Re: Olivia Judson

["Jim Law" <jamesblaw@gmail.com>]

On Mon, Jan 5, 2009 at 1:40 AM, Joseph J. Esposito 
<espositoj@gmail.com>wrote:

>But, Bernie, the researcher shouldn't have to do this.

Perhaps, if we were in a world where reasearchers are the ideal, or even a
customer.

>  The system should do it.

The system offering the file gives the file a perfectly 
understandable name - to that system. What is the incentive to 
name it something else?

> The mark of a well-designed car is that the owner/driver never, 
> ever opens the hood.

Car manufacturing would seem to be a broken system at the moment. 
Aside from that, most recent cars are not user servicable, even 
though the hood gives the appearance of opening.

My intention is not to be snarky. I have a problem with this idea 
that these problems are easily solved and that there are clear 
parties at fault. The evidence is that it is a tangled mess, with 
few incentives to change, many dis-incentives to change, and 
groups such as researchers who rely on outputs they have no 
control over.

Jim Law
LiquidPub Project
<http://project.liquidpub.org/>


> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "B.G. Sloan" <bgsloan2@yahoo.com>
> To: <liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu>
> Sent: Friday, January 02, 2009 12:37 PM
> Subject: Re: Olivia Judson
>
>> Olivia Judson's 12/16 NY Times blog seems rather uninformed.
>> Her big gripe seems to be the naming conventions used for PDF
>> files:
>>
>> "The journal articles arrive with file names like 456330a.pdf
>> or sd-article121.pdf. Keeping track of what these are, what I
>> have, where I've put them, which other papers are related to
>> them, is hopeless. Attempting to replicate my old way of doing
>> things, but on my computer - so, electronic versions of papers
>> in electronic folders - didn't work, I think because I couldn't
>> see what the papers actually were."
>>
>> As a number of commenters on her blog pointed out, she easily
>> could have renamed the PDF files as she downloaded them so that
>> the file names indicated author/title information. This would
>> have solved her problem of not knowing "what the papers
>> actually were".
>>
>> For someone with such great intellectual/scientific curiosity,
>> Judson seems surprisingly unimaginative when it comes to
>> scholarly communication.
>>
>> Bernie Sloan
>> Sora Associates
>> Bloomington, IN
>>
>
<...snip...>