Andrew Lentvorski wrote:
Gus Wirth wrote:
My subscription costs me $99/year. This is a magazine for computing
academics so they aren't into the "educating the general public
cheaply" approach. Putting the stuff online for free would destroy the
print magazine.
Which I might feel some sympathy for if they actually paid for the
content or paid the reviewers of the content.
In addition, if that is really their rationale, they should open up the
archives after a year or so.
I agree.
What they are really protecting is their rather expensive access package
that they sell to universities, whose staff provide the articles *in the
first place*.
In addition, I'm really starting to worry about the fact that the
*libraries* are no longer storing all of this kind of information (it's
all off-site, online access). If someone decided to outlaw the ACM, it
would only have to seize their servers and backup tapes and the ACM
effectively *disappears* since libraries no longer have independent copies.
It costs a lot of money (and, not to mention, requires a lot of space)
to store and preserve dead tree media. While I can understand (and from
a practical standpoint, agree with) why the libraries are doing this, I
agree with you more:
It seems that we have forgotten the lesson of Alexandria.
If libraries are about preserving information for everyone's benefit,
then hosting content off-site in electronic archives you don't own is a
bad idea, and thoroughly contradictive to the general idea of what a
library is all about in the first place.
-kelsey
--
[email protected]
http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
