 

Publications and Research

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

9-2011

Abstract

The widespread appearance of computers in libraries during the early 1990s elicited a debate among those who welcomed new technologies and those who perceived such changes as a threat to the traditional role of academic libraries and the values of liberal education. At the same time, increasing consolidation of major media channels—including sources of scholarly communication—has allowed a small number of corporations to control distribution and access to the materials libraries offer, through tools such as licensing fees, copyright restrictions, and digital rights management. In response to these barriers, librarians and educators have embraced open access publishing and Creative Commons licensing as viable alternatives. Some go further in their struggle to separate content from its proprietors, through channels such as torrent sites that undermine conventional notions of ownership. This paper will argue that restricting information and denying access to resources without addressing the systemic failure of affordable access weakens critical thinking and threatens the mission of liberal education. By pursuing new models for scholarly communication and resource sharing, libraries can both reassert control over their collections and help support the mission of liberal education.

Comments

This work was originally pubilshed in Library Philosophy and Practice, available at http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/libphilprac/557/.

Share

COinS
 
 

To view the content in your browser, please download Adobe Reader or, alternately,
you may Download the file to your hard drive.

NOTE: The latest versions of Adobe Reader do not support viewing PDF files within Firefox on Mac OS and if you are using a modern (Intel) Mac, there is no official plugin for viewing PDF files within the browser window.

 
 
 
https://academicworks.cuny.edu/hc_pubs/76/
academicworks.cuny.edu
crawl=CC-MAIN-2020-45
36316
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:E344ET36N5RSSJPZU4IDBWR6XRR5GPR5
<urn:uuid:c2fb2522-b184-4717-a464-02f40a8b50fb>
2020-10-30T23:17:49Z
13.57.92.51
text/html
sha1:RCIXNJSLPSIFZQH5FZMKDOEHMFLGAWXQ
<urn:uuid:85676f27-615d-4d55-972f-7d79e135d42e>
https://academicworks.cuny.edu/hc_pubs/76/
response
<urn:uuid:24697eea-1094-4cdc-91ae-ec8ba057caed>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2020-45
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for October 2020
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-67-67-244.ec2.internal
software: Apache Nutch 1.17 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.2-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: http://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/