January 2012
14 posts
The Poseidon Option: an alternative to paying for...
> From: Rick Anderson > For the Good of the Order, I’m going to <snip> right there so as not to > create a ten-foot-long email string. And hopefully I can respond > effectively by simply saying that I think you’re trying to fit too much > cargo into the very small boat of my argument. To (hopefully) clarify:
[for some background to this exchange, you can look at...
The Poseidon Option vs. PDA: Intro
I’ve been engaged in an extended conversation about the issue of paying only for usage as a strategy for serials subscriptions in library collections. Or, more accurately, there is a long discussion going in within the library community about this as a possibility and I, as a faculty member interested and researching libraries, have been able to take part in it. As I understand it, paying...
“when a copyright law is primarily backward looking the risk is greater that...”
– From Justice Breyer’s dissent of the Supreme Court verdict on Golan v. Holder. I tried to make this point about the SOPA/PIPA activism (and the ambiguous definitions of the public) a few weeks ago. It seems a good policy to have Congress be especially attuned to considering the needs of...
My Storify page on SOPA/Protect IP
“What the library won’t do, ever, is rat you out to the publisher. Guess what?...”
– The Library Loon on JSTOR’s new program for collecting user data allowing non-subscribing users to view 3 articles a week (image only, not full text) in exchange for a few nuggets of your personal information. The most helpful part of the post is where the Loon points out the things JSTOR is...
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“The overall critique of the education is its absorption within and continued...”
– As I read in other places about the glee the precariat (rebranded as “Generation Flux” by Fast Company) should feel at their new, flexible lives, critiques like Undressing the Academy (helpfully summarized by Jodi Dean above) appear in a clearer context. We are seeing (and really, have...
PIPA, SOPA and OPEN Act Quick Reference Guide
libraryadvocates:
In case you missed it, our Assoc. Director in the Office of Government Relations, Corey Williams created this helpful PIPA, SOPA and OPEN Act Quick Reference Guide (pdf). If you’re just looking for tl;dr - The ALA will continue to voice strong opposition to PIPA and SOPA, while further analysis of the OPEN Act is needed.
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The upside of total human annihilation for...
I would like to start a journey - towards thinking about the library of the future - with what might be a peculiar example. P.D. James begins her novel The Children of Men with an explanation of the tragedy that has befallen humankind in the late twentieth century: “For all our knowledge, our intelligence, our power, we can no longer do what the animals do without thought.” Namely, they are...
Kindle woes and digital storytelling
I just spent the last hour (off and on) chatting with various Amazon.com workers. On the one hand, I have a scathing post to someday write about the pigheaded policy they have on not providing access to notes and highlights for personal documents through any portal other than the device itself (you can’t see them online or in any of the app readers) for seemingly no technical reason than...
