Thursday, November 09, 2006
DLF, day one
The sessions which are really of interest to me at DLF are all happening today (sometimes two and three at a time), so my report on yesterday will be short.
There's a clear trend toward the development of large digital collections compiled from diverse sources. The Internet Archive presentation was talking about petabytes. There's starting to be talk, even within the digital library community, that perhaps more information is being archived than anyone could ever care about.
A presentation by Denise Troll Covey of Carnegie-Mellon on "Faculty Rights and Other Scholarly Communication Practices" was rather interesting. I was actually hoping to hear something about what the issues are in Open Access vs. traditional publishing, but what we got was the results of a survey of faculty members on their views, which was still pretty interesting. Quite a number of faculty who publish (at least among those surveyed, all at CMU) don't really care much about what rights they sign away, and aren't very clear on what Open Access is. (Here's a piece that I found on the subject with a very quick Web search.) A significant minority said that they'd just "self-archive" their papers (jargon for putting them up on their own or their department's websites) without caring what the publishing agreement said.
More tonight or tomorrow morning.
