[WEB4LIB] RE: Questia: who is behind it?

[Dan Lester]

Thursday, February 01, 2001, 1:06:49 PM, you wrote:

SR> What concerns me is the prospect of universities taking fees to
SR> promote commercial ventures such as Questia.

Universities take fees for the signs in the football stadium, for the
soda and candy machines on campus, for the commercially operated food
service, for ads in publications of all types, and so forth.  Why
should any possible fees from Questia (who doesn't seem to want to
market to universities anyway) be any worse?

SR> Some search engines give prominent placement to websites based on fees.

I'm missing the connection, as most universities don't run search
engiens (other than for their own pages).

SR> As universities
SR> look for new alternatives to become profit centers, what's to stop
SR> them from providing links directly from on-line syllabi to Questia
SR> or Amazon, for example, and getting their referral fees.

Nothing, other than institutional policies.  Many universities forbid
such ads or links on their pages.  But, if they do sell such ads, is
that any worse than income from vending machines?  If so, why?

SR>  What if
SR> these companies pressure the university to take actions such as
SR> eliminating course reserves via the library because they cut into
SR> their profit margin?  I don't think that prospect is too far-fetched.

I'm not sure that would be a bad idea.  I don't particularly support
it, but we all know that articles on reserve are simply an
institutionalized copyright violation and method of avoiding paying
for reprint rights.  It didn't used to be so in the olden days when
some of us were undergrads and we had to take notes, but it has been
for years.  Of course ereserve is starting to change that,
fortunately.  It has always bothered me that librarians, most of whom
are particularly righteous about privacy, copyright, and so forth (as
we should be) have perpetuated this scam for several decades.

cheers

dan

-- 
Dan Lester, Data Wrangler  dan at RiverOfData.com
3577 East Pecan, Boise, Idaho  83716-7115 USA
www.riverofdata.com  www.postcard.org  www.gailndan.com