Recently I’ve been doing research. Okay… for the past four years I’ve been doing research of one form or another. What I keep coming back to is the absurdity of unavailable information. When I’m doing research there is a blend of old and new information I might want to look at. The internet has provided the opportunity to quickly research and review information for a wide variety of purposes and students have certainly benefitted from this technology. What is disappointing is when something gets between the student and their ability to learn.
There are often different colleges and sometimes those colleges have different libraries. Sometimes those libraries typically cater to a certain type of student (law or medicine come to mind) and generally don’t hear from the larger university system they are very much a part of. Earlier this year I was doing some research that involved copyright law. I was looking for a certain book and found it in the library system and tried to access it: but there was no clickable link even though the page indicated that I have the ability to download the book. What did I do? I called the library. It turns out that this particular book was in the law library and I wouldn’t be able to access it via the web (even while on campus) but would have to use one of the computers in the law library to access the content. I asked them to check on something else for me and while on hold I did some quick browsing on the internet. Guess what I found?
Now, before the claims of infringement come flooding in the book I was looking for was published prior to 1900 and firmly in the public domain. A certain search engine giant has been scanning public domain works and providing them for download to the internet community. Before I was taken off hold with the law library I had solved my own problem and found the book by other legal means. Students are not always so lucky, however. Sometimes you come across an “out-of-print” book that is still under copyright (I know I certainly have). You call the publisher but they’re not interested in helping. You search libraries but the work is too obscure. You look to purchase used copies and almost faint when you see the price tag (the one I was looking for was never less than $450). What are you to do? Let me just say this now: “out-of-print” doesn’t make sense in a digital world. Hopefully the future brings intelligent change.