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The article focuses on the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), which was created by the Association of Research Libraries in 1998, to serve as a catalyst for action and to reduce barriers to the access and the use of information. SPARC's mission is to correct imbalances in the scholarly publishing system and the belief that these imbalances inhibit the advancement of scholarship and are at odds with fundamental needs of scholars and the academic enterprise. The SPARC has three program areas, which includes educating stakeholder on scholarly communication, advocating policy changes, and incubating market-based initiatives.

This article reports that open access to scholarly information is a hot-button issue that quickly triggers heated discussion, especially if the topic arises in a mixed group of librarians and publishers. Issues surrounding open access are important, and they deserve serious considerations. Serious considerations however, requires the recognition of certain legal and economic realities. In addressing them in this article, it will seem to some readers that the author is belaboring the obvious, but he thinks a careful treatment of these points is necessary, because while many in the library profession recognize them as self-evidently true, there are some who regard them as blasphemous. First, there is no such thing as free information. There is a second basic reality of the information economy that bears on the open-access question, and this one is more controversial than the first: Information is not a public good.

The article focuses on the announcement made by Endeavor Information Systems that it is implementing changes to many of its key product offerings. The first changes are referred to as the Endeavor foundation layer of technology, which consists of Voyager, Meridian, Curator, and Journals Onsite. These products are rich data repositories and each is designed to manage different type of library content. The curator product will introduce in mid-2006 and feature some major architectural changes in terms of support for Extensible Mark-up Language schemas to handle new metadata standards.