#LinkRot Keynote - Jonathan Zittrain (@zittrain)
I have seen Prof. Zittrain speak before, probably six years ago at Duke. In fact, I think his talk made me begin thinking about pursuing information science and law as a vocation. So here I am, getting ready to graduate with the JD / MSIS IN May. On to notes and impressions from the Zittrain keynote,
We are lucky to be at this point with link rot. We can actually solve these problems, and soon.
Is there anything really wrong with the library-as-fortress mentality? Well, no. But libraries must be more than mere archives, obviously.
But mere conduit? Not good enough either.
So, we direct patrons to resources in their interest. Our principles and practices can be a little more explicit than, say, a search algorithm's.
What is the core purpose of the law library's enterprise and legal scholarship:
- skill development
- access to world's information
- free dissemination of what we know
- develop free information platform
Elsevier has a 40% profit margin. So what are the vendors adding?
There really is a "spam" or SEO of academic journals. ISI, impact factor. Publishing yourself is giving up. But it makes sense.
Free distrubution: But, locate things worth finding
(H2O - casebook generation and flexibility. An interesting project I hadn't heard about.)
Integrity of the information is the key problem. Is what we're reading really what was written.
There is a great deal of potential for Perma.cc beyond merely warehousing sources, though I'd say the primary mission is tough enough, especially when we're talking about institutional buy-in.
