Abundant information, libre open access and information literacy

[Heather Morrison <heatherm@eln.bc.ca>]

A recent thread on Liblicense raised the good point that access 
is not the only issue with electronic information.  We also need 
to figure out how to cope with the ever-growing abundancy of 
information!

Here are three coping strategies:  libre open access, open data 
and linking of open data, and information literacy.

Libre open access:  this is going beyond free-to-read, to 
free-to- reuse.  This allows for re-processing of published 
information, whether automated (data mining), or hand-created 
(e.g., new ways of hand-creating review articles incorporating - 
with appropriate attribution - the original articles). For an 
excellent summary of gratis and libre open access, see Peter 
Suber's article in the August 2008 SPARC Open Access Newsletter: 
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/08-02-08.htm#gratis-libre

For a brief but awesome webcast explaining why we need raw open 
data, and we need it now, see the TED talk by World Wide Web 
Inventor Tim Berners-Lee, The Next Web of Open, Linked Data, at: 
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/tim_berners_lee_on_the_next_web.html

Information Literacy - knowing when we need information, how to 
find, evaluate, and use it - is a key skill set for the knowledge 
age, for which there is a growing need.  This is one of the most 
basic areas of academic librarianship, however one that has 
nothing to do with licensing per se.  There is a very great deal 
of discussion, workshops, conference presentations, and courses 
on this topic in librarianship, but this discussion is generally 
outside the scope of Liblicense.

Any opinion expressed in this e-mail is that of the author alone, 
and does not represent the opinion or policy of BC Electronic 
Library Network or Simon Fraser University Library.

Heather G. Morrison
The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics
http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com