On 7/14/11 6:08 AM, Steve Rooke wrote:
It's a shame these, and other elderly scholarly works, can't just be released for the greater good, without all this red tape tying them down. I wonder how much better the world would advance if we could all go back to the days when we shared knowledge and skills freely between engineers before all the lawyers became involved. Does anyone else remember the hay days I wonder...
Oh yeah.. I remember how wonderful all that was..I think, overall, we're a lot better off today
Getting on the bus or driving for an hour or more to go to a library which happened to have a copy, and then taking notes by hand from a bound journal after waiting for it to be retrieved from the stacks.
Waiting for several weeks while an interlibrary loan was processed and they mailed it to you.
Paying a nickle or dime a page in the 1970s ($.50/page today) for a crummy "greasy" copy of a not very wonderful microfiche image.
Even as recently as the mid 90s, it was very difficult to get online access to most things. Search databases have been around for quite a while, and you could get the abstract sort of online, but then you'd have to request the article from someone like University Microfilms or hunt it down at a local library.
And I think it's wonderful that most universities put dissertations online now. The typical "Chapter 2" of a dissertation where the author reviews the literature and current state of knowledge is a gold mine for tracking down stuff, and for half way decent synthesis of a bunch of stuff together.
I will say that it was fun to get the postcards in the mail from all over the world asking for a reprint of your paper. Now, they just send you whining emails asking why the link on your website is so slow or broken. And, letters asking for permission to cite or copy a figure.. they're pretty rare. Instead, you find your words in someone else's work when googling, send them a nice note asking for attribution, and get an offended, "it was on the web, so I used it, whaddya gonna do'bout it.". I'm just codger-like this morning.. get offa my lawn you whippersnappers
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