The Information Commons/Examples

The Information Commons are considered Academic libraries, as well as the following examples from the internet.

The internet took the information commons to another level. The internet age empowered consumers to become creators, producers, and distributors of information. The internet facilitated a decentralized production and distribution of information.

Digital Libraries- Libraries have transcended the boundaries of their traditional buildings by delivering their collections of research materials remotely. To assist scholars and transform the academy into a 21st century digital enterprise, they have developed digital libraries. They often convert works to machine-readable form from their own collections, and by purchasing and linking to electronic resources. Today, faculty and students can use their library’s research materials anytime and anyplace, and they can receive expert assistance with the click of a mouse.

Wikipedia is a free, collaboratively edited, and multilingual Internet encyclopedia supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. It currently has 22 million+ articles that have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world. Almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site.

The Internet Archive- The Internet Archive is a non-profit organization. It is an internet library, with a goal of providing a digital archive of websites, music, images, public domain books, and other types of digital materials. It is officially recognized as a library by the state of California. The purpose of the Internet Archive, "[includes] offering permanent access for researchers, historians, scholars, people with disabilities, and the general public to historical collections that exist in digital format."

Project Gutenberg- Founded in 1971, Project Gutenberg is a site that hosts over 40,000 free ebooks. It is the oldest digital library, and is run completely by volunteers. These volunteers scan and upload every work that is on the site. the mission behind Project Gutenberg is to allow everyone access to these materials. The works they host on their site are mostly in public domain, but they also have a sizable collection of books that were written by authors who gave Project Gutenberg permission to digitalize and redistribute their work.

Open Video- Open Video is intended to help researchers study ways to catalog, retrieve, preserve, and interact with digitized video once widespread access is available. The collection is housed at the University of North Carolina and contains video and descriptive information for close to 2,000 digitized video segments.

Biomed Central- In 1999, BioMed Central became the first scientific publisher to institute an alternative model that offers open-access online journals that are fully peer-reviewed. It recovers costs through author charges, some advertising, and institutional support from universities and foundations.

Creative Commons- Founded in 2001, Creative Commons (CC) is a non-profit organization which aims to facilitate the legal sharing of creative works. The organization provides a number of copyright license options to the public, free of charge. These licenses allow copyright holders to define conditions under which others may use a work and to specify what types of use are acceptable. Terms of use have traditionally been negotiated on an individual basis between copyright holder and potential licensee. Therefore, a general CC license outlining which rights the copyright holder is willing to waive enables the general public to use such works more freely.