Comments on: Dear AAA, can I have my $$$ back?

By: @Kerim on AAA Abstracts Revisited, Being an Instance of Advocacy for Using the HathiTrust Digital Library and the Liberation of Already Digitized Content by Rights-holders | Jason Baird Jackson

Tue, 02 Aug 2011 18:12:18 +0000

[...] time. I just discovered it and decided to finish it off. Some readers of this blog will recall a post by Kerim at Savage Minds on the subject of making the paper abstracts from the annual AAA meetings available online. What [...]

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By: @Kerim on AAA Abstracts Revisited, Being a Instance of Advocacy for Using the HathiTrust Digital Library and the Liberation of Already Digitized Content by Rights-holders | Jason Baird Jackson

Tue, 02 Aug 2011 02:40:45 +0000

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By: mark

mark — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 06:28:09 +0000

Thanks, Jason, for pointing me to this thread. FWIW, I “posted some thoughts on this issue”:http://ideophone.org/aaa-open-access-meeting-abstracts/ over at The Ideophone without being aware of the discussion here.

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By: mark

mark — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 06:22:44 +0000

Thanks, Jason, for pointing me to this thread. FWIW, I posted some thoughts on this issue over at The Ideophone without being aware of the discussion here.

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By: Anthropology 2.0: For Real? | Savage Minds

Anthropology 2.0: For Real? | Savage Minds — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 02:45:32 +0000

[...] If you haven’t already, take a look at the Open Anthropology Cooperative. Back in May I wrote yet-another-post complaining about how the AAA relied upon poorly made user surveys instead of proper qualitative [...]

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By: Jason Baird Jackson

Jason Baird Jackson — Sun, 31 May 2009 02:38:58 +0000

Abstracts Update: Just a quick note to observe that AAA Meeting Abstracts for many years are already available in Google Books. Many (if not all of these) were digitized from the UC Libraries, which means in turn that they will soon also be included in Hathi Trust (where at least one year’s book from the UM Library’s collection is already online). One can do full text searches already on these volumes via both services. One cannot read full text. It is my understanding that all that would be required now would be for AAA to release the copyright and they could be read (not just searched) in full text. Unless I am missing something, this could thus be done at no cost to anyone.

(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.

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By: John McCreery

John McCreery — Sat, 30 May 2009 23:25:57 +0000

For what it’s worth, the problem isn’t limited to academia. I’ve had similar issues with NGOs that waste huge sums of money because the members of the board don’t understand IT and someone knows someone who can do it “for” them (I’d say “to” them) for some multiple of tens of thousands of dollars, when there is perfectly good off-the-shelf software available for a fraction of the price.

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By: Michael E. Smith

Michael E. Smith — Sat, 30 May 2009 19:59:59 +0000

Does anyone at the AAA pay attention to Savage Minds? The above comments contain several EASY solutions to the simple matter of posting meeting abstracts online, all of which are probably superior to the implied difficult and expensive procedure hinted at in the survey (which I agree was silly and ridiculous). But perhaps Savage Minds is considered by the AAA as a nuisance rather than as a potential source of ideas. Or maybe Savage Minds isn’t considered AT ALL by the AAA.

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.

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By: maggie b.

maggie b. — Wed, 27 May 2009 23:04:05 +0000

as to the original issue of whether or not to place electronic copies of the abstracts online, I too was dismayed after taking the survey, at what a costly and needless plan was being proposed – there seems to be a simple solution:

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.

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By: ckelty

ckelty — Fri, 22 May 2009 17:43:59 +0000

Well, let me put a finer point on this. I think the AAA is a neurotic institution. It’s run by non-university staff who are supposed to be “governed” (and I don’t really know what that word means in this context) by elected academics who meet once a year (sometimes more) to make binding decisions. This means a certain amount of stability for the staff, as long as they don’t make any big changes. So even if they have the SAME very good big ideas I do about how the world, the website, the publications and so on should be different, they can do nothing about it. Really–my sense is that the staff can do nothing without some elaborate “goverance” process, and this in turn becomes an excuse to do nothing because it reduces the amount of emotional trauma they have to undergo and the amount of work they have to do, makes the academics happy and keeps the staff employed. The only solution would be for angry people like me to get off their asses and do something about it. I already have at least one such job at my home institution though, so I would have to be *really* passionate to do that… and I’m just not. About all the passion I can muster concerning the AAA today is what you see right here.

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By: Andrea

Andrea — Fri, 22 May 2009 13:54:37 +0000

Really, ckelty? I hardly think the AAA would consider your ideas a threat to their employment. The AAA, Executive Board, journal editors, etc. probably have a number of ideas worthy of consideration. I believe they discussed open access and digitizing content at length, but, for some reason or other, can or will not institute such practices. It’s probably tucked away on their website somewhere, but I don’t have the time or patience to tackle that mess.

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By: Barbara Piper

Barbara Piper — Thu, 21 May 2009 12:24:56 +0000

ckelty opines: “i think the reality is that there are people whose job it is to produce the paper abstracts, create silly surveys, and run the AAA, and that if those of us with better ideas wanted their jobs we could have them. But since we don’t want their jobs and they don’t have the ideas, we are nothing but a massive threat to their continued employment.”

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.

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By: John McCreery

John McCreery — Thu, 21 May 2009 07:06:11 +0000

As long, one suspects, as departments are distinguished by discipline and those who hire wish to press the flesh at the annual meat market. (Why is it that my imagination suddenly conceives of meetings with fifteen-minute presentations and lots of milling around in the hallways as cattle pens where the buyers separate the prime from the choice from the dog food?)

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By: Kerim

Kerim — Thu, 21 May 2009 06:27:52 +0000

It seems the folks behind Open Journal Systems (a free open source CMS for publishing open access journals) also run Open Conference Systems, a free open source project for running conferences:

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

How much longer will we need professional associations?

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By: ckelty

ckelty — Thu, 21 May 2009 04:00:55 +0000

i think the reality is that there are people whose job it is to produce the paper abstracts, create silly surveys, and run the AAA, and that if those of us with better ideas wanted their jobs we could have them. But since we don’t want their jobs and they don’t have the ideas, we are nothing but a massive threat to their continued employment. On the one hand, I have massive sympathy for just such people, because no one should have to change all the time. On the other hand, I think we have just witnessed the transition from academic scholarly society to mini welfare state.

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