Accountability of information providers -Reply

[KAREN SCHNEIDER]

However, Stuart, there is another side to the coin.  Plenty of us think that
information does not necessarily want to be free, but rather equitably
accessible to the people who pay for it.  (Information wants to be a
Socialist... not a Communist or a Republican.)  It is a question of cost
models.  I don't begrudge OCLC the Netfirst database.  However, its cost
model does not lend itself (er... no pun intended) to a global index.

The taxation model works very well in many cases.  We toss dollars on a
table, someone gathers the dollars and pays the bill.  (This is how we
bought dinner while I was in library school, come to think of it.)  A great
deal of high-quality information has been distributed this way.  There is a
huge difference between saying, this cost model provides the best access
to information for those who most need it, and saying, this cost model is
the least expensive.  But in librarianship, we do not have that "someone"
to gather the dollars and pay the bill.  We have a few itneresting projects,
some that are limited to certain data sets and some that have limited cost
models, but we don't have a digital index developed on the taxation
model.  That, it seems, is reserved for paper materials, as the public
library proves.

Karen G. Schneider
opinions mine alone