Re: Napster, Planned Obsolescence & Control

[garri002@mc.duke.edu]

I was pleased to see a fellow health sciences librarian exhort the
potential of Napster and gnutella.  Dan Chudnov at Yale's Cushing-Whitney
Medical Library, an advocate of open source for libraries, advances the
notion of "docster".  A Napster-like document delivery system, docster
could be a conduit through which libraries connect individual researchers
to digital documents.  Libraries could reduce the highly redundant and
inefficient work of copying and recopying articles each time they're
requested, and researchers could gain much quicker access to what they
need.

Check out Dan's thought piece on docster at
http://www.oss4lib.org/readings/docster.php

Cheers,

--SG

***********************************************************
Scott Garrison, M.L.S.
Assistant Head, Information Technology Services
Duke University Medical Center Library
DUMC 3702 * Durham, NC 27710 USA
vox:(919)660.1197 * fax:(919)681.7599
email:garri002@mc.duke.edu
URL:http://www.mc.duke.edu/mclibrary/
************************************************************

David Goodman <dgoodman@phoenix.Princeton.EDU> on 06/04/2000 03:33:29 PM

 To:      liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu                         
 cc:                                                          
 Subject: Re: Napster, Planned Obsolescence & Control         

Another way is to drastically lower the cost of production enough to
permit free distribution. The scholarly journal literature would seem an
obvious place to start, and all of us on this list are undoubtedly
familiar with the proposals by Ginsparg and others. Perhaps the
development of this technology will be the decisive factor so long
anticipated.

I strongly disapprove of the use of such technology to obtain illegal
access to publications of any sort. I strongly advocate the use of this
technology to facilitate the production and distribution of publications
that do not need such protection.

David Goodman, Princeton University
Biology Library
dgoodman@princeton.edu
609-258-3235