Saturday, May 26, 2007

Calling Theseus


Frank Paynter: Why should we think that they, the JSTOR management, will be interested in tearing down the ivy covered walls when their stakeholders are the ones most interested in creating a distinction between “University” and non-academic culture? It remains for us, the interested parties, to find a way through the maze and a way to straighten out these crooked paths.

Via Stephen Francoeur: "Although Google Scholar is very useful for identifying the title, author, and other bibliographic information associated with an article, very often one cannot use Google Scholar to access the full text of an article. This is because Google Scholar's results page may point to articles in restricted databases that require a subscription or payment to access the full text.

"For each article returned with the Google Scholar results, OpenURL Referrer will add a link to your local library's database, as shown in the picture below. If your library has access to the article, the link will bring you to a page from which you can access the article. These links are similar to the "Institutional Access" links recently introduced by Google. However, OpenURL Referrer can produce links for any public or instututional library that supports OpenURL, not just the ones supported by Google."

AKMA: Were I not loath to compare my friend to a former B-movie actor, I might wish that Tom exhorted his interlocutor, “Mr. Heterick, tear down these firewalls!”

Maxine Clarke: Microsoft's scholarly search engine, Live Search Academic, has been available in a beta (trial) version for more than a year. Launched 18 months after Google Scholar, it has a lot of catching up to do in order to make researchers aware of it and want to use it in preference to other search services.

Update: I don't know exactly what to make of Al Gore, but I believe that the labyrinthine knot of reference is very much at the heart of what he's talking about here:
Gore taps James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, political theory, new technology, and cognitive and developmental psychology to blame the "withdrawal of reason from the public sphere" on profit-crazed disruptions of what should be the mutually reinforcing openness of free markets and democratic communication. Truthout

2 Comments:

Blogger jonhusband said...

He notes that Internet openness is reviving the mental stimulation of reading and writing, and its interactivity is reviving Revolutionary-era pamphleteering, generating new "committees of correspondence" and strengthening a "meritocracy of ideas" instead of letting conglomerates corner the "marketplace of ideas."

I suppose the problem thecorporations and Bushies pervceive is that in the longer-term knowledge may still be power, or at least more powerful than propaganda. So, they seek to close off access to any knowledge other than what they say should be knowledge, locking up that marketplace of ideas

5/27/2007 3:03 AM  
Blogger Tom Matrullo said...

This morning's newspaper offers nothing about the world, or even about what might be going on in the local area. But it has an entire themed section relating every article to Pirates of the Caribbean.

The deepest section: The TV listings.

5/27/2007 9:09 AM  

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