monstrous machines to print and bind these journals–this was really the only option. Academic institutions would pay these journal publishers to distribute their content for them. Now, many of these journals are not even published in a physical format, residing electronically on servers and whatnot. Also, because these are the only places to get these articles, journal publishers apparently feel perfectly free to jack up their prices mercilessly.

So, in one of my classes we (as future information professionals/librarians) discussed this issue at great length. We also read very dated academic writing on this subject. I’ve recently stumbled upon a couple of articles online on this very topic.

The first:

“Introduction to Open Access for Librarians”

lays out the basics of this issue and suggesting the (really very) obvious solution: universities publish–electronically if need be–the research output of their scholars.

Open-access methods of funding journals are novel but already in use and proving themselves. However, if the novelty causes trepidation, then by all means compare these methods carefully to the “tried and true” model we are using today, which takes literature written by authors donating their labor, and vetted by editors donating their labor, and locks it away behind price and permission barriers so that even the world’s wealthiest institutions cannot assure their faculty full access to it.

The second:

“How and Why To Free All Refereed Research From Access- and Impact-Barriers Online, Now” is more technical and abstract than the first, but they lay it out pretty clearly:

All that is needed in order to provide immediate, unlimited click-through, full-text access to the entire refereed research corpus online, for free, for all, forever, is for universities and research institutions to install Eprint Archives and for their researchers to fill them with all their papers, now. If (a) the enhanced access by their own researchers to the research of others and (b) the enhanced visibility and the resulting enhanced impact of their own research on the research of others are not incentive enough for universities to promote and support the self-archiving initiative energetically at this time, they should also consider that it will be an investment in (c) an eventual solution to their serials crisis and the potential recovery of 90% of their annual serials (S/L/P) budget

The third:

“Why Open Content Matters” deals with things from the Linuxy/open-source software point of view. Not as dry as the first two and more evangelistic. Also, the most current and link-heavy and doesn’t really deal with the academic journals crisis as specifically.

In the absence of a true public domain, in which no one person’s claim to the rights to use a work are in any way superior to any other person’s, those who would make information freely available must develop an alternative to copyright that replaces the functions of the public domain for written works. The failure to do so is to embroil the “freely redistributed” information in a legal quagmire increasingly inimical to the exercise of free speech.

Happy New Year, everbody!

Here’s hoping 2005 will be a million times better than that year that will not be spoken of!

Enjoy:

Gotta Get My Stuff Done

(Via the inimitable boingboing.)

Heh.

I imagine some kids got into reading comics through Superman or Batman or the X-Men. Not me, man! I got into all those tights-wearing super-heroes much later in the game.

I got started reading comics with The Picture Bible, that 800-page comical behemoth–containing both Old and New Testaments (but none of the sex and gore!). (The only thing that saved me–heh–was a heaping dose of Tintin and Capn Haddock… Cigars of the Pharaoh was an eye-opener, let me tell you!)

Oh my, I’m realizing now that I read a bunch of these Jack Chick comics, invariably while hanging out at other people’s houses. I think I had radar for anything in comic book format. I couldn’t get enough.

Anyway, what got me going on all of this was Valmiki’s Ramayana, a comical treatment of a Hindu text. The artistic style flashed me back to the bible comic (except for the blue skin, of course).

Google conquers the world…. RAWRRR!

Thought Lion might be interested in this. He’s got all sorts of wacky things going on that I sort of understand. Local Names is one of ’em. I’d implement that sucker, if I had a WordPress weblog in action. (I tried to get WordPress going; wasn’t pretty; so much for the five minute install.)

(Google thing via this charming nostradomification for 2005.)