The Scholar’s Space

Ithaka published a report last week entitled University Publishing in a Digital Age that discusses how universities publish scholarly output in an environment of ubiquitous Internet access. They interviewed administrators, press directors, librarians, and others to learn that “universities do not treat the publishing function as an important, mission-centric endeavor.” In the past, university presses were the chief publishers of scholarly content, but in more recent years, scholars are using other means for distributing information in more informal ways including working papers/preprint sites, blogs, institutional repositories, etc. The report observes that, “These changes in the behavior of scholars will require changes in the approaches universities take to all kinds of publishing.” I believe that TDL and other such collaborations among universities hold promise as one solution for supporting the changing world of scholarly publishing.

Today I found an animation online, courtesy of the New England Journal of Medicine, that shows the changes in the Framingham social networks over the 32 years of the heart disease study, but focusing, of course, on the weight of those who were part of the changing social networks. The animation is accompanied by a narration that explains what you’re seeing. It’s very well-done, and raises several interesting points: since this kind of interpretive tool is only available online, it illustrates smart exploitation of the digital networked environment for far more than just posting a paper online; it may suggest roles for intermediaries that will help to distinguish them from public repositories, unless public repositories also can host (and perhaps create?) such non-text data; and it could explain, given the current services that public repositories offer, why report authors would not be rushing to post their text only pdfs on their Websites. Note, however, I did learn from report author James Fowler that he has indeed posted text and supplementary materials on his Website. He commented on the original post, below (thanks, James).

Multimedia enriched reports might seem to many authors and their libraries “better” and worth paying for. The ability to imagine and deliver new services built on the corpus of publicly available research data and reports will put to rest any expectation we might have that some day when all the research is available online, publishers won’t have us over a barrel anymore. A snowball’s chance…

A May 2007 report submitted by the Canadian Library Association’s Task Force on Open Access recommends that CLA provide full and immediate open access to most of its publications. The June 29, 2007 CLA Digest reports that the Executive Council has approved these recommendations.

A rather lengthy blog post at O’Reilly Radar, “Guest Blog: Teens Weigh in on Changes in Publishing, Media,” but one that is packed with interesting observations. It’s written by two teen interns at the Northwestern Summer Discovery Program, studying O’Reilly’s publishing company, about what and where they read (and why it’s not books). These kids are our undergrads in 1 year, our grad students in 5 years, and our junior faculty in 10 years. Listen to what they are saying about their relationship to reading, and the media they use to obtain information. As librarians, as educators, as colleagues, we’ll no doubt change them, to some extent, but they are going to change us too. They are going to be us in a very short period of time. Is this an exciting time to be alive or what?

TDL got a nice mention in yesterday’s Daily Texan: Archiving software receives fund boost – Top Stories. The story focuses on additional funds that will be made available to DSpace repositories. As Mark McFarland notes, however, it’s really up to faculty whether TDL or any repository takes on importance in academic life. “… the faculty needs to see the value,” he said.

This raises the ages-old chicken and egg question, however. They have to know about it and what it means and its potential in order to start imagining what it can do for them. We learn from our pre-school years what libraries can do for us, but no one comes to us with previous experience with institutional repositories. We are definitely meeting faculty half-way though, beyond the half-way we’ve already come by simply building the TDL. We’re working with faculty to imagine uses and services and get feedback on what would best meet their needs. Have you got ideas about what we could do? Let’s talk!

A short article in Walt Crawford’s, “Cites & Insights 7:9 – On the Literature” explores the contribution of blogs to scholar’s communication today. Crawford’s field is Information Science.  The analysis would be different for different fields, but the overall point he makes is an important one: whether official or not, we are all in the midst of examining and assessing the value to us as scholars of publications that are not reviewed by our peers *before* they are published, but only afterwards in the exchange of comments and discussion that follows a blog post, for example. We assess this value as we decide what to read and how much time to spend on what we read. We assess this value when we cite to sources like blogs and wikis. We assess this value when we decide how best to convey important information, ask questions including research questions and disseminate the results of our research, to our peers. The article is worth reading as it sheds light on a process that is well underway, in many fields, but that still is not acknowledged in tenure and review processes. There we still seem to believe that only one process adequately assures us of the quality of our scholarship. Is that belief still justified?

I’m very honored to have the opportunity to host the Texas Digital Library’s new blog, The Scholar’s Space, along with contributors Lexie Thompson-Young, Roxanne Bogucka and Cathy Hartman. We’ll be inviting additional contributors as we roll out the blog, so that together we may provide a wide-ranging discussion forum for Texas Digital Library participants, as well as others, interested in the rapidly evolving world of scholarly communication. Please take advantage of our RSS feeds (see the bottom of the right-hand side bar) so that you’ll be alerted when we post new information. We hope you’ll visit often and join in our conversations. Please let us know if there’s something you’d like to see!