FOR all its woes, nowhere beats Silicon Valley for finding the next big thing in information technology. Unfortunately, the region’s entrepreneurs and engineers often fail to take into account how well their inventions mesh with social institutions. Vicky Reich and David Rosenthal, respectively a librarian and a researcher at Stanford University, are exceptions. Rather than invent a better mousetrap, they are using existing technology to imitate an important function of libraries. They want to ensure that readers will still be able to access electronic academic journals even centuries after they have been published.
Interesting: it’s not often we think of libraries as the logical progression of the old scriptoria . . .
Earlier today, I was browsing through my aggregator and found that Jenny was asking: Of course, the bigger question for me is how do libraries fit into a future where music is mostly digital and these types of services are the norm?
Is the LOCKSS project an answer? Will the music oligopoly let anyone but themselves keep archival copies? Are books — freely loaned at your local branch library — so different from music-bearing media? Yes, the duplication potential of the two forms is totally dissimilar. I still think that the solution to unlawful copying is a reasonable revenues model and sales of value-added stuff you can’t get elsewhere.