I just took a quick look at The Learner’s Library As far as I can tell, the service breaks down as follows:
- LL contains a collection of academic journal articles that have been pre-cleared for copyright.
- There’s a search interface to that collection that includes what appears at first glance to be pretty decent natural language search.
- Searches return results including an appropriate excerpt, a full, formatted citation, and a link to the full text of the article.
- Professors can assemble “course packs” of articles, essentially Furling the collection for one-click access by students.
I bet we could assemble equivalent service for open access journals using free, loosely-coupled pieces. (more…)