Free Access to the Web

For my final blog post, I found an old (by internet standards) article from 2000 that views the entire web as one low-cost library and discusses the marvel that much of the access to it is free. Arms, writing at Cornell, envisions the web as replacing libraries in many people's lives. Whereas libraries, and especially research libraries, are incredibly expensive and limit access to their members, the web is self-funding (in that individual "publishers" pay for that privilege) with free access for anyone with an internet connection. (Of course, one could argue that this doesn't really constitute free...) Furthermore, Arms concludes that although the expected model of information provision on the internet was fee-based subscriptions, it turned out that there is enough free information of quality out there to obtain genuine substitutes. The example he gives is that Cornell provides legal sources via the web, including case reports, hitherto only available with an exorbitantly expensive Westlaw subscription, and one need not be affiliated with Cornell to access it.

Another point that Arms makes is that digital libraries can be nearly completely automated. He asserts that a brute force search, such as that provided by Google, with enough information and in the hands of a good researcher, can actually be much more powerful than an intelligent search by trained librarians. (While I don't like the implications for library services, it does seem like a lot of the focus on the need for reference librarians is in terms of not-good or amateur researchers...) This automation actually increases access as you no longer need to work through a small group of homogeneously trained elites.

Arms identifies two issues or potential problems for further research. One is insuring quality of information. This role was traditionally performed by the publishing process, but with the self-publishing afforded by the web, we can no longer count on good publishing practices. The second is permanence. Flip a switch on a server, and its information vanishes.

I found this article interesting mostly because of its now somewhat historic outlook. Some things have not turned out as Arms saw them in 2000, namely the level of free access. As we see with the Google Books project, proprietary interests are finding their way into the new cyber-reality, and the Great Copyright War has yet to be fought. Interestingly, though, Arms did identify two key issues that continue to be relevant: trusting found information, and ensuring its permanence. I suspect that the best answer to the former is via education of the public. At some point, the onus has to be on the searcher. The second problem, in my mind, is much more problematic, and it is one that plagues the physical as well as virtual information worlds. All in all, I found this early article quite interesting.