Friday, October 08, 2010

Age of big access & Liberation bibliography

It's not specifically information literacy, but I just read a post on the ACRL blog by Iris Jastram, expressing deep concern about what she calls "The age of big access" (exploitation by big information providers/publishers like OCLC and EBSCO, rather than Google), which led me in turn to a column by Barbara Fister, in which she argues against the current focus on providing access to material (rather than pursuing other core goals and values), and argues that academic librarians should not "continue to pour our resources into renting access and into training students on how to pass courses using temporary access to information that will not be available to them when they graduate [...]".
Fister, B. (2010) "Liberation bibliography: trumping ownership with open access: a manifesto." Library Journal, (7) 1 April.
Photo by Sheila Webber: Trip on the Vltava, Prague, September 2010.

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