(Again, unless I am missing something….) Full text access to the abstracts has not previously been available, thus we are thinking about a new service. This case provides an almost laboratory-quality test case for open access versus (attempted) for-profit enclosure.* Faced with the already existing ability to make the meeting abstracts fully available to the world at no cost to the AAA or to attempt to enclose them via a complex toll access scheme, which direction will we take? Hathi Trust is a not-for profit undertaking. Its goals are scholarly and in the public interest. If we share such goals, we have an opportunity to partner with them and do good with little effort. Will we?

I now know that the search term “windigo” apparently appears on page 71 of the 1975 Annual Meetings Abstracts book in Hathi Trust. For the cost of an email to mdp-help {at} umich(.)edu, a duly authorized representative of the AAA could make it possible for me to read the abstract in which this word appeared and, in a matter of months, for all of us to read any abstract in nearly any abstract book the AAA ever published.

P.S. Thanks for those who have continued to follow this tread.

*I recognize that enclosed (gated, limited) digital access to the abstracts could be framed as a member benefit rather than as a potential direct revenue stream. Such a sense of the service was implied by the survey. I am not unsympathetic to the revenue and also the membership challenges faced by scholarly societies, but the realities of this situation together with recent AAA history suggest to me that building a complex abstracts vending machine is not worth the time, expense, and internal conflict that it would entail. I would feel better as a member knowing that my association was collaborating with public-interest partners than I would knowing that my association was investing precious resources in rube goldberg machines designed to make me a happier member.

I frequently take pot shots at the Society for American Archaeology about Open Access, journals, meetings, etc. in my blog, “Publishing Archaeology” and in letters to the editor of the SAA newsletter. But I never get any reaction from the SAA. I used to attribute this to the obscurity of my blog, but after following Savage Minds for a while, I wonder if the silence may derive partly from the culture of professional associations, who just don’t want to hear new and alternative solutions. Perhaps open access seems too edgy to these people.

why don’t they just post the abstracts as a pdf file on the aaa website? as aaa does with the preliminary program…. which one then downloads and can search at will, as I think Jason mentions above.

Maybe. When I was a graduate student, writing up, living in Washington DC, I applied to the AAA for a position doing ‘research’ for the association — essentially doing those surveys — and I was told by the then-director that they were not interested in an academic anthropologist for that position. There was a large group of association employees who circulated among the several thousand associations in D.C., and ultimately a lot of association staff come from, or join, that network. Academics from (or even members of) any discipline didn’t seem to be regarded as an employment threat to the staff of academic associations.

And while ckelty may have better ideas, associations have ways to solicit and consider new ideas that don’t require that they hire people who basically don’t want to work in that environment in the first place.

http://pkp.sfu.ca/?q=ocs

How much longer will we need professional associations?

It is a separate matter to inquire into how much revenue, if any, the AAA’s print publication of the abstracts generates. I am less concerned with this than I am in preserving and making accessible a piece of the scholarly record. My elaborated comments were aimed at countering the suggestion that the abstracts, as documents, were not of any use.

While making a claim for their usefulness to some, I was not insisting that they are useful to everyone.

My original comment questioned the value of these abstracts in general, but the unstated point was that the cost and trouble of printing them in a book was hardly worth it, when they are all submitted on-line these days and could be archived digitally much more easily and cheaply.