huh... librarians as Elsevier's bouncers

Academic libraries, which in earlier days provided a service, have outsourced themselves as bouncers to publishers like Reed-Elsevier; their principal job, in the digital realm, is to prevent interested readers from gaining access to scholarly material.

Shirky responded to the Gorman post on the Britannica site. At first I was amazed at how much I agreed with him, until I got to the above quote near the end. My mind rebelled, but then I decided it deserved more thought. To a certain extent he's right. We dump money on publishers and then sign away a lot of rights in the licenses (we do this in life, too, particularly in the form of community association covenants, but that's another rant). We sign these licenses to provide access and are then responsible in part for preventing abuses and enforcing the licenses.

To be honest, I don't think we have real choices.

Of course to say that this is our "principal" job is messed up -- that goes without saying. In any case, "outsourced" is clearly the wrong word (maybe sold out?). It has never been our job to create the scholarly literature and selection decisions are ever more complicated.  ¶ 10:16 PM| |cites (technorati) |