Have laptop, will travel is his approach, and he came to the UK expecting to have no difficulty in making telephone calls and multimedia file transfers with his folks and colleagues back home, via his PowerBook. Sadly, he has encountered problems at almost every step. The networking support in our universities is perhaps not yet ready for fully fledged Net citizens like Brett. He returns to his favourite subject. I find it scary that companies can now buy the digital rights to reproduce works of art on the Internet.
Commercialisation is rampant, and public access to information is being lost.
Brett's great grandfather, a bookstore manager, took over the management of the Cleveland Public Library in Ohio, in the days when readers paid to borrow. When the library began to lose money he opened the stacks to the public and organised reading sessions for local children. Free access, so long taken for granted, is under threat once more. Librarians need to wake up and organise particularly with the subject based resources. It is time to think about copyright, access issues and protecting the collections that have been built up.