RE: Abundant information, libre open access and information literacy

["Sally Morris \(Morris Associates\)" <sally@morris-assocs.demon.co.uk>]

Heather, you have missed one point that I tried to make quite 
carefully. 'Free to Reuse' is NOT what is needed for text mining, 
etc - in fact such content doesn't even need to be free to 
access. What it does need, though, is rigorous structuring and 
adherence to standards (for both text and data)

Sally Morris
Email: sally@morris-assocs.demon.co.uk

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
[mailto:owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu] On Behalf Of Heather Morrison
Sent: 26 March 2009 22:32
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: Abundant information, libre open access and information literacy

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