No Big Deal | Library Babel Fish
peter.suber's bookmarks 2019-03-30
Summary:
"While our system is dandy for finding things we’re not allowed to share, it’s not always great at discovering open access materials. Quite often, an open access publication listed in a database or a book in the catalog will fail to link to the item, and that confuses students. The behind-the-scenes work that has to go into making things connect from one database to another or from a catalog to an electronic source is complex, and it may seem silly to worry about cataloging something that can be found with a Google search – but if our shared catalogs lead to things we can’t borrow but fail to find open access books, we’re really dropping the ball...."