Information Access on the Wide Open Web, an interview with RLG President and CEO James Michalko in the current issue of Ubiquity, the ACM IT Magazine. Why is a magazine for professional computer scientists interviewing the head of a professional association of research libraries? Quoting Michalko: "I think the whole set of cultural memory institutions represents an opportunity for the CS community. They'd be very willing partners. They've got complicated problems that make some of the industrial applications that people are working on seem pretty easy....[For example] we hired a young woman out of industry when the dot-com bubble burst. We were talking in a meeting about recasting our big Union Catalog and somewhere about 90 minutes into the meeting, she said, 'I'm sorry to interrupt, but I need to understand this. You mean you've got nearly 700 gigabytes of descriptive data that's all been structured in exactly the same way?' We said, 'Well, yes, that's what a library does.' And she said, 'I've never heard of such a thing. You could do some really interesting forms of retrieval and presentation.' She became very excited about what you could do with that data." (Thanks to Shelflife.)
Posted by
Peter Suber at 3/06/2003 04:35:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
