Digital Grinnell

This semester, the scholarly works of Grinnell College faculty members are becoming available free to anyone, anywhere — through the College’s new online repository, Digital Grinnell.

Grinnell College faculty members voted to provide online access to faculty-authored articles that have been published in peer-reviewed journals, to promote access and learning.  They hope all members of the Grinnell community will consider providing access to  other scholarly materials  such as course syllabi, book chapters, and books.

“Digital Grinnell and similar systems encourage more democratic sharing of knowledge,” says Richard Fyffe, the Samuel R. and Marie-Louise Rosenthal Librarian at Grinnell. “That resonates deeply with Grinnell’s values, and in particular with our commitment to educating women and men to serve the common good.”

Easy access to atlatls

John Whittaker’s extensive works on atlatls (or spear-throwers) will likely be among the first represented in Digital Grinnell. The anthropology professor was one of seven faculty members who served on the task force that examined open access at Grinnell. Whittaker has for many years maintained an up-to-date, comprehensive, annotated bibliography on atlatls, which he posts on his website and the World Atlatl Association’s site.

He says, “I believe in sharing my work with professional colleagues and with friends who have an interest in what I’m doing. Digital Grinnell will help scholars by making the material available and easy to find.”  

Digital Grinnell also centralizes and standardizes information, Whittaker notes, making ownership more clear. He cites as an example a photograph he took that is frequently shared on the Web, without a photographer’s credit. 

Adding institutional authority

Centralized ownership also provides credibility, notes Lesley Wright, director of the Faulconer Gallery and lecturer in art: “In an era when you can’t ever really be sure about the quality of information you find online, colleges should be a place where learners can be confident they’ll find the best possible information.”  

Wright, who also served on the open-access task force, notes there are special issues associated with open access to visual art, especially work produced after 1900. Copyright for those works is retained by the artist; to make the work freely available on the Web, museum curators must secure permission and determine required credit lines for each individual artwork. Often, the museum must pay the artist a fee to make the work available through open access.

Even so, Wright says, the art world is moving toward open access — and that’s the way it should be. “The Faulconer has always been dedicated to ‘holding things in safekeeping for the world,’” she says. “That’s what scholarship is all about. It’s social justice, frankly.”

Serving the common good

For computer science lecturer John Stone, open access is a political issue born out of the free-software movement of the early 1980s and Creative Commons, a nonprofit organization focused on sharing and using creativity and knowledge by providing free legal tools. Open access, Stone says, is the next logical step.

Education, he notes, has always sought to serve the common good; it’s an altruistic practice built on “a spirit of generosity about extending knowledge as widely as possible.”  The Internet helps even those in some developing countries get easy access to ideas.

Stone is putting his ideals into action: He’s negotiated a contract with his publisher that allows him to put the latest version of his upcoming book on algorithms and functioning program language on Digital Grinnell, giving everyone free access to it.