Monica Westin, director of open policy development at Cambridge University Press & Assessment, will visit campus to discuss the dual nature of knowledge: as a market commodity and as a public good.
How should society value and steward knowledge that is costly to create yet once shared often defies scarcity and becomes priceless? What do we really mean when we claim that “information wants to be free,” and how does today’s information landscape complicate this ideal?
In this conversation-and-debate session we will unpack the dual nature of knowledge: as a market commodity that allows creators and publishers to exist; and as a public good for libraries, education, and projects like Wikipedia. After a brief scene-setting overview and a rapid survey of key ideas from information economics and commons theory, we will move into conversation and debate about real-world cases: paywalled journals and open access mandates, web scraping for creating large language models, and the role of libraries and collective knowledge projects as civic infrastructures. The session is designed to be engaging yet grounded, equipping the Kenyon College community to sharpen its collective stance on the future of knowledge.
Monica Westin is a librarian whose career spans roles at information institutions on both sides of the Atlantic, including work at Google developing copyright policy and the Google Scholar index; at university libraries in the United States and United Kingdom serving researchers and learners; advancing digital preservation infrastructure at the Internet Archive; and now driving open policy development at Cambridge University Press. She also serves as a trustee of Wikimedia UK, championing free and open access to knowledge worldwide.
Join us on Thursday, April 30, for this exciting talk by Westin hosted by the Program in Computing. The presentation will begin in Samuel Mather 201 at 10:10 am. We hope to see you there!