Joho the Blog
An Entry from the Archives

I'm a little surprised to see you researching with Highbeam, David, when (since you're at Harvard) you have one of the world's very best library systems at your fingertips. I'm not suggesting you should leave your desk and visit one of its many excellent physical libraries. But the number of electronic resources at Harvard's "E-Research" portal (http://lib.harvard.edu/) utterly dwarf what's available at Highbeam. According to its home page, Highbeam indexes only 3,000 titles; it omits nearly all the peer-reviewed academic journals in the field I know best; and you have to pay for it. Harvard's library system, on the other hand, has *hundreds* of indexing databases similar to Highbeam, only one of which - - EBSCO's Academic Search Premier - - has 4,700 titles (3,600 available full text online); and it's all free if you have a Harvard ID. Almost every small college, major university, and large public library offers more information to its users than Highbeam. So, as a practicing librarian, I suggest you explore the power that a generation of tech-savvy professionals have been assembling for you in your library.

Michael,
How many people worldwide have access to Harvard or one of the other fantastic libraries that offer so much to the students that go there? While Highbeam isn't as comprehensive it is available to anyone that can get online.

It'd be great if all those libraries made their archives available electronically to anyone worldwide. They don't necessarily have to be free either.

Thank you, Michael. After a year at Harvard, this is the first I've heard of that resource. Maybe I should have gone to orientation :)

In my first poking around at the Harvard site, I'm getting bibliographic info about articles but not the articles themselves. I'll keep looking...

Yes, Damien, access to commercially produced databases is an important issue. They are created by businesses who invest millions to build them, and must license access to them for years before they get that investment back (I know this from dealing with some of their creators). But in the U.S., most cities and states fund public access to the most important and useful electronic sources through their library or education budgets. Anyone with a public library card can access them from home, for example, here in Wisconsin where I live. Personally, I still always start at Google, and the free Web almost always gives me the information I need. My professional work is devoted almost entirely to making the print resources of one of the nation's best research institutions available for free on the Web (www.wisconsinhistory.org). I sympathize entirely with your sentiments, but I also recognize that we don't live in the People's Republic of America. The Web is very much a commercial environment, and access to information is (like access to health care, housing, food or anything else) a commodity that is bought and sold.

I've posted about HighBeam and David Weinberger endorsement on www.clipperz.net

Commentinh here since trackback doesn't seem to work ...
http://www.clipperz.net/users/master_clipperz/blog/2005/07/25/highbeam_no_thanks_im_a_blogger