Ecology, Economy, Equity by Mandy Henk

Author:Mandy Henk [Henk, Mandy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BUS099000 Business & Economics / Environmental Economics, LAN025010 Language Arts & Disciplines / Library & Information Science / Administration & Management
ISBN: 9780838919699
Publisher: American Library Association
Published: 2014-07-18T04:00:00+00:00

The Digital Library and the Enclosure of the Information Ecosystem

The consolidation of the publishing industry into a few behemoths and the all encompassing nature of a webscale ILS surely would have taken Shera and his contemporaries by surprise. I suspect even Guédon is startled by the sheer scale of the current system. Librarians in Shera’s day did not foresee the extent to which the advent of high technology and its application to the “library problem” would lead to the old process of enclosure. Hence, a technological problem has been replaced with an economic problem with the result that the full utopia once imagined cannot come into being.

Enclosure is the process of taking a previously shared resource, a graz-ing field, a water source, or even information, and erecting barriers to use. The most well-known example of an enclosure movement is in the sheep grazing common of England in the Middle Ages. There first the nobles, and then eventually those who had been made wealthy through industrialization, began taking land that had previously been used by all members of a village for their own private use. The goal was to raise as many sheep as possible for the new mills being built in the cities. As a contemporary poem describes the process:

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