Competency 3: Podcast

My choice for the 3rd Competency is The Right to Research: Student involvement in open access to scholarly communication from the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at Simmons University in Boston. This podcast is given by Gavin Baker (of SPARC Outreach and the founder of University of Florida's Students for Free Culture chapter), discussing his experiences with open access from an undergraduate student and beyond.

The most interesting thing about this podcast to me is his anecdote about reading an article in his campus newspaper about millions of dollars of cuts in the library budget for electronic journals. The cost of scholarly journals is exorbitant and most schools must be extremely choosy with license subscriptions, to the dismay and frustration of many professors, and residually, to students. I feel that it is important to increase awareness of the student impact of the burdens of monopolization of scholarly journal distribution.

This podcast was found by using the search string "library open access podcast" in the Google toolbar.

Competency 2: Related Blog

The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics immediately caught my attention upon reading and digesting its purpose statement, which urges readers to "imagine a world where anyone can instantly access all of the world's scholarly knowledge." Heather Morrison's blog captures news, research questions, and her own perspective on Open Access of scholarly content. IJPE is even more interesting to me knowing that even though Heather is writing from Canada (Vancouver, approximately) her experience is one singularly felt by librarians, professors, students, researchers, and universities all over the world. Consider the following passage from a May 2008 entry which discusses the benefit of free-to-read open access to businesses:

There are many flavors of open access; green, gold, public access, free to read, free to write. One thing that every aspect of open access has it common, is that it brings many benefits throughout our society, what the Budapest Open Access Initiative called "an unprecedented public good".

Consider how making research articles free to read for anyone with an internet connection, opens up new possibilities for the business community. The wealth of knowledge developed by our universities and researchers becomes freely available to everyone from the large corporation, to the budding entrepreneur. And why not? One of the arguments for open access is that taxpayers should have access to the results of research that they have funded. Businesses are taxpayers, too!

I decided to use the Imaginary Journal first of all because the whimsical name immediately caught my attention, but I admire the credentials behind its author, Heather Morrison, and it is certainly a nicely written, intelligent perspective on the issues. Another reason behind my choice is that IJPE, while making its focus on scholarly communications, also blends an understanding of impacts outside the scope of academic libraries, including businesses and special libraries. This is important because it demonstrates that the scholarly journal crisis is far-reaching and can have affects on industry research and advancement. I found IJPE by typing "scholarly knowledge blog" into the Google toolbar.

Competency 1: Introduction and Purpose

This blog has been created to satisfy the requirements of the library science course of "Information Storage and Retrieval" (ISAR) at Texas Woman's University (TWU) and will demonstrate successful completion of the ISAR Competencies.

Its author is a first-year MLS student with a tendency toward academic libraries. Her subject of interest is the scholarly journal crisis affecting the academic library community and scholarly communication in the information age.