PUBLISHING PRACTICES
10 Publishing and Accessing Information
Kathleen DeLaurenti
One of the great promises of the internet was that information could be widely accessible to everyone at low or no cost. Anyone seeking knowledge could learn from low-cost but high-quality online resources. And while it may seem that everything is and has always been online, much of the 1,000-year publishing history of printed musical scores, scholarly journals, and scholarly books remains available only in libraries and archives.
In addition to making the vast history of human knowledge available online, the competing interests of publishers, authors, and consumers seem to be more at odds now than ever. Unlike the print environment, the digital environment works on technologies that make sharing easy. This change has been welcomed by consumers, but is a concern for publishers and some creators who worry that digital piracy will undermine their business model.
One ongoing development is the move to stop selling born-digital media to consumers and libraries. Concerned that digital content cannot be easily controlled, large publishers of books, music scores, and sound recordings continue to move to a leasing model. While this eases publisher concerns around piracy, it means that increasingly no one (including libraries) can collect and lend books or sound recordings.[1] At the same time, individual musicians and authors are embracing new technology; they are leveraging our connected information world to develop collaborative models for publishing that favor artistic control and building relationships with their audiences.[2]
Libraries, researchers, and creators are asking challenging questions as the future landscape for knowledge production and dissemination evolves:
- Who should own digital books, scores, or sound recordings?
- How do we maintain a record of our cultural history when libraries cannot collect books, articles, or sound recordings?
- What role should creators have in deciding how their work is published and shared with their audience?
- What is the value of collecting when digital media is platform dependent and publishers can modify or delete the content on those platforms at any time?
- What will the future of memory institutions or private collections be if publishers and copyright holders prevent individuals and institutions from preserving these resources for future generations of scholars?
Scholarly Publishing
Much like learning copyright basics, understanding some basics about publishing can help you understand the intersections between published works, copyright, and access to resources. Knowing how works are published can even help you understand how they’re organized online or in catalogs. As we discussed in Chapter 4: Preparing to Search, the kinds of search tools we have are a reflection of the way historical publishing practices have been adapted to online environments over time. For many, an ideal world wouldn’t even have online indexes: w