Look, nobody's saying we'll be Trinity College...
Points‘ mission, in addition to providing readers with a regular opportunity to read new, insightful, and provocative content on the history of drugs and alcohol, is to help further develop online research and publishing in general. In an age in which WordPress, Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr are fundamentally altering the nature of academia – in both positive and negative ways – it is incumbent for sites like Points to play whatever small role they can in negotiating a working relationship between newer and older forms of research. To that end, we are delighted to announce an exciting new project that will bring the best online research material to current and future readers.
Over the next month, we will be developing the Points Online Library, a virtual repository for links to all manner of open source drug- and alcohol-related materials on the Web. The library will provide links to readily-available studies, one-off articles, periodical archives, PDF-format eBooks, all manner of video, and even pre-existing drug resource databases, all in an easily-searchable format for both casual exploration or serious perusal. Our goal is to facilitate online research by creating, promoting, and maintaining a centralized location for relevant and trustworthy academic resources.
You, the Points reader, can play an important role in the early development of this library, as we’ll be crowdsourcing our readers over the next month in an attempt to build up our holdings before we put the library online in May. We would appreciate it if any readers interested in helping with this project would pass along, either as a comment at the end of this article or in an e-mail, any sites, pages, or downloadable material you’d like to see in the Points library. We’ll be open to suggestions for the next three weeks and we urge you all to send us the links you’d like to see on our site. With your help, the Points library might be a significant resource in the field of drug and alcohol research.