Marcia J. Bates writes > After retiring, I worked full time for 4 years as Editor-in-Chief, By which time many of the original submissions were probably out of date. > We worked and re-worked the contents so as to create as > comprehensive, balanced, and up-to-date coverage but even by the publisher's own admission almost 30% is not original material. > Yet only half of the US and Canadian LIS programs have bought the > encyclopedia, according to OCLC's WorldCat. I suspect the $3000 price tag is a problem. > I know these have been unusually hard times economically, but if we > are not able to recognize and take up such a huge communal project > so central to our field--then what does matter to us as a > professional community? I can't answer that generally. Personally I am in the field to make information freely available to people. Therefore I suggested right from the start to make the chapters freely available on E-LIS, a system I co-founded. > Rather than an encyclopedia to be consulted only occasionally, it > should be thought of as a comprehensive state-of-the-art review of > all the specialties in the information disciplines--a review that > can be consulted frequently, with the articles widely used in > classrooms. Given the breadth of coverage of the field, most of us just don't need these articles. We can barely keep up with what is written in our own narrow areas. > ASIST members were kind enough to award it the "Best > Information Science Publication of the Year" award for 2010. Well these were probably the authors voting for their own chapters. Cheers, Thomas Krichel http://openlib.org/home/krichel http://authorclaim.org/profile/pkr1 skype: thomaskrichel