The road not taken meaning software#
The road not taken meaning free#

The library profession has long upheld the principle of privacy for our users, and librarians have fought for that principle through innumerable legal challenges. My focus is on three of these fundamental issues: These are insidious issues that challenge our own value systems and missions. вЂњSome faculty members find the trend worrisome: is a professor who stands to profit from his or her research as credible as one who does not? Will universities provide more support to researchers working in profitable fields than to scholars toiling in more musty areas?вЂќ Д«eneath the glaring headlines of change, there are deeper issues adrift issues that lie beneath the surface, iceberg like, relatively invisible, rising periodically to public discourse. Instead, it will offer the expertise of its faculty on a new for-profit Website that will be spun off as an independent company.

The road not taken meaning free#

edu model that provides free sites listing courses and research interests. Universities such as Columbia are going retail-on the Web. вЂњNew Profits for Professors: Universities Grapple with New Ways to Turn Ideas into CashвЂќ ( Newsweek, February 28, 2000). Today's marketplace is boisterous with new players and commercial interests vying for a voice at the table, fighting to make their вЂњrightsвЂќ central. When information is recognized as a commodity, the stakes in ownership are raised dramatically. This new, commercialized way of thinking about knowledge and information raises serious questions about longstanding values held by librarians regarding access to and management and preservation of knowledge resources. Greenspan argued that technology generated macroeconomic value not only through technology product sales but also as an aid in the enterprisewide process of getting the right information to the right person at the right time. Most of what we currently perceive as wealth is intellectual and impalpable.

The road not taken meaning software#

Today's economic value is best symbolized by exceedingly complex, miniaturized, integrated circuits and the ideas-the software that utilizes them. The quintessential manifestations of America's industrial might earlier this century-large steel mills, auto assembly plants, petrochemical complexes and skyscrapers-have been replaced by a gross domestic product that has been downsized as ideas have replaced physical bulk and physical efforts as creators of value. Ford Foundation and a university audience, In a speech in September l999, Alan Greenspan, chair of the Federal Reserve Board, told the Gerald R. Content, the very content that we have so carefully managed in our libraries for centuries, took on a new importance. Marketing analysts recognized the power of new computer tools to segregate markets and sell products and knowledge to targeted groups of potential buyers.

Information and knowledge took on a new value: information moved from the domain of libraries, becoming a commodity-bartered, bought, and sold in the broader marketplace of Wall Street and Silicon Valley. Spurred by new technologies, the economic models of developed countries made a quantum leap into the information age. Society has gained alternative methods of disseminating knowledge and of publishing, bringing us closer to the creation of a true global village. Indeed, the advent of the Web and the explosion of the Internet occurred only seven years ago, bringing new ways of accessing all kinds of information. The world is not the same as it was twenty or even ten years ago. Let us start by taking a look at the world in which we live. Walk down a path with me that examines choices around privacy, intellectual property rights, and access to quality information, core values that medical librarians support and rely upon every day of the year. Choices surrounding our fundamental beliefs in an age of disruptive technologies and value-changing economies are the theme of this paper. We, too, know of choices forced upon us with dizzying pace, choices made with adrenaline and exhilaration, agonizingly belabored, or often ignored. The stillness of the woods was not yet pierced by jet-propelled aircraft and, yet, Robert Frost knew then of roads not taken. The disruption of the interstate highway with its unrelenting straight lines had not yet cleaved the fences one from another. The rhythm of the crafted stone fences of New England marked the boundaries of the land. When Frost wrote these words in Vermont more than a century ago, he had no intimation of the myriad choices that overwhelm our senses today.

These charming pastoral words evoke a not so subtle hint at the importance of choices made and opportunities unexplored.