It is Open Access Week and for that reason, SUNY Albany libraries held an afternoon-long event. I learned a lot at the brown-bag discussion about how open access policies could dramatically improve the abilities of librarians to serve their constituents, and dramatically improve the ability of universities to generate and transmit knowledge. The horror stories about copyright, DRM, and unfair IP practices were, well, horrific. In the afternoon I gave a seminar about the openness of our group at NYU, including this blog, our web-exposed SVN repo, and our free data and code policies (obeyed where we are permitted to obey them; see above). It was great, and a great reminder that librarians are currently—in many universities—the most radical intellectuals, with sharp critiques of the conflicts and interactions between institutions of higher learning and institutions of commerce.
On the train home, I tried out importance sampling for my posterior PDF over catalogs
project. Not a good idea! The prior is so very, very large.
No comments:
Post a Comment