Online E-phemera

Abstract

Recently, an academic colleague showed me a letter of complaint from an undergraduate student who demanded to know why faculty continued to set expensive textbooks for students to purchase when the material needed ?is all available for free on the internet?. At one level, the student has a point. The internet is a rich and growing source of text, images, videos, interactive freeware and more of great value to teaching and research. For example, many government reports and statistical databases are available online rather than in print and online historical documents are now accessible to anyone rather than just those few with the opportunity to access physical archives (e.g., my personal favourites http:// showcase.netins.net/web/creative/lincoln.html and http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/). Furthermore, increasing numbers of peer-reviewed research papers are available via open access, whereby authors, their institutions, or their granting bodies pay or provide a repository through which papers are available online for free to readers. Some granting bodies insist on open access for all published work arising from their support and some professional societies have gone to great lengths to place journal back issues online, in some cases back to the 19th century (e.g., the Searchable Ornithological Research Archive, http://elibrary.unm.edu/sora/). Despite these advances, there can be worms in this apple of knowledge.