[PLUG] The end of libraries

[Rich Shepard]

On Thu, 13 Nov 2014, Keith Lofstrom wrote:

> For now, Oregon Health Sciences University, Washington State, and the
> University of Washington still permit visitors access to their online
> collections, but this is expensive and could disappear. Worse, common-mode
> information system vulnerabilities at the big four could wipe out much of
> the academic corpus. If the lights are blinking on a backup drive during a
> restore, is that actually a restore, or an erasure?

Keith,

   FWIW, the Multnomah County Library has an outstanding interlibrary loan
system that quickly finds research journal articles as PDF files and
provides them free of charge. Many of these I can download directly from
journals available in JSTOR and other databases to which the library
subscribes. I believe that even Washington County residents can use MCL.

   My interests are not physics or computers, but aquatic ecology,
statistics, hydrology, and related subjects. Many of the journals in these
fields (and in the medical/health fields) have to provide free access to
published articles within a short time of coming out on paper. That's a
requirement of the federal grant research funding. Then there are on-line
journals such as PLoS, Public Library of Science, that publish articles and
raw data under the Creative Commons license.

> Yes, electronic journals are convenient. But copies should be widely
> distibuted: purchase the content once, watermarked perhaps, and keep a
> copy on your local institutional hardware, forever.

   What's worse, IMNSHO, is that paper has so much greater longevity than the
ever-changing digital storage media and formats. Sure, paper can get soaked
with water or burned, but the same fates can occur to digital storage media.
Paper's good, but control of the printed scientific output by a few
publishers who charge obscene subscription and reprint rates for research
results funded by tax dollars is just plain wrong.

Rich