Charles Forrest, Martin Halbert: A Field Guide to the Information Commons (2009)

Our sources of information, and the practices we use to find it, are in a period of rapid flux. Libraries must respond by selecting, acquiring, and making accessible a host of new information resources, developing innovative services, and building different types of spaces to support changing user behaviors and patterns of learning. A Field Guide to the Information Commons describes an emerging library service model that embodies all three spheres of response: new information resources, collaborative service programs, and redesigned staff and user spaces.

Technology has enabled new forms of information-seeking behavior and scholarship, causing a renovation of libraries that revisits the idea of the “commons”—a public place that is free to be used by everyone. A Field Guide to the Information Commons describes the emergence, growth, and adoption of the concept of the information commons in libraries. This book includes a variety of contributed articles, and descriptive, structured entries for various information commons in libraries across the country and around the world.

Published by Scarecrow Press, Feb 2009
ISBN: 0-8108-6100-3, 978-0-8108-6100-8
214 pages

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Charlotte Hess, Elinor Ostrom (eds.): Understanding Knowledge as a Commons: From Theory to Practice (2006)

“Knowledge in digital form offers unprecedented access to information through the Internet but at the same time is subject to ever-greater restrictions through intellectual property legislation, overpatenting, licensing, overpricing, and lack of preservation. Looking at knowledge as a commons—as a shared resource—allows us to understand both its limitless possibilities and what threatens it. In Understanding Knowledge as a Commons, experts from a range of disciplines discuss the knowledge commons in the digital era—how to conceptualize it, protect it, and build it.

Contributors consider the concept of the commons historically and offer an analytical framework for understanding knowledge as a shared social-ecological system. They look at ways to guard against enclosure of the knowledge commons, considering, among other topics, the role of research libraries, the advantages of making scholarly material available outside the academy, and the problem of disappearing Web pages. They discuss the role of intellectual property in a new knowledge commons, the open access movement (including possible funding models for scholarly publications), the development of associational commons, the application of a free/open source framework to scientific knowledge, and the effect on scholarly communication of collaborative communities within academia, and offer a case study of EconPort, an open access, open source digital library for students and researchers in microeconomics. The essays clarify critical issues that arise within these new types of commons—and offer guideposts for future theory and practice.”

Contributors: David Bollier, James Boyle, James C. Cox, Shubha Ghosh, Charlotte Hess, Nancy Kranich, Peter Levine, Wendy Pradt Lougee, Elinor Ostrom, Charles Schweik, Peter Suber, J. Todd Swarthout, Donald Waters

Publisher MIT Press, 2006
ISBN 0262083574, 9780262083577
367 pages

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