[Web4lib] Authority + Wikipedia

[Patricia F Anderson]

This echoes anecdotal evidence from those who found putting up free copies 
online increased use and/or purchases of the print item. I am thinking, 
for example, of the UM Making of America project, in which circulation of 
the included items rose by several 100 percent after the items were made 
available over the Internet. I don't know if any articles were published 
about this trend, but if there were I'd love to see them.

Patricia Anderson, pfa at umich.edu

On Wed, 12 Oct 2005, Peter Morville wrote:

> Thanks for surfacing this important point Karen. Information that's hard to
> find will remain information that's hardly found. And, as evidence-based
> studies have shown (see below), even within the realm of scholarly research,
> articles that are freely available online, and therefore more findable, are
> much more highly cited...which to me, suggests an important link between
> findability and authority. The scholarly researchers that are most commonly
> cited tend to have the most authority within academia.
>
> http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/online-nature01/
>
> http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/staff/kaantelm/do_open_access_CRL.pdf
>
> Cheers!
>
>
> Peter Morville
> President, Semantic Studios
> http://semanticstudios.com
> http://findability.org
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Karen Coyle [mailto:kcoyle at kcoyle.net]
> Sent: Wednesday, October 12, 2005 12:20 PM
> To: Peter Morville
> Cc: web4lib at webjunction.org
> Subject: Re: [Web4lib] Authority + Wikipedia
>
> Peter, thanks.
>
> What jumps out at me here is not the concept of "authority" but of
> "findability." The information that people use is the information that
> they find, and knowing human nature, it's the information that they find
> most easily. In 1984 or so, the U of California MELVYL catalog put up
> its first A&I database online -- Medline...
>
>
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