http://paulcourant.net Paul Courant's blog about libraries, economics, public policy, and other stuff Sun, 04 May 2008 01:44:32 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Actually, the title of the song is "Will You Love Me Tomorrow?" It was written by Carole King and Gerry Goffin, and hit number one on the charts, sung by the Shirelles, in 1961. King covered it herself in the album, Tapestry, ten years later. The King ... http://paulcourant.net/2008/05/03/will-you-still-love-me-tomorrow/ In a recent AP article about mass digitization at Michigan (available here via Salon), my colleague John Wilkin was amusingly misquoted as characterizing some comments of Brewster Kahle's as "theoretical," when John meant polemical." John has a nice blog post on the on the subject, with responses and rejoinders ... http://paulcourant.net/2008/04/26/john-wilkin-and-others-on-openness-and-its-opposites/ I recently changed the Creative Commons license on this blog from Attribution-Non Commercial to Attribution, for a number of reasons. My reasons are all related to a general point of view about commerce, one that is highly unoriginal (having, famously, been well articulated by Adam Smith in 1776) but powerful nonetheless. ... http://paulcourant.net/2008/04/22/on-choosing-a-creative-commons-license/ It is with dismay that I read in today’s New York Times that three distinguished academic presses, Oxford, Cambridge, and Sage, are suing Georgia State for copyright infringement with regard to course websites. I cannot know the merits of the case, but two points are telling. One ... http://paulcourant.net/2008/04/16/oxford-cambridge-and-sage-sue-georgia-state/ Since everyone else is talking about the new open access mandate from Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences, I figure I might as well jump in, too. There are any number of details that will have to be worked out before we know how the mandate will be implemented, and we ... http://paulcourant.net/2008/02/16/the-michigan-of-the-east-goes-open-access/ I've always thought of blog posts as basically being open letters to some editor or other. In this case, I attempt to take the New York Times to task for coding Hillary Clinton as the winner of the Democratic primaries in Michigan and Florida. In both states the ... http://paulcourant.net/2008/02/15/a-letter-to-the-editor-of-the-new-york-times/ Today the University of Michigan Library is celebrating a significant milestone: We have just put the one millionth book digitized from our collections online. (I recommend clicking on the link. The page is pretty cool.) As far as I know Michigan is the first library to have ... http://paulcourant.net/2008/02/02/one-million-digitized-books/ From yesterday's Chronicle of Higher Education In 2005, when the Motion Picture Association of America stepped up its campaign against college movie pirates, officials with the trade group said that 44 percent of the film industry’s domestic losses were the result of illegal downloads on campus networks. That statistic — which came ... http://paulcourant.net/2008/01/25/mpaa-bad-universities-good/ In this post, I get to be both an economist and a librarian. I want to argue that recessions pose at least two kinds of problems for academic libraries, one of them quite obvious, the other one less so. The obvious problem is that recessions bring with them reductions in ... http://paulcourant.net/2008/01/23/recessions-and-libraries/ Like everyone else who follows the blogs and listserves that everyone else follows, over the past month or so I have had the opportunity to skim thousands of comments on the new Amazon Kindle. I haven’t actually played with a Kindle, yet, but if ever a subject were well ... http://paulcourant.net/2007/12/29/e-books-and-p-books/