I saw something recently that pinpointed exactly why JSTOR charges so much for admission; JSTOR itself is nonprofit, but there are for-profit entities that format the content and make it available. The big bucks fund them. I wish I could remember where, exactly, I saw this. I will look around for the source.
It seems as though there ought to be some workable solution to this problem, but it would take time and money to come up with one.
Oursin's comments about the robustness of digital content are right on. This is a huge problem in so many ways. The guy who thinks digitized scholarship can't be stolen: uh, the way digitized music can't be stolen? It doesn't have physical storage: he's never heard the words "hard drive failure"?
I will link to a discussion I got into on New Music Box (http://www.newmusicbox.org/articles/Finding-a-Home-for-the-Longest-Opera-Ever-Written/) a few years ago about digital archiving of composer archives. There's someone there who also doesn't understand the magnitude of the problems.
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Date: 2013-01-24 02:45 pm (UTC)It seems as though there ought to be some workable solution to this problem, but it would take time and money to come up with one.
Oursin's comments about the robustness of digital content are right on. This is a huge problem in so many ways. The guy who thinks digitized scholarship can't be stolen: uh, the way digitized music can't be stolen? It doesn't have physical storage: he's never heard the words "hard drive failure"?
I will link to a discussion I got into on New Music Box (http://www.newmusicbox.org/articles/Finding-a-Home-for-the-Longest-Opera-Ever-Written/) a few years ago about digital archiving of composer archives. There's someone there who also doesn't understand the magnitude of the problems.