Dear All
I would like to add Information Research Watch International (IRWI) to
Leonard Will's example of LISA as available at Cilip's Info Centre. IRWI is
the most comprehensive resource of current and ongoing LIS research in the
world. It comes out in hardcopy 6 times a year, and is accessible online at
csa.com. At present the database covers circa 10000 research records,
increasing by about 500 per year. It is a commercial enterprise like LISA,
and produced on a shoestring budget. It covers as many UK based LIS research
projects as is possible for one person to trace, both academic and
commercial, which range from 1980 to the present day. Until 2000 the product
was titled CRLIS (Current Research in Library & Information Science), and
for some time the British Library provided a small grant for its production.
An entry covers a short abstract, title, index terms, references, status and
contact details, so that LIS researchers and others can contact researchers
throughout UK and indeed throughout the world for further information about
their research. Could the RLN somehow make use of this readymade resource
for LIS research information? The combination of IRWI as a reporter of
current and ongoing research and LISA as a reporter of published research
(often first recorded in IRWI) could be a powerful tool for LIS researchers.
Pirkko Elliott, MPhil, BA, MCLIP, Editor, IRWI
P.S. I tried to send this messge before and it got blocked, and I have no
idea why.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Leonard Will" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Sunday, August 08, 2004 12:40 PM
Subject: Re: Announcement from The British Library
In message <memo.20040802160400.2096D@aovq45> on Mon, 2 Aug 2004, Alan
Pritchard <[log in to unmask]> wrote
>> £3 million national framework for UK research information announced
>>
>> Research Libraries Network promises UK researchers 'joined-up' services
>
><fx: leaps on hobbyhorse>
>Having looked at the information on this, although it talks about 'the
>information needs of researchers', it does seem exclusively concerned
>with corporate researchers, i.e. researchers who are active members of
>universities.
Alan and others -
I was interested to see this message, as I share your concerns. Now that
so much information is available electronically, it is extremely
frustrating to find that it is restricted to those in academic
institutions which pay for site licences and that there is no reasonable
means of access for individual researchers who may require access just
for a short time while working on a specific project.
Many databases are available free to those who are willing and able to
travel to the BL in London, but their licence terms exclude access from
anywhere except the BL reading rooms. This does seem discriminatory, and
the travel cost we have to pay to use these services benefits only the
railway companies, besides our contributing to the congestion in the
reading rooms. Even when we go there, they block us from emailing search
results to ourselves, so that we are reduced to making notes with pencil
and paper!
As this is a CILIP list, another specific example is that we can search
LISA if we visit CILIP, but not remotely. They offer to do searches for
us, using staff time which we pay for in our subscriptions, though we
could perfectly well do them for ourselves; this would not only be
cheaper but more effective, as it would allow interaction and
modification of searches according to what is found.
Presumably most of these problems arise from commercial and licensing
considerations, but I wish that some alternative models might be found.
Would it cost CILIP a lot more to pay for a LISA licence that gave
remote access to all its members, for example? Could the BL negotiate a
deal that gave remote access to electronic databases to its ticket
holders - if necessary for a modest fee, perhaps with different rates
depending on usage, or pay-as-you-go?
Leonard Will
--
Willpower Information (Partners: Dr Leonard D Will, Sheena E Will)
Information Management Consultants Tel: +44 (0)20 8372 0092
27 Calshot Way, Enfield, Middlesex EN2 7BQ, UK. Fax: +44 (0)870 051 7276
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