Good thread to have come back. So much has changed in a few years. For example, it is astonishing how quickly Google managed to scan a whole bunch of books. Katlaughing was recently talking about maybe selling a big old book she has, but she'd like a copy of it. I suggested she check Google Books and because it is so old it is in the public domain and she can download it.

The crisis in publishing periodicals is being met on several fronts. Our university is putting in a digital database of published works from our faculty and staff. They are copies of journal articles that our people wrote, and when they got to the point about assigning all rights to the for-profit journal, they supplied their own sheet that said (more or less) that the rights being assigned to the journal were limited, and the retained the right to keep a copy in our institutional repository. Which is free for anyone to use. Anywhere. It is still relatively early days, we've been talking about writing an article about it, but faculty have been slow to submit works and frankly, the librarians have been slow to make it easier for people to submit stuff. There is some territory to be traversed in the process. But we'll get there.

SRS