[SLLS] Rescue campaign for the International Bibliography of Sign Language

[Trevor Jenkins]

On 7 May 2011, at 00:08, Terry Janzen wrote:

> Elitist? Maintaining and updating such a massive bibliography takes  
> an incredible number of hours of work. That costs somebody. ...

There's an analogy with software development here. The big  
corporations spend huge amounts of money creating software products.  
Then there are the open source teams creating excellent software for  
free --- for example, the Linux and *BSD operating systems, the  
Apache web server and its adjunct projects, the OpenOffice.org (and  
its recent fork as LibreOffice when commercial interests wanted to  
control the freely given time by the developers) office product  
suite, the MySql and PostGres and SQLite database systems, the ruby  
and python and perl and other programming languages, and the ELAN  
video annotation system is released under the GNU Public Licence.

Sure there's a cost to compiling a bibliography. Just as there is  
with the development of those major software products. However, it's  
whether the cost is bourne by those doing the work, or those who use  
the work or whether time is given freely and altruistically.

> I think Bencie’s proposal is at least worth some discussion. I  
> think many people could convince their libraries to subscribe, so  
> it might just work....

My point is that for jobbing interpreters and trainees they are  
themselves their libraries.

> It’s been great to have the bibliography for free all this time,  
> but I’m not surprised in the slightest that the time has come to  
> think about its worth, and alternatives for maintaining it. Would a  
> publisher be interested in picking it up, by chance? For example,  
> Mouton de Gruyter? They are moving to a lot of online services. But  
> of course, if so, that wouldn’t happen without a subscription fee.


Or copy the existing bibliography to Zotero and making compilation a  
collaborative activity. Payment becoming "use it? update it!"

Regards, Trevor.

<>< Re: deemed!




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