2005 Student Travel Award Winners
NEASIST is pleased to announce that the winners of the 2005 awards are:
Jim Campbell
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
School of Information Science
for his paper: "Reactions to the Enclosure of the Information Commons: 2000-2004."
Abstract
In the U.S. Constitution, Congress is tasked with granting only one specific property right: “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries” (Art. 1, S 8). The Founders’ wished to create a social contract which provided incentives for creators with the understanding that the right to freely use their work would revert to society after “limited Times.” That social contract is still the justification for copyright today. For the first 180 years of the Republic, copyright worked well to achieve its social purpose of balancing the rights of copyright owners and users.However, since 1976, and particularly in the last decade, changes in law and technology in the U.S., and, in fact, around the world, have resulted in what James Boyle has referred to as the “enclosure of the information commons,” a fencing off of access to information that he and others contend violates the social contract so carefully crafted by the Founders, and that tips the balance of rights between owners and users dramatically in favor of owners at the expense of users. This “enclosure” has resulted in a wide variety of responses from those who oppose it. This study examined those responses and postulates that they fall into six categories: Legislate, Litigate, Limit, Create competing systems, Legally re-interpret, Philosophize and mobilize. This paper reviews those responses and their effects on the information commons in the digital age.
and
Johanna Kasubowski
Simmons College
Graduate School of Library and Information Science
for her paper: "Providing Subject Access to Images."Abstract
The visual orientation of our world has encouraged a demand for accessible visual materials. Images once used in the teaching of art history, are increasingly being used within an interdisciplinary context. The advent of digital image collections has made images more accessible to a wider public, thus placing greater importance on the metadata that makes the images searchable. Image subject description is much more complex, mostly because of the subjectivity of it, than subject description of textual materials. Textual materials have not only clearly defined access points -author, title, and subject headings - but also common places to find source info - title page, cover, written content. Famous paintings and photographs may have definitive descriptive keys, but commonplace images are sought for both their implicit and concrete subject content. Subject access of images has long been discussed and approached by different means, with the ultimate goal of retrieval. The difficulty lies in the fact that images are dependent on textual description. There exist no scientific and prescribed method in providing subject access to images, but this paper sets out to highlight the intellectual and technical issues that cumulatively approach the topic of subject access to images.Understanding that images are multi-faceted in terms of providing subject access due to their nature of being of and about, is the first step in approaching comprehensive subject access. Just as textual pieces are described in both broad and narrow terms, so must an image. The human factor is important to consider. The cataloguer must be systematic and be guided by use of standards and controlled vocabularies to enable consistent access to images. The ultimate goal is retrieval, and the user is to be served in the most efficient manner. Fortunately, the user is also responsible for quantifying particular images for a specific representation. The use of controlled vocabularies and metadata schemes can introduce consistency in data entry, thus making the difficult task of subject access more predictable when in the hands of the cataloguer and then from the user’s point of view. Pictorial materials are truly unique from textual materials, but with both, there is a common goal, making the materials available to users. Our current image culture is demanding, and the development of new systems to retrieve images by subject access will be sought with the understanding of user needs.
These awards entitle each recipient up to $750 to help defray the costs of attendance at the 2005 ASIST Annual Meeting, "Sparking Synergies: Bringing Research and Practice Together" which takes place Oct. 28-Nov. 2 in Charlotte, North Carolina.
Congratulations to both Jim and Johanna for their outstanding research papers!
darcy@mit.edu
07 July 2005