Great Minds do not always think alike...

Take a view at this document that a group of us put together for the Dynix Institute that came out during Midwinter ALA (Jan 2005). It's called upStream and it was compiled by the folks at Dynix. Actually, they provide a forum for continuing education via free webinars. See what you think. I wrote about free access to copyrighted information via Google or other search engines. What would that look like...for aggregators, publishers, authors, librarians, but most importantly, our customers/patrons? Would access be funded by ads? Well, what I wrote expounds on the theory of Open Access. We are seeing it in the academic field with Google Scholar. And usually these things start in academia and broaden. We'll see. But can you imagine a world in which the contents of all our our databases (Gale Group, Ebsco, Proquest, Grolier, etc.) was included in the results of a search engine? A popular one, like Google? Isn't that what we try to do when we offer metasearch tools that simultaneously search all of our databases? Wouldn't that be great if Google took that on? No more contracts, $$$ for other things, easy, easy access! No more tracking statistics! No more authentication headaches. And for the customer, one stop. What does that do to the business model (publishing) and how does that affect our customers. Would search results be weighted? Would keyword searching prevail? Would we lose advanced searching capabilities? Would ads for drugs inundate any articles on health? Would information seekers care?

p.s. to get to this document you have to fill out some info before you can actually get to it which makes access a bit cumbersome. Again, here's the URL.