Following up on last month’s announcement that the New York TimesSelect service was opened up to all educational institutions, The Chronicle of Higher Education is now reporting that NYT is backtracking and now “says that Times Select archives will be available only to students of colleges that subscribe to database companies that carry Times content.” Why? ‘Cause librarians complained that they had already paid for access to the archives through ProQuest and other aggregators.
I think I have to agree with the early commenters to the Chronicle post; it stinks that librarians would be blamed for shutting down the flow of free information. Yeah, we paid for it, and we get it in a better and more useful interface – let the schools that couldn’t afford it get the content for free! If we don’t want to pay next year we won’t. Hmmm, maybe it wasn’t the librarians who complained, maybe it was the vendors who sold it to us? Just a thought.
Technorati Tags: NYTimesSelect, Librarians