The Rob Kling Center for Social Informatics offers a Speaker Series each semester. Alice Robbin (faculty member, School of Library and Information Science) and Alan Dennis (faculty member, Kelley School of Business) are the current Co-Directors of the Center. The series is free and open to the public. Often additional student events are planned around the talks.
On March 27, 2009 Kristin Eschenfelder will be giving a talk for the RKCSI Speaker Series (see abstract and biographical sketch from the RKCSI website below).
The talk is entitled "The 1980's Downloading Crisis: Why Can We Do What We Do with Bibliographic Citations?". It will be held from 1:30 p.m.—2:45 p.m. in Informatics East, Room 130
ABSTRACT
Controversy about unauthorized downloading or "piracy" of digital materials seems like a recent intellectual property phenomenon. But an earlier "downloading crisis" occurred in the 1980's when users, newly equipped with personal computers began to download data from commercial databases like DIALOG and Chemical Abstracts. Database vendors feared that downloading of citations would undermine their revenues and they initially forbade downloading, employing the rhetoric of piracy and economic harm common in today's intellectual property disputes. But, also similar to today, some users continued to download despite vendor protests. What led to a change in database vendors' attitudes toward downloading between 1980 and the mid-1990s? This talk focuses on change in use regimes associated with one type of digital intellectual property: scholarly bibliographical citations. Use Regimes are an analytical tool to analyze changes in who can access intellectual or cultural property and what they can do with it. Analyzing changes in past regimes helps us better understand contemporary debates about what counts as legitimate and illegitimate uses of intellectual and cultural property, the potential effects of access and use restrictions on knowledge and cultural production, and the circumstances important to facilitate change in access and use rules.
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
Kristin R. Eschenfelder is Associate Professor at the School of Library and Information Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research focuses on social, legal and business norms determining use of intellectual and cultural property and how and why these norms change over time. She is the 2006 recipient of the first IMLS Laura Bush 21st Century Junior Faculty Research Grant to support her work on use regimes. Her work has also been funded by the American Library Association's Carroll Preston Baber and Samuel Lazerow awards, and the ALA Government Documents Roundtable. Her research appears in leading library and information science and social informatics journals, among them the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, The Information Society, Information Technology and People, Government Information Quarterly, Journal of Information Science, and Library and Information Science Research.
Posted March 03, 2009