On Wed, Jan 14, 2009 at 12:21 AM, David Goodman <dgoodma...@gmail.com> wrote:
<snip a lot of details of journal/database licensing for libraries, which are consistent with my experience in the field> > There is an alternate pathway. WPedians should find out what databases > their local public library already subscribes to,and use them. They > should then urge their public libraries to subscribe to what they > need. The subscription rates for public libraries for limited subsets > of JSTOR are not very high, but few public libraries subscribe, as > they do not see a demand. Any library would rather spend its money on > what its patrons will actually use, and ask for. I agree that this is by far the most practical way to go. Journal & database licensing is not too different from software licensing... asking to buy a license for JSTOR for all Wikipedia editors is a lot like asking to buy a group license for Microsoft Word for all Wikipedia editors. Expensive, impractical, distinctly non-free, and of questionable benefit for many. Taking full advantage of your public library, however, is precisely what they are there for. Those within range of a good university can typically be a "walk-in" patron and use their resources on-site, as well. Institutionally, I think our collective energies would be better spent supporting the open access movement, free reference databases, efforts to freely digitize public domain materials, etc. Slowly but surely we can chip away at closed scholarship... The problem of backing up our articles with solid scholarship is a big one, but not one that simple access to any particular database solves. For one thing, there's hundreds on hundreds of databases (which simply point to the literature) out there, and thousands and thousands of journals (which publish the literature) that are indexed by them. For another thing, as an encyclopedia, we're a tertiary source: what we really need access to are the best of the secondary sources out there, the specialty encyclopedias and guides and handbooks that summarize information, not (in most cases) the original journal literature.* It's true that wider access for some full-text databases would be very helpful: particularly news and business databases, perhaps, that would include biographies for many of our BLPs. But fortunately these are the databases most likely to be available in public library settings, and unfortunately for everyone a lot of the very best reference sources are still in print. -- phoebe * I say this as someone who has spent a lot of time trying to reference Wikipedia articles, on all sorts of topics, using the full arsenal of a good university library. _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
