ranting below the fold follows
ACM Copyright says:
ACM aims to serve readers' and authors' interests by publishing high-quality original works, maintaining the integrity of these works, defending authors' rights in them against plagiarism, providing a stable means of linking to them, promoting the dissemination of these works to the widest possible readership in contemporary media, and preserving access to them indefinitely despite changes in technology.
While I don't doubt they are sincere, the problem with locking stuff up on their private server (this goes for JSTOR and IEEE and the various other libraries too) is that sometimes your server goes down.
Right now, ACM is telling me:
Error Diagnostic Information
An error occurred while attempting to establish a connection to the service.
The most likely cause of this problem is that the service is not currently running. You can use the 'Services' Control Panel to verify that the service is running and to restart it if necessary.
Windows NT error number 2 occurred.
Which, while fascinating and--most likely--transient, is NOT what a guy working on his dissertation needs for the four or five references that he's trying to pop into his work at the last moment.
The problem is, see, ACM provides a reliable digital library and prevents anyone (except the author) from keeping a copy around. Which means that when the digital library goes down, we're just stuck. While this is nothing compared to the restrictions of a paper library, which can not only catch on fire but often close in the evenings, it's substantially worse than allowing documents to propagate. Say, to Google and Citeseer, which each have their own reliability problems... but collectively are very powerful and reliable.
July 27, 2004 08:02 PM | TrackBack | in Data and Documents