John Cassara's Blog

Open Access November 23, 2009

Reading John Willinsky’s The Access Principle really made me think about the ease of access to scholarly journals that I have basically taken for granted over the past six years of undergraduate and graduate school. Essentially, if I’ve been working on a research paper and wanted access to a journal article (or even some newspaper articles), there was about a 90% chance that I could instantly access it online through my school’s library system. As the Old Scholar has pointed out, occasionally you will find an article that your library does not have access to, but I’ve always been able to get those articles through the interlibrary loan system. The fact is, my status as a university student has allowed me to read anything that I have wanted to over the past six years. After I (hopefully) graduate in May, that is going to change. I’m no longer going to have that privilege.

Of course, Willinsky would argue that having access to journal articles shouldn’t be a privilege, it should be a right. And I agree with him. I know that there are economic realities involved, but fundamentally, why should research (particularly research done by academics at public universities) be closed off from a member of the general public who wants access to it? As Willinsky brings to light, open access is really about public access to knowledge. The prohibitive cost of higher education in this country has already limited that public access to some degree, because it discourages people who don’t think that pursuing a degree in higher education is economically viable. Journals that are not open access have contributed to the high cost of education. Indeed, the exorbitant prices that university libraries currently have to pay for access to certain journals and databases is mind-blowing. I do realize that even if every journal became open access, everything would not immediately become free. There would still be a lot of costs involved, and assuredly the majority of those costs would still be paid by university libraries. However, open access would allow anyone from anywhere (i.e. non-university students) to read what they want to read.

Therefore, I agree with Willinsky’s argument that open access is a human rights issue- everyone deserves access to knowledge. So much of education is already closed off to the privileged few, journal articles do not have to be.

Website Mock Up November 10, 2009

I finally have a mock up of my website up and running (though because I’m posting it so late, I don’t know if anyone will actually have a chance to see it before class tonight). Anyway, I decided to actually register a whole other blog with WordPress, and basically use that blog as my prospective site. You can see my creation here.

You will notice two things immediately. One, the name of the site stinks (I need to actually come up with something creative/descriptive). Two, the main page does not have any actual content. However, it does display the basic structure of the site, with links to the main pages of the site. First, there is an About page, which will eventually describe who I am, what the site is, and what it is trying to accomplish. For now, the only content it has is a brief note to let potential visitors know that the current site is just part of a project for this class.

I also created a Players page, which is the one page of the site that actually does have content. Ultimately, I would want this page to have an elaborate search tool where users could search for players by name, school, conference, or year. I would also have links to the various conference pages, which would feature tables similar to the one I actually created. That table displays the name of the first African American football player(s) at the schools of the Big 12 Conference, and the year in which they integrated the team. The goal, obviously, is to have a link to articles about every one of these players. For now, I mocked up a sample page for George Flippin, who played at the University of Nebraska from 1891-1894. The page is far from perfect (the image is not aligned properly), and the content is probably too long (I basically copied information I had written about Flippen for an earlier paper), but it will do for now. I also created a page for Edward Harvey, the first African American player at Kansas, but I only had time to put up his picture, not actually write any content.

Although I could easily identify the first black football players at 10 of the 12 Conference schools (both through prior research and simple internet searches), I could not identify the first black players at Oklahoma State or Texas Tech. Therefore, I wrote “Tell Me!” in the field and hyperlinked that text to my Contribute page. That page (which is now blank) will have a field where visitors to the site can enter in any information they may have about a particular player or school. Therefore, if a visitor actually does know who the first black player at one of those schools was, they can immediately tell me. As I have mentioned earlier, user contributions will be key to my site.

The final two pages I created were Sources and Timeline. The Sources page will feature a bibliographic index of all the scholarly materials I have come across relating to the integration of college football. The Timeline page will feature (what else?) a timeline of key events in the integration of college football. So the incident between Nebraska-Missouri that I describe on the George Flippin page would be added into the timeline. In fact, I ultimately envision that the incident would get its own separate page, and would be linked to from both the timeline and Flippin’s player page.

Anyway, it is far from perfect, but I was excited that I was able to put something together that at least somewhat resembled what I had envisioned as my final website. Of course, I would definitely appreciate any comments/feedback from the class.

Open Library vs. Google Books (not even close) November 3, 2009

Apologies for the delayed post this week….

I love Google Books. I have used it a number of times in the past few years in doing research for my classes. What I really love about it is the fact that you can do a full-text search for a specific word or phrase in their entire library (books and other publications). That is really great when you are researching a narrow subject, like the integration of college football. Indeed, searching for “integration” AND “college football” brings you 888 results on Google Books. The fact that you can actually read some of these books immediately on your computer makes Google Books an invaluable resource.

So I was excited to explore Open Library, which I had never used (or even heard of), but is essentially the same sort of resource as Google Books: a digital library. For the sake of comparison, I performed the same full-text search of the Open Library database, using the terms “integration” AND “college football.” That search returned 0 results. I was pretty disappointed by this. So I went through the site and did some more digging. In the end, I came to the conclusion that Open Library is simply a less comprehensive version of Google Books. Because of that, I’m not sure why anyone would want to use it. I do like the overall design of the site, but that is hardly a reason to go to a site that is primarily a research tool. I’m definitely going to stick with Google Books.