I am grateful to Edmund at the Arcadia Project Blog for pointing out an excellent article by Daniel Goldstein challenging the commercialisation of libraries: see
Goldstein argues that libraries charge for more services than they used to and that this affects their relationship with their users. The article concerns the use of third party journals providers who sell bulk packages of journals without allowing librarians to select the titles within the package. Although it is at times hard to follow his logic, Goldstein argues that this is leading to a loss of specialist knowledge amongst staff and fewer subject librarians. This article raises many of the themes covered in Martyn Everett's talk on copyright given at the Association of Independent Librarians' conference last week.
As a wannabe author facing issues of selecting illustrations for biography of Dionysius Lardner I will have to grapple with these issues soon. If Michael Popham was surprised that Google books subsidiaries could charge copyright fees on republished works when they had done little more than photocopy them I would contend that it is equally surprising that Libraries charge authors large digital rights fees to obtain images from copies of books of which those libraries are only the custodians, and have forced users to use their expensive digital services departments to take images when effectively any photocopier might do the job perfectly adequately in many instances.
Goldstein argues that libraries charge for more services than they used to and that this affects their relationship with their users. The article concerns the use of third party journals providers who sell bulk packages of journals without allowing librarians to select the titles within the package. Although it is at times hard to follow his logic, Goldstein argues that this is leading to a loss of specialist knowledge amongst staff and fewer subject librarians. This article raises many of the themes covered in Martyn Everett's talk on copyright given at the Association of Independent Librarians' conference last week.
As a wannabe author facing issues of selecting illustrations for biography of Dionysius Lardner I will have to grapple with these issues soon. If Michael Popham was surprised that Google books subsidiaries could charge copyright fees on republished works when they had done little more than photocopy them I would contend that it is equally surprising that Libraries charge authors large digital rights fees to obtain images from copies of books of which those libraries are only the custodians, and have forced users to use their expensive digital services departments to take images when effectively any photocopier might do the job perfectly adequately in many instances.
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