Taking a moment here, before the press of exams consumes all of my energy, to talk about some things that are on my mind. First, the fabulous Robert Darnton has an op-ed in Thurday's Times on the possibility of a digital library better than google's. Impossible you say? I know it's hard to believe, given how absolutely outstanding book.google is. The only way it could be better -- at least for my research -- is if they put some more of the pre-Civil War pamphlet literature on-line.
Darnton has this suggestion, which I'm guessing won't be followed:
Perhaps Google itself could be enlisted to the cause of the digital public library. It has scanned about 15 million books; two million of that total are in the public domain and could be turned over to the library as the foundation of its collection. The company would lose nothing by this generosity, and might win admiration for its good deed.
Why am I guessing it won't be followed? Because I think the public domain material generates a lot of traffic for google and they won't want to give that up.
Second topic, been meaning to write about this for a while. Here's the best article I've read in legal history in a long time.
Third topic, I see from James Donovan and Carol Watson's recent article, "Citation Advantage of Open Access Legal Scholarship" (via TaxProf) that we have some empirical evidence that open source articles are more likely to be cited than those that are behind a gate. No surprise here -- but very important. Pretty interesting experient they ran -- looking at citations to articles in the journals published by the University of Georgia's law school since 1990 and comparing the citations to the pieces available in full text on the net without a gate to those that gated.
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