Take, for example, this Chronicle article on the increasing inability of libraries to subscribe to academic journals of their choice; due to increasing consolidation of these journals under larger publishing houses, it no longer makes economic sense to pick and choose the journals an institution wants as they must now accept a catch-all bundle that often contains much a trained bibliographer would rather not have. The result? Libraries cannot make sensible choices for their needs as these large 'block' offerings leave little room in the budget for individual choices. Even if a library carries the journal one wants to access, there is little guarantee that a physical copy will exist. Instead, one can access articles electronically, a marvel of efficiency and ecology so long as one possesses the necessary computer login required, a means not easily acquired by non-students in most university libraries. While I am not against unnecessary printing of materials, I am alarmed to see increasingly closed access to materials once open to those who walked in and knew how to use the card catalogue.
This is one reason I started this blog- I wanted to provide a venue where I could freely share ideas and my work with anyone who wanted to access it. As a historian, I feel that my work, which borrows from dozens of previous historians and hundreds of printed/written documents, can no more be sectioned off from the greater public than the Grand Canyon's views be hidden from plain sight. This is a personal belief and one that I know others do not necessarily share. That is why it was extremely refreshing to come across Marcus Boon's blog, In Praise of Copying. Here is an excerpt from a post on why he decided to upload his recent publication, of the same name as the blog, onto AAAAARG.COM:
"I don't think we should rely on Googlebooks making texts available online. We should do it ourselves, or through our publishers. The pdf functions more or less the same way as the book sitting in the bookstore or the library, and I'm happy that my writing will be accessable to those who have a somewhat marginal relationship to book buying, as I myself have had at different points in my life. Making pdfs of all of our work available online is an easy but powerful gesture towards an expanded public domain. And it may even support the economic needs of writers and publishers: James Boyle believes so. So do I."I fully agree. There is a need in the historical profession to reevaluate our contribution to the public domain. In the coming months/years there will be defining battles and conversations as to the new establishment of parameters of a fully digital IP existence. It would be all too easy, using this new IP potential, to wipe out the public domain that took shape and evolved during the physical print era. This is an issue I am currently grappling with now, both as a human infused with culture and as a historian constantly sampling from culture to create new interpretations of the past. History, I believe, demands that its practitioners make open and available their use of the past so that all may learn and share and become active members in the preservation of culture for future generations.
Marcus Boon's latest work, In Praise of Copying, is available for purchase at Powells.com or free pdf download through Harvard University Press here.
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