Going underground for scholarly content
March 5th, 2009 3:30 pm | by Catherine Lavallee-Welch
Brian Scott Mathews over at The Ubiquitous Librarian made some very interesting looking into the underground market for academic materials via illegal file sharing sites like bit torrent. Apparently, his fictional research brought up big time reference titles like the CRC handbooks, the entire Referex engineering e-book collection, Harvard Business Cases, textbooks and tutti quanti.
Hey, does it matter where the students get it if they do use scholarly, quality sources? At least, they not Googling everything? Well, there’s the thorny, ginormous issue of copyright. I cannot condone students downloading illegaly but now, I cannot ignore it either.
As the first USF librarian at the Lakeland campus (now Polytechnic), I opened the USF Polytechnic Library in January 2007 and have developed its various services. I've held positions as information broker, Internet consultant and academic librarian in Canada, the US and Europe. A blogger since 2001, I've created and maintained several sites in, and outside, of the biblioblogosphere. I'm active in SLA, and currently serve as on the boards of the Academic Division and the Florida-Caribbean Chapter.
