George Plosker, The Information Industry Revolution: Implications for Librarians, Information Today, November/December 2003. Reflections on a panel discussion with Gary Price and Stephen Abram at the 2003 meeting of the Special Libraries Association. Excerpt: "Based on feedback at presentations and on-site visits to well-regarded special libraries, we became increasingly concerned that professionals and researchers sincerely believe that searching the Open Web, particularly Google, is 'good enough.' Groups with degrees from excellent schools, Ph.D.s in environments that included technical R&D, and even biomedical and pharmaceutical professionals were using Google, not recognizing the significant differences in authority and quality between the Open Web and premium subscription content typically provided by the information centers/libraries....Craig Silverstein, the director of technology at Google,...recently stated that Google is now getting 250 million search requests per day! According to Searcher editor Barbara Quint, Google gets more searches in 3 days than all libraries combined globally get in 1 year. This volume and popularity have made electronic access to information ubiquitous --a good thing. What remains to be done is to inform and educate users that there is more to the content world than the Open Web." (PS: So far.)
Posted by
Peter Suber at 11/13/2003 03:31:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
