Yes.
Weapon of Mass Instruction
Built from a welded frame atop a 1979 Ford Falcon, Raul Lemesoff drives around the streets of Buenos Aires distributing free books to anybody who wants to be assaulted with some serious learnin’.
(via: make / laughingsquid)
Presses and libraries work on different revenue models. While publishers are required to make enough money so that they balance their books at the end of the day, there is no income stream required so far in most library publishing. Libraries, in other words, don’t need to justify their costs in the same way. Also, because library publishing generally doesn’t provide the same set of services that most UPs do (editing, design, production, marketing, sales, and distribution to retailers) their overhead costs are lower. To put it simply: many library publishers are not yet really operating as businesses, but as part of a service organization. That means they can publish material (like research papers, technical reports, newly-launched journals) that is valuable scholarship without worrying about whether it has a market.
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NYU’s Monica McCormick in a wonderful discussion about the relationship between the university press, university library, and scholarly publications. “Are You a Press or Are You a Library? An Interview with NYU’s Monica McCormick” from The Chronicle (via thelifeguardlibrarian) |
Confirmed: The Internet Does Not Solve Global Inequality
If you live in a rich country, the Internet has probably changed the way you consume (and produce) information. But when you look at global-scale knowledge production, things are as they ever were: the Anglophone world dominates with the United States doing the lion’s share of academic and user-generated publishing.
Those are the messages of the Oxford Internet Institute’s new e-book, Geographies of the World’s Knowledge, from which the above graphics were drawn. The book’s authors, Corinne Flick of the Convoco Foundation and the Institute’s Mark Graham and Viktor Mayer-Schonberger, reluctantly conclude that the Internet has not delivered on the hopes that it would make knowledge “more accessible.”
“Many commentators speculated that [the Internet] would allow people outside of industrialised nations to gain access to all networked and codified knowledge, thus mitigating the traditionally concentrated nature of information production and consumption,” they write. “These early expectations remain largely unrealised.”
We’re not only talking about publishing in academic journals or Wikipedia. The researchers also sampled user-generated content on Google and found that rich countries, especially the United States, dominate the production of user content.The fact of the matter is that people without money can’t afford to get the education necessary to publish in academic journals, Internet-enabled or not. The other fact of the matter is that the vast majority of people in very poor countries don’t spend their time producing content for free. Hope as we might, the Internet isn’t a magic wand that makes the world more equal.
Read more. [Image: Oxford Internet Institute]
Best library professional conference slide show ever!
(via Getting the most out of an in-person professional conference… » Librarians Matter)
