Steve Hitchock thinks:
> WebWhacker and PDF technology notwithstanding, I do hope there aren't many
> librarians considering this approach. While I can understand the
> motivations, which are based on familiar journal patterns established in the
> print age, the dynamics of online information through the Web will be quite
> different.
I secod that opinion.
> Our experience with publishing project papers on the Web is that we have
> declined requests to mirror these papers simply because we intend to make
> periodic updates and we didn't want to propagate obsolete versions.
That is what mirroring (as supposed to copying) is supposed to avoid,
In theory it can never be perfect since the flow of data occurs
over time, but it turns out to work well for all practical purposes.
> This is not to say that mirrors have no function or to deny the benefits of
> authorised mirror sites,
From my experience of mirroring NetEc, there must be a strong spirit
of collaboration between mirroring sites to get entire services
mirrored. A service is more then just the pages, it can contain
search engines, a coherent presentation of access stats etc.
> Nor does this response resolve the very real problem of archiving in
> perpetuity the new digital materials - it probably adds to the problem - but
> it will be better to sort this problem than to bypass it.
I think we will have to get accustomed to the fact that things on
the internet are only available as long as the holder of write access
to the disk will allow. The uncertainties over copyright adds to the
instablity of the environment.
In Economics, we see the birth of the postprint. A quite famous
professor has made available over 20 PDF papers, most of them from
the top journals (in versions immediately before the formal
publication), on his homepage. If the publishers find out,
he may be in for some trouble. And it would be worse if there were
a bunch of libraries that copied the PDF in the meantime :-)
Cheers,
Thomas Krichel mailto:[log in to unmask]
http://www.surrey.ac.uk/Economics/tkrichel
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