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Info Commons - Saturday - Session II

Libraries and Information Commons Workshop

Saturday

Panel 2: Creation and Preservation of the Commons
Tom Moritz -- American Museum of Natural History
"A Vision of the Biodiversity Commons"
There is ONE commons that have a variety of dimensions (physical, digital, ethical, managerial)
"The mission of a park ranger and the mission of a librarian is the same"

Jefferson (1807): "The field of knowledge is the common property of all mankind"

The potential commons is huge

Access to scientific publications beyond the U.S./Europe -- very problematic
Axes of access: open to close, public to private

Modalities of constraint on open access
Market
Law
Norms
Architecture/code/tech

Strategic decisions about data, information, knowledge and technology must be conscious

Is information free? No

Peter Hirtle -- Cornell University
"Open Archives, Self-Archiving and Trusted Archives"

Crisis in Scholarly Communication
Rising price of commercial publications
High cost of titles
Scale
Need to buy our own product

Proposed Solutions
Budapest Open Archives Initiatives
- For peer-reviewed journals
- Two approaches:
Self-archiving
Open-access journals
- People are free to read, print & use
Example: PLoS, PubMed Central (not free to produce)
Problems: Author-pays model could cost some universities more, which could impact academic freedom

Institutional Repositories
- Universities become publishers
- Comprehensive
More than peer-reviewed
Covers all subjects
- Compatible with self-archiving
Examples: DSpace, FEDORA
Problems: DSpace - more hype than follow-through on the long-term access end; not a lot of material in DSpace - for DSPACE and FEDORA, issues of faculty mistrust

Disciplinary archives
_ Repository for one field
Examples: ArXiv in physics -- arXiv.org e-Print archive
- Selective, controlled
- Open Archives Intiative -- metadata harvesting protocol for archiving

What's in a Name?
Archive vs. Archives
Characteristics of archives:
Trusted 3rd party
Ensures authenticity, integrity, reliability of information
Open Archival Information System (OAIS) Reference Model, Trusted Digital Repositories
OAIS-complaint institutional, disciplinary repositories?

Summary
Open access is about immediate access, not archival access
Self-archiving = self-publishing
Trusted 3rd parties are needed
Long term costs of archiving are unknown


Mary Kadera -- PBS
Commons and public broadcasting
Public broadcasting was to be the commons antidote for the "vast wasteland"
PBS is a cooperative at the national end, not a "network"
Physical commons - local public broadcasting stations
Organizationally -- changes to traditional models of interaction/input from the public
Transition to digital broadcast (partially funded mandate from Congress to move to digital spectrum by May 2003)
Proliferation of cable and satellite
The Internet: benefits and challenges - has along for more interaction with the public and more opportunities for discourse, but it is NOT local

Barriers to public broadcasting -- chilling effects of public complaints regarding decency, bias -- fairness & balance, etc.

How do publicly funding institutions continue their missions and not be used as partisan petards?

Education, archives and public broadcasting: lack of human support for the technology

Open source solutions and interoperability solutions in schools; going beyond e-textbooks; economic structures and partnerships to help with the resource issues

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» ALA-OITP Workshop on the Information Commons from The Digital Librarian
Trip Report - Meeting on the Information Commons, at the Cerritos Public Library This past week I attended a workshop on the Information Commons, sponsored and paid for by ALA's Office of Information Technology Policy (OITP). This was an invited... [Read More]