CompuServe Messages

Doug: The usgs has been better than most agencies in making its materials widely available, including in electronic formats. By comparison, agencies like the fair-haired EPA, and the scatter-brained OSHA, with their engorged budgets, have the money for LOTS of print copies of books, pamplets, etc. The feds could save lots of money, in lots of agencies, if they made documents available only electronically, and not in print. It is remarkable how some private concerns have gotten copyright protection for their "redoing" of public domain govt. materials. The best example of monopolistic, predatory market behavior is the West Publishing Co. West takes public domain judicial opinions, written by judges (and their lawclerks), who are on the public payroll, puts in paragraph headers (which can sometimes be of help in electronic db searches of all opinions), and then copyrights its own format and pagination of the Opinions! West has held on to this stranglehold on the legal profession and the public for a century. The advent of electronic mail and publishing is a major threat to West because the opinions do not need to be published in a paginated book form. They can be uploaded to a WWW site or whatnot, and every decade's worth can be released as a CDROM. As so often happens, technology renders monopolies worthless, especially because monopolies become fat and happy, and rarely have the impetus to anticipate market change. I suppose I am fairly sanguine about the continued availability of usgs workproduct in an inexpensive form, via new modes of technology. On the database front, is there any word of Lanny's dbase coming out? Now that Idaho is back in the ice age? Is there any way for us to plan and execute a mineral dbase online here? If we defined the fields, I would volunteer for some discrete species, say zeolites and U-Th minerals, to input. Nathan