Thousands of sources of content, which would normally have a premium associated with them, are now free to residents of New York.
What does that mean? It means that I don’t have to pay lots of dosh to do research. It means the tools like LexisNexis have slightly less value for cross-publication search. They’re still valuable for some things, but this decreases the market share in an ever-increasing market. Ever increasing? Yes, as more people get access to the internet the more people you have who will want to find information. It’s addictive and cnn.com isn’t ever going to be good enough.
So, when kids want to do research for a school report, New York state parents won’t buy a LexisNexis AlaCarte (sic) search like they do in the office. They’ll show their kids NOVEL.
Here’s the MIT Technology Review article.
