Liberating old papers
Professor Erik Ringmar will be on iPM on BBC Radio Four talking about liberating old papers. Do listen as it’s an important one. Partly, it’s about free information being freely available, but some of the things that should be freely available already aren’t. The case in point (as Erik writes in the Times Higher) is House of Commons reports.
“All reports produced by the House of Commons have, for example, been scanned by a company called ProQuest. Its site is great – pages are searchable backwards and forwards. The only problem is that access is restricted and comes with a charge. Each downloaded parliamentary report bears a little inscription: “Copyright © 2006, ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights reserved.”
Think about this for a second. Here is a company that lays exclusive claim to material produced by the elected representatives of the people. A company whose business idea it is to restrict access to our common heritage. This is upsetting first of all because it goes against the rights of citizens in a democracy to have the documents produced by their parliament freely available. Second, ProQuest is claiming copyright to material whose copyright has long expired. And finally it makes academic research far more difficult. Unless you belong to a university that’s prepared to pay for the stuff, you won’t get to read it.”
Do listen in – it’s on tomorrow afternoon.
xD.
April 18th, 2008 at 9:15 pm
Hi Dave, thanks for the promo. Let me know what you think of the programme. Who is this Peter Bottomley character they were going to put on? Seems like a colourful, Conservative, backbencher.
yours always,
April 19th, 2008 at 9:47 pm
I agree with you: this is disgraceful. But it is not new. At least 25 years ago, an outfit called Harvester Press produced microfiches of 19th century parliamentary returns and other official papers and flogged them off, presumably for profit, to various libraries, and for a fee one could subscribe to them.
The internet has changed everything and in a democracy it should be a means for improving access to free public information for everybody.
Up to now, quite a lot of Hansard stuff, going back I’m not sure quite how far, has been available free on the HMSO website, or whatever it is called these days. Is that no longer so?
Anyway, fortunately you can still access all this material in print, in any decent public library.
April 20th, 2008 at 2:17 am
Yes, the internet is changing everything. They have started to put some Hansard material online, but it’s in a “developmental” format (zips of xml pages) that are tricky to use. The parliamentary reports are still via Proquest only. Maybe things are changing. Let’s hope so. (And don’t forget, the “decent public libraries” which stock this material don’t exist everywhere — not here in Taiwan for example).
Btw, the interview is here: http://web.splashcast.net/go/so/2/p/BVOA1593YS/s/OWWM6184EA/sc/983328/fs/