[Sighfis-l] ASIST History Fund Awards 2013

[Lai Ma]

I am pleased to announce the winners of the ASIST History Fund Awards this year:

The ASIST History Fund Research Award is presented to Kalpana Shankar and Kristin Eschenfelder's research project: "Social Science Data Archives: A Historical View of Sustainability, Access and Use"

Topic of Investigation:
"This project will focus on the earliest and most long-standing example of scientific data archives: social science data archives (SSDAs). Social science data--drawn from government censuses, marketing surveys, historical documents and academic research studies--predate both computers and the Internet, and provide a unique opportunity to examine what makes an archive sustainable over long periods of time, through the ups and downs of funding cycles, and across massive changes in technical and organizational infrastructure."


The ASIST History Fund Best Paper Award is presented to Xiaohua Zhu's paper: "Who had access to JURIS?: A failed case of open access":

Abstract:
"In the early 1990s, public interest groups and small legal publishers pushed for public access to federal court decisions contained in JURIS, a legal information retrieval system used for in-house search by government employees. This early open access effort to free the law not only failed but eventually led to the shutdown of the JURIS system. This paper presents the findings of a historical investigation into this shutdown. It argues that the open access movement involves complicated social negotiations--many factors participated in shaping access rights to primary legal information in digital format. The factors leading to the failure of the open access request included relevant government agencies' indifference about information dissemination, commercial information providers' interests, and the ambiguity of the copyright ability of case law information. This study contributes to the broader open access and open knowledge (OA/OK) debates by presenting a failed case in the early stage of the open access movement and by summarizing the lessons learned from this failed case."


On behalf of the ASIST History Fund Advisory Board,

Lai Ma, Ph.D.
Lecturer
School of Information and Library Studies
University College Dublin
Belfield, Dublin 4, Ireland
lai.ma at ucd.ie


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The ASIS&T History Fund was established by the ASIS&T Board of Directors
in June 2000 for the purposes of supporting and encouraging research and
publication in the history of information science and technology. The
Fund is supported by donations (including book loyalties) from ASIS&T
members and others. The Fund Advisory Board encourages further donations
from anyone interested in supporting historical study of information
science and technology.



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