Mr. List,
I spend countless hours at work and home making things more helpful for our researchers. I wouldn't have asked this questions if I had not spend hours scanning and OCR old one of a kind journals for our researchers so they didn't have to travel here for everything. For our researcher its more of the coming to the "founding school". I understand that not everyone can visit, but I never turned down a copy request no matter how large. We are not trying to keep researchers from viewing anything at anytime, BUT we do need to have some sort of control of our collection otherwise what good am I in taking care of our collection.
Debra Loguda-Summers,
Curator
Still National Osteopathic Museum and the
National Center for Osteopathic History
800 West Jefferson
Kirksville, MO 63501
Phone: 660 626 2359
Fax: 660 626 2984
Toll Free: 1 866 626 ATSU Ext. 2359
[log in to unmask]
www.atsu.edu/museum
>>> Larry List <[log in to unmask]> 10/05/07 3:23 PM >>>
Dear Ms. Loguda-Summers,
This becomes a question of how helpful or how hostile do you want to be
toward researchers. It is a good question for all archives to consider
these days.
In this day and age many serious scholars do not have the money or
institutional support to travel and stay at research sites and/or the
time to read through and transcribe information longhand while there.
Many must be able to download, store, print out, and scrutinze material
evenings, weekends, holidays or while commuting to other unprestigious
jobs that indirectly fund their work. To the degree that you limit
access to the material you can be assured that you are handicapping and
limiting the amount and quality of scholarship that can be done with
your materials.
A colleague (who must remain nameless) recently got an opportunity to
visit a MAJOR reseach archive (that must also remain nameless) that was
3,000 miles away. Because reservations had to made to use this center
far in advance, (despite that fact that the place was nearly empty when
he came) he was only allowed to come there for one day. He was there
when the place openned and ploughed into the copious amounts of
important material they had, noting everything pertinent that he would
read in full or translate carefully (for weeks) later from xeroxes. He
was then informed that of all this material (the only copies extant)
there was a limit of 30 copies per researcher per visit. He was happy to
pay whatever copy fees they charged. BUT, he would have to re-visit the
next day and the next and the next to get any more material, which was
logisitcally impossible. Hence, the institution made the cost of copies
include the added cost of more airline tickets, hotel rooms and rental cars.
He was visiting at the authorized behest of the estate of the artist in
question and was researching to write an essay for another major museum
about this artist. There was much more he could have written concerning
what he found had he been able to spend time with copies of the material
once back home and been able to provide complete accurate quotes,
tranlsations and citations. The "guardians and stewards" of this
valuable material crippled his efforts to do serious research and
publish it because of they limited access and refused copies or
flashless photocopying via digital camera. I fear that people working at
institutions sometimes forget the rest of the world and begin to assume
because they, themselves, have open-ended time and access to materials
everyone else does too.
99.9 % of researchers are going to use any material they have access to
responsibly and are happy to offer clear citations to assist others,
etc.The other fraction are unscrupulous enough to crack PDF locks or
anything else you may try to affix to "guard" the material and will
mis-use things no matter what you do. Many of us hope that institutions,
large and small, will do some realistic re-considertion of their
policies in a digital and (research-underfunded) era.
Sincerely yours,
Larry List
Debra Loguda-Summers wrote:
> Hi everyone,
>
> We are working on a scanning project of old medical journals and have
> created PDF files that are OCR for our researchers. We have it locked
> so it can not be printed but I am looking for a way to lock the PDF
> file from being downloaded from our website. Can this be done? It
> there another format that we can use that will allow are researchers
> to still search the text? HELP :)
>
> Debra Loguda-Summers, Curator
> Still National Osteopathic Museum and National Center for Osteopathic
> History
> 800 West Jefferson
> Kirksville, MO 63501
> Phone: 660 626 2359
> Fax: 660 626 2984
> Toll Free: 1 866 626 ATSU Ext. 2359
> [log in to unmask]
> www.atsu.edu/museum
>
>
> The Mission of the Still National Osteopathic Museum is to collect,
> preserve, and make available artifacts and related materials to
> communicate the history and philosophy about the osteopathic
> principles of mind, body and spirit to a global audience.
>
>
>
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