Comments on: The Oregonian, NewsBank and Us

By: Jane Nichols

Jane Nichols — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 01:54:21 +0000

Caleb,
sadly this scenario is still in effect. Thankfully, libraries are stepping up to make available to what content we can. Kudos to the Oregon Digital Newspaper Program: http://libweb.uoregon.edu/diglib/odnp/online.html!

By: rachel

rachel — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 18:54:59 +0000

“I know it might not matter to Advance (who is probably just as happy to sell more articles to individuals for $2.95), but it will matter to NewsBank and it matters to us”.

At the UMUC CIP symposium at the end of May, Stuart Schieber from Harvard (one of the driving forces behind the Harvard FAS open access policy) was speaking about the serials crisis and said that the real problem was that the publishers are profit-maximizers while the faculty who write the articles are access-maximizers. The publishers would be perfectly willing to sell half as many subscriptions for twice as much whereas the faculty would be happy to sell twice as many subscriptions for half as much. There is a balance where the profit-maximizers and the access-maximizers can both be reasonably happy. It’s safe to say that in the world of academic publishing that balance has long since broken down.

This whole Oregonian fiasco definitely a case of the profit-maximizers and the access-maximizers not being able to strike a balance. I hope, with you, that we will see a widespread boycott of electronic editions of Advance Publications’ papers through NewsBank. Thanks for presenting this whole thing in such a clear and calm manner.

By: Anne-Marie

Anne-Marie — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 12:52:49 +0000

In this post you’ve hit on about 1/3 of what I usually talk to students about when they get sent to the library for instruction in their first year - two different sides of the access coin. In those first-year sessions, I used to love to show the New York Times site because I could say such great things about it — and the archive search was the centerpiece of that part. And then I’d show how articles cost $5, we’d all bond over how that happens all the time, and I’d move on to talk about accessing library’s subscriptions. So that’s the more commonly-used sense of “access” where users get something from the library they would have to pay for elsewhere. (This has become a more difficult example since the NYT opened up more of their archive for free. Giving up personal information is a less impressive visual than the “buy this article for $4.95″ line).

But I also used the Oregonian as an example in those sessions, because in contrast to the NYT, OregonLive is such an unholy mess. When I’d ask incoming students if they’d ever tried to use it to find something old there would *always* be three or four who had. And when I would ask them if they were successful, they didn’t just say no - they would talk about how bad it was. First-year students in a one-shot library session where they don’t know me usually don’t talk, and these students don’t spend a lot of time comparing the different quality of newspaper websites — and yet. Their experiences at OregonLive were so bad that they remembered them and wanted to talk about them. So that was always a nice intro into the concept of metadata, and how library databases give them another kind of access making stuff that’s out there easier to find.

I have no idea how this really fits into what you’re really talking about here except as a long way of agreeing that this is a big access issue - I was just struck by how much of what I do in an academic library has shifted in the last year, and will continue to shift because of the larger picture of the corporate media.