Scholarship and Academic Libraries (and their kin) in the World of Google

First Monday ◽  
2006 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul N. Courant

The prospect of ubiquitous digitization will not change the fundamental relationships among scholarship, academic libraries, and publication. Collaboration across time and space, which is a principal mechanism of scholarship, ought to be enhanced. Reforms in copyright law will be required if the promise of digitization is to be realized; absent such reform, there is a serious risk that much academically valuable material will become invisible and unused. Ubiquitous digitization will change radically the economics that have supported university–based collections of published material. Scholars and scholarly institutions (including libraries and university presses) must assert vigorously claims of fair use and openness.

Author(s):  
Siva Vaidhyanathan

Copyright is the most pervasive cultural regulatory system in the world. In recent decades, copyright law has become stronger, covers more activities, restricts more uses, and lasts longer than ever before. Is the current system the best possible system for the current and future creative environment? And are the benefits of the copyright system justly distributed or do the wealthy and powerful continue to reap the bulk of the rewards for it at the expense of everyone else? “Copyright, commerce, and culture” considers what copyright does, and the four major limits of copyright—expiration, fair use or fair dealing, first sale, and the idea/expression dichotomy.


Author(s):  
Rick Anderson

The internet has transformed the ways in which scholars and scientists share their findings with each other and the world, creating a scholarly communication environment that is both radically more complex and tremendously more effective than was the case just a few years ago. “Scholarly communication” itself has become an umbrella term for the increasingly complex ecosystem of publications, platforms, and tools that scholars, scientists, and researchers use to share their work with each other and with other interested readers. Scholarly Communication: What Everyone Needs to Know® offers an accessible overview of the current landscape, examining the state of affairs in the worlds of journal and book publishing, copyright law, emerging access models, digital archiving, university presses, metadata, and much more. Anderson discusses many of the problems that arise due to conflicts between the various values and interests at play within these systems: values that include the public good, academic freedom, the advancement of science, and the efficient use of limited resources. The implications of these issues extend far beyond academia. Organized in an easy-to-use question-and-answer format, this book provides a lively and helpful summary of some of the most important issues and developments in the world of scholarly communication--a world that affects our everyday lives far more than we may realize.


2019 ◽  
Vol 29 (5) ◽  
pp. 135-150

The springboard for this essay is the author’s encounter with the feeling of horror and her attempts to understand what place horror has in philosophy. The inquiry relies upon Leonid Lipavsky’s “Investigation of Horror” and on various textual plunges into the fanged and clawed (and possibly noumenal) abyss of Nick Land’s work. Various experiences of horror are examined in order to build something of a typology, while also distilling the elements characteristic of the experience of horror in general. The essay’s overall hypothesis is that horror arises from a disruption of the usual ways of determining the boundaries between external things and the self, and this leads to a distinction between three subtypes of horror. In the first subtype, horror begins with the indeterminacy at the boundaries of things, a confrontation with something that defeats attempts to define it and thereby calls into question the definition of the self. In the second subtype, horror springs from the inability to determine one’s own boundaries, a process opposed by the crushing determinacy of the world. In the third subtype, horror unfolds by means of a substitution of one determinacy by another which is unexpected and ungrounded. In all three subtypes of horror, the disturbance of determinacy deprives the subject, the thinking entity, of its customary foundation for thought, and even of an explanation of how that foundation was lost; at times this can lead to impairment of the perception of time and space. Understood this way, horror comes within a hair’s breadth of madness - and may well cross over into it.


Author(s):  
Alex Perullo

This essay makes two points about digital collections. The first recognizes problems that emerge as archives present indigenous content online. In uploading indigenous songs, speeches, and documents, an archive allows that material to move from a local space with limited access to an international repository with many points of access. This chapter examines conflicts that can occur with this action, including those involving copyright law, fair use, and ethics. A second point of this chapter revolves around technology and repatriation. If repatriation means the return of material to a country of origin, then online archives never fully commit to this task. The material typically remains preserved on servers and in its original forms away from indigenous communities. Despite these ethical, legal, and technological concerns, archives should encourage the creation of digital collections as part of repatriation given the desire by many indigenous communities to preserve and promote their traditions.


2017 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 429-456
Author(s):  
Melissa Adler

Guided by Deleuze's taxonomic theory and practice and his concepts concerning the body, literature, territory and assemblage, this article examines library classification as a technique of discipline and bibliographic control. Locating books written by and about Deleuze reveals processes of discipline formation and the circulation of knowledge, and it troubles the principles upon which the classification is based. A Deleuzian critique presents the Library of Congress Classification as an abstract machine that diagrams knowledge in many academic libraries around the world.


2011 ◽  
Vol 38 ◽  
pp. 103-122 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jan Jansen

Literacy is a personally acquired skill, and the way it is taught to a person changes how that person thinks. Thanks to David Henige historians of Africa are much more aware of how literacy influences memory and historical imagination, and particularly how literacy systems introduce linear concepts of time and space. This essay will deal with these two aspects in relation to Africa's most famous epic: Sunjata. This epic has gained a major literary status worldwide—text editions are taught as part of undergraduate courses at universities all over the world—but there has been little extensive field research into the epic. The present essay focuses on an even less studied aspect of Sunjata, namely how Sunjata is experienced by local people.Central to my argument is an idea put forward by Peter Geschiere, who links the upheaval of autochthony claims in Africa (and beyond) to issues of citizenship and processes of exclusion. He analyzes these as the product of feelings of “belonging.” Geschiere argues that issues of belonging should be studied at a local level if we are to understand how individuals experience autochthony. Analytically, Geschiere proposes shifting away from ”identity” by drawing from Birgit Meyer's work ideas on the aesthetics of religious experience and emotion; Meyer's ideas are useful to explain “how some (religious) images can convince, while other do not.”


2020 ◽  
pp. 111-124
Author(s):  
Lea Shaver

This chapter analyzes the nuances of the copyright law book, such as translating a book into another language for academic use, adapting a famous book to make it more multicultural, or cheaply photocopying a book to give away to low-income families. Copyright exceptions are sometimes quite specific and clearly defined, while others are open-ended and subject to broad interpretation. It talks about the doctrine of “fair use” in America. Contrary to popular belief, the fact that something is widely done is no assurance that it is legally recognized as fair use. The chapter also provides a hypothetical situation in order to illustrate how the fair use doctrine might apply to a potential non-profit publishing project to address book hunger.


2021 ◽  
pp. 298-319
Author(s):  
Lidija Bajuk

Trying to interpret oneself and the other in the world, the traditional Man has established a real world and an otherworld. Specific herbal and animal attributes were ascribed to particular people who allegedly had the power to communicate between worldliness and transcendence. Also some human characteristics were linked with herbal and animal mediators. These attributes were folklorized as miraculous powers. Such supernatural beings from South Slavic traditional conceptionsof the world have been largely associated with the pre-Christian deities and their degradations, based on the observed real attributes of the vegetal and animal species. The interdisciplinary comparative way of treating South Slavic folklore real-unreal motifs through time and space in this article is its ethnological, animalistic and anthropological contribution.


2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael J Madison

More than 150 years into development of the doctrine of "fair use" in American copyright law, there is no end to legislative, judicial, and academic efforts to rationalize the doctrine. Its codification in the 1976 Copyright Act appears to have contributed to its fragmentation, rather than to its coherence. This Article suggests that fair use is neither badly conceived nor badly applied, but that it is too often badly understood. As did much of copyright law, fair use originated as a judicially-unacknowledged effort via the law to validate certain favored social practices and patterns. In the main, it has continued to be applied as such, though too often courts mask their implicit validation of these patterns in the now-conventional "case-by-case" application of the statutory fair use "factors" to the defendant's use of the copyrighted work in question. A more explicit acknowledgement of the role of these patterns in fair use analysis is consistent with fair use and copyright policy and tradition. Importantly, it helps to bridge the often-difficult conceptual gap between fair use claims asserted by individual defendants and the social implications of accepting or rejecting those claims. Finally, a pattern-oriented approach is normatively appropriate, when viewed in light of recent research by cognitive psychologists and other social scientists on patterns and creativity. In immediate terms, the approach should lead to a more consistent and predictable fair use jurisprudence. In the longer term, it should enhance the ability of copyright law to promote creative expression.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document