From Conversations to Things

By Barbara Fister. Last week I was thinking about how librarians think of knowledge as a collection of things and faculty in the disciplines think about it as a conversation among people. This morning I realized, thinking about the Georgia State University e-reserves lawsuit and the ways nations are negotiating the limits and latitudes of fair use in the classroom, that publishers, like librarians, tend to think of scholarship in terms of things. Librarians do it because we have had to take care of things and provide access to them. Publishers do it because the sale of things (or the licensing of things) is how they pay their bills and, in some cases, make their profits. Read more...