Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Tuesday, May 09, 2006

OA for archival institutions

Peter Van Garderen, Web 2.0 and Archival Institutions, Archivemati.ca, May 8th, 2006. Excerpt:

I’ve been preparing my presentation for some upcoming conferences in Summer 2006 (IS&T Archiving, Association of Canadian Archivists, Society of American Archivists). I’m going to be talking about Web 2.0 as a set of enabling technologies and practices that can enhance the quality of archives access systems.

Open content and open access refer to the elimination of restrictions on the re-use of digital information through more flexible licensing practices such as those provided through Creative Commons licenses....Although there are still many tough legal, business, and professional obstacles to clear, the increased adoptation of open content licensing can help archival institutions to enrich the content and contextual information of their own collections while ‘letting a million flowers bloom’ and enriching the ‘long tail’ of the Web with open access to the wealth of information and cultural treasures that are preserved in archival collections.