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Google Scholar: The Pros and Cons for Maritime Scholars

Mainstream academia, particularly the sciences, rely heavily on publication “impact factor.” Will that work for academics in the maritime sector?

One tool for measuring how important an article has been to the extension of academic knowledge is the impact factor. There are different methods for calculating impact, but most involve measuring the number of times a work is cited in the works of others, and where. Journal impact is measured as well as that of authors. Thus, an author typically gets a higher impact ranking for having published in higher impact journals.

Until a few years ago, the ability to measure scholarly impact required a subscription to data services like Scopus or Web of Knowledge. These services still represent the gold standard of impact measurement, especially in the scientific community, but with the advent of Google Scholar, authors can see how their works measure up without having to pay for the privilege.  Furthermore, because Google is less restrictive in the publications it includes, academic researchers outside the hard sciences have a better chance of getting a score, or scoring higher, than they would in the commercial ranking services. Anyone can sign up, search for citations, and add them to their Scholar profile. Google does the rest, adding the number of times cited, links to the citations, the h-index, the i10-index, and even a bar graph of each year the author’s works have been cited.

Publications that do not show up in search results can be added manually, although such entries will have no impact until they start showing up in Google Scholar searches and have been linked to other works. Google’s manual forms allow users to enter data for books, chapters, articles, conference proceedings, patents, and “other.” There are no fields for standard publication numbers, such as an article’s document object identifier (DOI), a periodical’s international standard series number (ISSN),  or the international standard book number (ISBN). What this likely means is that, without this precise identification number, a publication that had to be entered manually will never be linked to an impact factor. If and when the citation shows up in Google Scholar, the author will have to add the citation from Google to his or her profile, and delete the manually added entry that it supersedes.

For maritime academics there are two particular drawbacks with Google Scholar. The first is that, because the maritime sector is so small, impact is almost by definition exceedingly limited. A Venn diagram of publications having to do with maritime affairs and the entire world of academic publishing could be represented as a pencil dot within a giant circle several pages in diameter. A better measurement would be the impact within the maritime sector. This leads to the second problem, namely, the lack of standardized metadata in maritime publications that would facilitate the cross-referencing needed to determine a given work’s relevance to other works. Without standards-based formatting for author names, publishers, volumes, editions, etc., upon which computer algorithms can act, even a long and respectable list of published articles and papers would produce an impact factor of zero.

We should also note that Google’s format limitations do not account for numerous other contributions that faculty can make to maritime knowledge. For example, a conference presentation that results in international policy changes might never have reached the stage of published proceedings, or at least not with a high impact, brand name publisher. There is no form to fill out for presentations, only papers in published proceedings. Likewise, there is no place to enter grant projects, consultancies, and guest lectures. These activities and accomplishments can make for an impressive Curriculum Vitae that, in the maritime world, could easily outweigh the impact of a publication list with a moderate h-index.

Certainly, wherever it is appropriate, maritime faculty should be encouraged to sign up for Google Scholar and add their citations. But they should keep in mind that it is not intended to be an online version of their complete CV. And administrators in maritime academics should also keep in mind that it is not a complete measure of impact in the maritime world. Martin Stopford, whose Maritime Economic is likely the most widely used text on the subject, has a Google h-index factor of 7, which is less than 20% of the impact of an oceanographer with a career of publishing in respected scientific journals. Both authors are highly regarded in their areas of expertise, but the one with the lower impact factor in Google Scholar would almost assuredly be judged to have the higher impact among the community of academics dedicated to safe, secure, efficient shipping on clean oceans.

The Economics of Open Source

“This revolution has occurred so rapidly that many institutional managers above the level 
of day-to-day IT work are unaware of the low-cost — often free — options ripe for the taking.”
 

As we have seen with the library’s deployment of the Koha library management system, the free software movement has emerged beyond the wishful thinking of its early champions to become a viable competitor in numerous information technology endeavors.  Indeed, it is our contention that the economic trend does not favor traditional commercial software as the principal solution of organizational IT. This trend is not hard to understand in terms of consumer demand, where free solutions are preferable even when they are not as good as commercial alternatives, so long as they are good enough. But consumer demand in itself would not endanger the proprietary model were it not for the strong incentives among software developers, themselves, to give away their code.To appreciate the incentives at work in current software development we must bear in mind the need for an enterprise to focus on its core business and outsource the rest on the most favorable terms. In the past, the proprietary, commercial code vendors saved their customers money by automating manual routines with off-the-shelf software that could be mass-produced far less expensively than could be accomplished with in-house programming. They also provided a certain peace of mind by offering a product that was standardized, at least among the customer base, which created an incentive for businesses to buy what every one else was buying, thus reinforcing the code proprietor’s standard.

Eventually, the success of the shrink-wrapped software solution exposed its achilles heal, for the software company profiting from the sale of multiple iterations of its standard code found it increasingly challenging to accommodate the exceptions and local configurability demanded by customers with similar but not absolutely identical needs. Different institutional work flows, organizational structures, legal requirements and commercial relationships required linking applications and exchanging data in ways that no single software vendor could possibly anticipate, which forced institutions either to purchase customized code from the vendor (and hope the customization would still function after the next upgrade), lobby with company developers and the customer user group for enhancements in the next release (and hope the majority of customers supported the enhancements), or muddle along with the status quo (and give up hope of further automation in that particular realm).

The challenge to this economic model came when wide-spread use of the internet allowed the sharing of code which was written not to be sold, but to solve particular problems in particular institutions. The code was posted and left “open” for all to use with the caveat YMMV –“your mileage may vary”– in explicit recognition that local circumstances might necessitate adaptation on the part of the user. In time, the internet was host to vast libraries of open code contributed by thousands of programmers. Volunteer communities and standards bodies evolved which facilitated even greater sharing of solutions. In large sectors of the IT economy, programmer talent was lured from the profits of proprietary code sales to the rapid development and deployment environment offered by what came to be known as the Open Source movement. For network and server administrators struggling with tight budgets, the growth of mature applications that rivalled and even surpassed the reliability, scalability and integrability of commercial equivalents made the switch to Open  Source an increasingly attractive option.

While chaos would seem to have been an inherent risk in this world-wide openness, the reality has been that the development community rapidly sorted winners from losers and built upon what was easiest to integrate with previous or ongoing developments. In this way, Open Source not only inspired innovation, but standardization, a benefit to IT maintenance equally as important as the significantly reduced price of software.  This revolution has occurred so rapidly that many institutional managers above the level of day-to-day IT work are unaware of the low-cost — often free — options ripe for the taking.

Skeptics who hold to the adage that “you get what you pay for” assume that the developers of free software can not be trusted to continue development and provide support with only altruism as their incentive. In all likelihood, past experience with haphazard, undocumented solutions written by in-house programmers no longer available to provide support have further prejudiced them against any software not written by one of the major commercial vendors. Such skeptics are wrong to confuse the home-grown development model, which the proprietary model largely replaced, with the Open Source community model which is now gaining ascendance. The skeptics are equally wrong in assuming there is no profit motive in Open Source development.The profit, however, is not achieved in the sale of software, but in the savings realized through collaborative development. Again, we refer to the business imperative of concentrating on the unique product –on what economists call business “differentiation”– rather than expending time and effort developing in-house solutions to problems that are not unique. Open Source software development is no exception. As computer scientist Bruce Perens has written in “The Emerging Economic Paradigm of Open Source” (16 Feb 2005):
It is funded directly or indirectly as a cost-center item by the companies that need it. Those companies need a great deal of cost-center, non-differentiating software. They are willing to invest in its creation through the Open Source paradigm because it allows them to spend less on their cost centers by distributing the cost and risk among many collaborators, and makes more efficient use of their software dollar than the retail paradigm.

This “retail paradigm” is the prism which too often distorts the managerial view of software acquisition. Word processors, spreadsheet programs, image manipulators, even database applications and web servers, tend to be evaluated as end-user commodities, to be paid for and consumed in the same manner as electronic books or music in digital format. But with the exception of the vendors who profit by the retail model, there is no reason for anyone else to think of such programs as “end use” consumables instead of as tools that help them in their work, as means to an end. Users would ordinarily choose free software if they were not under the impression that the programs they pay for are going to be better supported and have a rapid release of useful new features. After all, at least some of the money that they pay is expected to go back into product maintenance and development.But unlike physically-tangible goods, software, once created, can be replicated infinitely with no further production cost, and can be distributed at almost no cost over the internet. Under the retail paradigm, the price of software is essentially arbitrary once production costs have been recouped. In the Open Source paradigm, developers are not losing profits by forgoing sales. In the first place, the expense of writing code is not viewed as an investment for which a return must be justified, but as the cost of solving problems pursuant to the institution’s main business. In the second place, there is an entire community of developers in other institutions willing and ready to extend the code’s functionality and adapt it to more uses than its originators could have envisioned. In the words of Network World’s Stephen Walli, “The value gained by each contributor is enormous when compared to the cost of contributing.” (“Open source: nobody is working for free,” 2 Sept. 2010).

And here is why the long-term economic trend is working against the proprietary code model: Developing in corporate isolation, or collaborating through subcontracted, non-disclosure arrangements, the goal of the for-profit code writer is differentiation in a market where differentiation adds little or no value, and can in fact be a liability. Customers will not particularly care about bells and whistles if the basic functionality that helps them in their work can be had for free. The open source alternative not only suffices, but the open source community will respond more quickly and more accurately when the market requires innovation and variation, because of the commonly held asset of open code which can be instantly leveraged by thousands of programmers for thousands of different purposes. In that community even novice developers can search the internet for serviceable solutions that require only a little modification of the source code, which they are of course free to do. Professional developers can team up with developers in other businesses, libraries, science labs, etc., to share the burden of creating applications of mutual benefit, and their efforts only have to start where the ever expanding repositories of open source leave off. Their contribution to those repositories will make some one else’s development efforts easier in the future.

The proprietary software vendors, on the other hand, can not as effectively leverage this vast savings in development effort. They can take advantage of open code written by others, but as their motive is proprietary differentiation, they do not share the part of their code that is unique, and therefore can not benefit from the advice of the larger development community. It is, in effect, above criticism. Open Source software, on the other hand, is essentially peer-reviewed software. Any bug or security hole gets noticed and reported immediately in public forums, and workaround tips are quickly disseminated. By contrast, vendors have every incentive to stay mum, hope any bugs go unnoticed, and slip in the fix in the next release. Whereas commercial software brought much-needed improvements over the home-grown systems and manual office work of the past, in this day of ultra cheap storage and virtually free internet transport, the closely-guarded code of the proprietary model would be an obstacle to greater efficiencies and greater economies of scale, were it not for the fact that the community is free to share its own solutions, regardless of what commercial software companies want to keep hidden.

It must be mentioned that Open Source has not obsolesced commercial incentives in IT work. “Pioneer” enterprises have a marketable niche at least until an Open Source technologist manages to replicate or improve on the technology. OpenOffice, for example, offers word processing, spreadsheet, presentation and database software every bit as sophisticated in functionality as Microsoft’s, and can be used free of charge, while developers can extend their own functionality. When OpenOffice became the property of Oracle, the open source community responded with a virtual clone in LibreOffice. In other cases, vendors offer a robust open source version, available for free and continually improved through community development, but charge for an “Enterprise edition” with proprietary extensions and service guarantees; its core, however, is still based on the evolving work of the Open Source community.

And there are companies which charge a fee to host, administer, and even develop extensions to open source applications. Up until the university recently established its own cloud server infrastructure, the WMU library employed the London-based PTFS company to host its Koha library management system In that hosting arrangement, any development PTFS might do for hire on WMU’s behalf would be made available to the Koha community. By the same measure, any useful developments by other institutions were likewise available at no cost to WMU. Furthermore, PTSF’s client, i.e., the WMU librarians, had complete “root user access” to make their own developments. And lastly, when the library decided not to host any longer with PTFS, the company surrendered the Koha source code and the WMU data. This is now a typical arrangement between small institutions without the means for supporting Open Source software, and IT companies which can provide that support cheaply by not having to pass on proprietary license fees.While we predict growth in the commercial business of supporting Open Source development, we are not predicting the extinction of proprietary software itself. We are only pointing out that its economically viability is, or should be be, limited to areas where differentiation is an advantage. As the Google Apps Marketplace demonstrates, cloud-based hybrids that offer software as a service are finding the means to add their specialized additions to the great core of common code, but can do so more cheaply than they could develop software as a proprietary commodity. This should strike a chord with businesses that would rather pay only for the distinct functionality they need than for the bloatware of additional features which the retail developer includes to justify higher development costs.In terms of what software is worth paying for, and for how much, it is up to every organization to understand the  economic implications within the context of its core business. Alas, there is no substitute for institutional diligence on matters regarding Information Technology. There is no comprehensive solution, nor will there likely ever be one, with proprietary code or with Open Source. The institutional variations are too great for any one vendor, any group of programmers, to make a one-size-fits-all application, particularly when the pace of technological change continues to accelerate. Thus, while comprehensiveness of functionality might seem critical in evaluating software solutions, it is not in the long-term more important than conformance to data standards and exchange protocols. The ability to “play well with others” is a criteria institutions ignore at their peril. All the more important, then, to adopt applications which expose their source code to the review and scrutiny of the community.

Copyright and the library

Background

No library plan is sufficient that does not give consideration to the thickening tangle of legal and financial issues surrounding copyright in the digital age. Originally intended in the early 17th Century to protect authors from unauthorized reproduction of their works by unscrupulous booksellers and printers, copyright has evolved primarily to protect the intellectual property interests of publishers, to the point that authors have to take care not to infringe the copyright of their own work.  Before the convenience of electronic storage, internet distribution, and print-on-demand technologies, publishers had to layout considerable fixed costs per publication, having to estimate the size of their press run to amortize those costs over the number of items printed. A large press run lowered the cost per item, but overestimating the market for a publication wasted assets and filled warehouses with unwanted inventory. Because of the risks assumed by the publishing houses in bringing a work to print, authors typically surrendered ownership of their works in return for publishing with a reputable press. Financial remuneration was sometimes possible, but in the case of scholarly works, the chief reward was, and continues to be, the prestige. The presses which conducted “peer review” — selecting subject experts as referees to determine a work’s suitability for publication– offered better recognition, and therefore have been the most sought after by scholars and researchers.

The copyright regime in place today is largely designed to accommodate this arrangement whereby the creators of scholarly work or producers of research sign over their copyrights to publishing enterprises that bear the cost of printing and distribution. But as the new technologies for storing and retrieving information have greatly reduced the cost and the risk, the chief justification for signing over copyrights is the “prestige factor” of having one’s work exhibited through a big name publisher. But this prestige comes at a cost which many researchers –and librarians–  find increasingly objectionable. After all, the research is not usually commissioned by the publisher, but subsidized by the research institution. Likewise, the publisher pays little, if anything, for the editorial and peer-review work, as such services are performed by peers for small stipends, or simply for the scholarly renown. And yet, as publishers assume but a fraction of the intellectual labor costs, and as technology has significantly lowered the costs of disseminating information, the price of mainstream publications has continued to rise for decades –in the case of journals, precipitously.

Libraries supporting research are therefore hostage to pricing schemes which reflect the overhead expenses of copyright-protected monopolies maintaining legacy print infrastructures, but which bear little relationship to the value added by the publishers. Libraries have responded across academia with the only option available to them, cutting acquisitions. Ironically, research materials are being priced out of the reach of the researcher by the researcher’s own adherence to the status quo of peer-review.

The struggle is now on to redefine ownership of intellectual property in the “information age.” In the mean time, the WMU Library must continue to meet the research needs of its patrons –doing so within its means and without antagonizing the traditional publishing interests holding copyright on needed research materials. Neither the library staff nor the legal researchers on the WMU faculty have expertise in the area of copyright law, a situation made even more difficult by the ambiguous status of an international university situated in Sweden but with a collection of printed works and electronic databases owned mostly by non-Swedish publishers. As the WMU Library grows in its collections and extends its international patronage, this situation needs to be redressed. It will be the librarian’s responsibility to develop a set of flexible policies that can protect the university from litigation in state regimes, and to get clarification from IMO and the UN on “international copyright.” The WMU library will meanwhile proceed in developing and sharing its collections according to the best practices available, adopting a liberal but defensible “Fair Use” policy, establishing –with representatives of the publishing industry and through in-house technologies– an equitable system of “digital rights management,” and promoting Open Access journals and repositories as viable alternatives to traditional venues of publication.

Fair Use

The university currently pays an annual license fee of about SEK 150 per full-time student (set to increase to SEK 200) to Bonus Presskopia, the Swedish Reproduction Rights Organization. This modest fee is intended as protection against possible publishers’ suits for violation of copyright. In return for this payment, WMU faculty members are allowed to copy up to “15 percent of the pages in the publication, but not more than 15 pages, in the same academic year and on behalf of the same students“, which roughly corresponds with the copying rights granted to individuals by the Swedish Copyright Law. Elsewhere the university posts the rules as permitting 5% of a given work, or one article from a journal issue, or one book chapter, to be copied for personal use for scholarly or research purposes only. But whether or not non-Swedish publishers accept the legitimacy of the university’s “fair use” payments in accordance with Swedish Law, which recognizes “Kopimism” as a religion, the question for the library is its role in facilitating legitimate “personal” and “scholarly” use.

Library patrons have ready access to copiers and scanners, not to mention smart phones with digital cameras. In the face of this reality, WMU does not have the means to police the percentages of works copied per user or the sharing among users of privately copied materials. Library staff will ensure patrons know the rules, and will enforce those rules in the face of flagrant and open violations. Additionally, in its capacity as custodian of course reserves materials, the library will work with faculty to build and maintain curriculum-based reading collections that pass the “educational purposes” clause of typical copyright law, limiting access to members of the class, and only for the duration of the class. The university should meanwhile continue to pay copyright clearance fees until it is determined that they are not legally required or do not cover the materials being copied. Materials obtained digitally though Interlibrary Loans or commercial document services will be delivered with the appropriate copyright compliance notice.

Digital Rights Management

Copyright-compliant access to commercial digital materials is increasingly being handled by the vendors themselves. Journal aggregators provide access to particular titles to library users based on subscription arrangements. Providers of “e-book” services, such as Ebrary, Coutts, Dawson and other book vendors have their own built-in software controls to limit the number of simultaneous readers according to “copies” purchased. Other vendors are using Adobe’s “Digital Editions” for the same purpose. But not all DRM systems are equal. Cancelling an agreement with a vendor could mean cancelling access to books and articles that have been paid for, and prices and number of simultaneous users can vary by provider.

WMU intends to increase its use of these e-content services significantly, particularly in support of the academic curriculum, but also for research collections where appropriate. The Librarian and Assistant Librarian for Bibliographic Services will have joint responsibility for determining the best subscription packages and individual title purchases according to collection needs and library resources.

There are still many online sources of maritime information that do not have DRM systems implemented. In many cases, the library purchases subscription access to premium content web sites, online journals, and databases intended for a single user. As site-licensed access for universities and libraries is generally not offered, getting access for more users means purchasing more accounts. In the case of e-books, the library also pays for individual chapters and monographs it downloads on behalf of patrons, from sources (such as the IMO) that do not necessarily accommodate transference from the purchaser (library) to third parties (requesting patrons).

It is the library’s position that, should an appropriate DRM mechanism be devised locally or in collaboration with the library community, it would be within the library’s rights to keep and distribute purchased content according to its usage rights at the time of purchase. For example, if the library were to cache Lloyd’s List in a daily archive, it should in theory be allowed to provide online access to three users simultaneously per daily issue in its archive, just as it could do with its archive of printed daily issues, because the library has purchased three subscriptions to Lloyd’ List. Lloyd’s and other vendors might of course disagree with the library’s claims to electronic access, and no locally-managed DRM system is currently available with such a degree of functionality, but it is important to state the principle as a working premise in the library’s acquisition of commercial digital content.

For the foreseeable future, Digital Rights Management of commercially provided electronic content will be an important part of library collections and services. But of growing importance is a movement among universities and research institutes that has the potential to make DRM a moot point. At the very least, the Open Access movement is revolutionizing rights in favor of the researcher.

 

 

Open Access

 

As previously observed, the producers of research and creators of scholarly articles and monographs rarely receive direct financial rewards for their publishing activities. But they are still inspired to have their work reach the widest possible audience. The conventional publishing houses, while reaching the audiences that can afford them, are otherwise an obstacle to the broadest possible dissemination of information. Open Access publications, by contrast, do not charge readers for access. Like most traditional scholarly presses, Open Access publishers also do not pay scientists and authors for their work. In fact, in many cases they require payment from the author, or the author’s research funding agency. But this should not be confused with “vanity publishing.” Open Access offers peer-review, and work does not get published simply because the author can fund the publication.As unsettling as it might be for those accustomed to the traditional publishing regime, when authors fund their own publications in this way it reduces the net cost of bringing the information to the public. The creator makes a one-time payment for the cost of publishing, paying only the actual cost, but access to the published work is then free to the world.

The WMU library will seek out quality Open Access periodicals and endeavor to incorporate them into its collections and indexes. At present, there are only a handful of specifically maritime journals available as Open Access, although conventional publishers, perhaps seeing the handwriting on the wall, are starting to offer sample articles as Open Access for maritime titles that otherwise require proprietary access.

The library staff is also willing and ready to work with faculty on finding reputable Open Access journals in which to make their research and editorial contributions. In time, the library should be positioned to host Open Access journals on the library infrastructure.

 

Weeding the collection

About once a week or so, I descend from my musings on the art and science of information access to help the library staff with real work. So it was that last Friday afternoon, having set aside the virtual work expected of the trained professional, I rolled up my sleeves and reported for duty at the circulation desk. As we were closing early for a holiday weekend, the most urgent task at hand turned out to be the shelving of books, during which activity I came across a volume which in my line of business we would say was ripe for “de-accessioning.”


De-accessioning, de-selection, or collection weeding, is another one of those projects that urgently needs to be undertaken at my library, but not before we have developed a standardized policy determined through professional assessment, which of course, can not be undertaken without first establishing the metrics by which such an assessment can and should be made. (Non-professionals tend to be perfectly oblivious to such considerations, thinking it’s just a matter of keeping books in call number order and throwing them out when they become obsolete). Even without a policy in place, however, this particular item was too obvious: A 14-year old publication, approximately 7 cm. thick, entitled The Internet International Directory.


I recall the name of Ziff Davis, the publisher, from the shareware reviews found at the back of computer warehouse magazines, circa., 300 BE (Baud-modem Era). They hosted download sites accessible from Compuserve and Prodigy, mostly of inexpensive DOS and Windows accessories, like address books and memo pads with slightly more features than the ones delivered with the operating system. I don’t know the business model, but I imagine that making a few thousand pennies a day on products that required no physical storage space and could be reproduced and distributed to the consumer on demand, they were probably one of the earliest companies to see a profit from the internet. If not, they published traditional printed work about technology as well. But if any money was made publishing the internet directory, it was by exploiting one of the narrowest windows of opportunities that the uncatchable pace of technological progress has ever offered: The period between when the Internet was first made accessible to the Common Man, and the deployment of the vast full-text indexes we access today via enterprises like Yahoo and Google.


I suspect that a good bit of the information in the directory was already out of date before it ever fell into the hands of library patrons. It was published in 1995, a year about which I happen to know something regarding the composition and publishing technologies of the day, as it was the same year that Transaction produced my Road to Mass Democracy: Original Intent and the Seventeenth Amdendment. Even with state of the art innovations such as WordPerfect and Quark Express, the compilation of this data was likely completed in 1994, or even 1993. Add to this lag the comparatively glacial pace of library firm ordering back then (and how many libraries would have had approval plans for this sort of thing?), and add in as well the backlog of books that had to be manually received and cataloged, and it is not hard to imagine that by the time the internet directory reached the reference stacks, it had been obsolesced by the very resource it was attempting to index.


Can you imagine, though, in the dark ages of online information seeking, going to the library for help, watching the savvy staff member pull this 500 page tome off the shelf, and together perusing the table of contents for explanations of telnet and FTP? Or what you should look for in “Choosing a modem?” How grateful might you have been to see an entire chapter on how to get yourself up and running on this new-fangled World Wide Web?


As a current source of information, it is preposterous for this thing to take up valuable shelf-space. Think of anyone today finding use for the directory’s printed index, notwithstanding its thoughtful division into alphabetical and geographic parts. The first part covers everything from “Abayudaya Jews of Uganda” to “Zylwee’s WWW Page” — in 45 whole pages! The geographic index informs me that whatever was worth indexing at the time in Albania, it was likely accessible only on Gopher. Sophisticated Internet Guy (SIG) that I already was in 1995, I would have scoffed at this book when it first appeared, but as a librarian I probably would have ordered it for the information hoi polloi.


Undoubtedly today’s hoi polloi would be scoffing at this work as well, had they found it in the stacks before I did last Friday, but as I browse its naively compiled pages, for all intents and purposes obsolete the day they were published, I have a hard time tossing it out. I remember the pride I once took in my gophering and Archie-ing abilities. Those were the days when I would fix a pot of coffee and browse the newsgroups for 45 minutes while waiting for my Contacts Pro software to download from Ziff Davis (requires 386 processor and Windows 2.0 or higher). Of course, The Internet International Directory has no business in the regular stacks, but maybe I should make room for it in Special Collections?

How quickly the new becomes old these days — or was it ever thus? (Note to self: Reread Henry Adams “A Law of Acceleration” Does it still hold up?).