Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 17, No. 348.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/
www.princeton.edu/humanist/
Submit to: humanist@princeton.edu
Date: Tue, 28 Oct 2003 07:54:36 +0000
From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@kcl.ac.uk>
Subject: book recommendation
Dear colleagues:
Everyone concerned with publication issues (and everyone should be, no?)
will be interested in and profit from reading the essays in Brian L.
Hawkins and Patricia Battin, eds., The Mirage of Continuity: Reconfiguring
Academic Information Resources for the 21st Century (Washington DC: Council
on Library and Information Resources and the Association of American
Universities, 1998). See http://www.clir.org/pubs/abstract/pub75.html for
ordering information. Particularly valuable, I think, are the high-level
views of universities, university libraries, publishers and other
organizations and groups as components in an interrelated social system.
The overviews are mostly American but mutatis mutandis very valuable for
the rest of us also.
In thinking and writing about scholarship, the electronic medium, the
digital library, open-access publishing and so on, it's very easy not to
see the interrelatedness of parts and so to miss the high probability that
any change we make will have system-wide effects. Of course a mere systems
analysis cannot sketch out the future for us accurately; all is contingent
on historical factors we cannot control and those we cannot foresee. But
the bigger pictures can, I think, help us to avoid the grosser errors,
including the silliness of much punditry and slogan-driven crusades.
Yours,
WM
Dr Willard McCarty | Senior Lecturer | Centre for Computing in the
Humanities | King's College London | Strand | London WC2R 2LS || +44 (0)20
7848-2784 fax: -2980 || willard.mccarty@kcl.ac.uk
www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/wlm/
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