Category: access

you know what I think about this…

Posted on by jessamyn
The more documents are classified by our own government, the less The People have access to the information they need in order to be part of a functioning democracy. No wonder Bush & Co. want to replace the National Archivist with one of their own.

The Information Security Oversight Office (ISOO), a division of the National Archives, has released its report for fiscal year 2003, and it confirms what we’ve suspected: The government is classifying information at a staggering, sharply increasing rate. During the year, 14,228,020 documents were classified. This is an increase of 25% over last year.

letter writing for prisoners

Posted on by jessamyn
Karen Schneider and others have launched a NLW campaign to assist the imprisoned Cuban dissidents. This is one of the first approaches to this issue that I have seen that focuses on the plight of the prisoners themselves and doesn’t make their librarianness [or lack thereof] the central issue. You can work on this project and not have to listen to a lot of polemic vitriol against ALA, you can just help. If you want to work for reform within the US Government and the Helms-Burton Act, this may not be for you. Check out their Freadom Project. Nice going, team.

why open access is good for libraries

Posted on by jessamyn
The Open Access glossary page leads to all sorts of wonderful other pages including this one: “The (Refereed) Literature-Liberation Movement” with a longer article linked at the bottom “For Whom the Gate Tolls? How and Why to Free the Refereed Research Literature
Online Through Author/Institution Self-Archiving, Now” The implications for libraries and librarians are obvious. Can anyone say “serials crisis”?

an old chestnut from Bruce Sterling

Posted on by jessamyn
Speaking of free-as-knowledge [nod to Melvil Dewey], here is an old speech by Bruce Sterling about the intersection of money and the public good, and the benefits of Deep Archiving, when he spoke to LITA in 1992.

People talk a lot about the power and glory of specialized knowledge and technical expertise. Knowledge is power — but if so, why aren’t knowledgeable people in power? And it’s true there’s a Library of Congress. But how many librarians are there in Congress?