Information Research Weblog

Current Cites is an electronic publication I've drawn attention to before. Here are a couple of items that interested me:

I'm in the process of reviewing the latest version of EndNote, the bibliography organizer, and this version has a new feature, linking to the original source through the OpenURL protocol - coincidentally, Current Cites draws attention to an interview in the OCLC Newsletter with Herbert Van de Sompel, the originator of the protocol and a key figure in the Open Archives Initiative

The other piece is from First Monday that e-journal that is just a little younger than Information Research :-) This paper concerns 'open content' - that is, what you are reading now, and what you read in every new issue of Information Research. Magnus Cedergren, the author of 'Open content and value creation' states in the abstract:

In this paper, I consider open content as an important development track in the media landscape of tomorrow. I define open content as content possible for others to improve and redistribute and/or content that is produced without any consideration of immediate financial reward — often collectively within a virtual community. The open content phenomenon can to some extent be compared to the phenomenon of open source. Production within a virtual community is one possible source of open content. Another possible source is content in the public domain. This could be sound, pictures, movies or texts that have no copyright, in legal terms.

and in the body of the paper he looks at three examples of open content:

• Open Directory Project (ODP)
• Wikipedia
• Rick Prelinger's digital film archive

All in all, an interesting paper.