University Publishing in a Digital Age

II. [...] : B. Some libraries are striving to support these needs

Among the librarians consulted for this study, we perceived a high level of energy and excitement about the “reinvention” of librarians’ mission, making them more relevant and reinvigorated with a better understanding of their purpose and potential. This new mission involves a combination of:

• serving faculty research, teaching, and publishing agendas (building collections to support faculty research, providing tools, delivering everything they want to the desktop, developing technological expertise for their publishing projects, supporting the infrastructure for their courses);
• serving student study needs (creating new physical and virtual spaces for private and group work, helping students to become more efficient researchers);
• preservation (e.g. launching institutional repositories, as 87% of librarians in a recent Ithaka survey cited archiving and preservation of an institution’s intellectual assets as a “very important” reason for having IRs[19]);
• making scholarship available to the wider world (open access, digitizing special collections); and
• lowering the cost of scholarship (alternative publishing, legal experts to negotiate contracts).

One librarian said, “What you are witnessing today is the dynamic reinvention of the role of the library. We went through a period where we worried that Google was going to put us out of business, and that the ubiquity of electronic resources would make our physical spaces less relevant. We watched our budgets being eaten up by the high cost of journals. But we’ve responded to these threats. We’re fighting back. Libraries are now one of the most vital centers on campus. We’re working to bring down the cost of information through initiatives such as open access and institutional repositories. We’re increasingly getting involved with publishing.” It should be noted that the sentiments of this statement do not apply to all libraries, and overstate the degree of success librarians have had in actually reducing costs through these initiatives. Also, while some of the librarians we talked to felt energized by all the opportunities afforded by information technology, others felt disenfranchised by the quickly changing digital landscape and worry that they will be supplanted by Google and relegated to little more than computer clusters.

Librarians with whom we spoke view their role with respect to scholarly communications as making sure they have robust online collections; creating research environments (e.g. collections and tools) that will help faculty and graduate students create the scholarship of the future; finding ways for the institution to take back more control and lower the cost of scholarship; and developing infrastructure and tools to enable multimedia. Increasingly, these roles bleed into what might be considered “publishing”. The role of librarians has always been, in part, to provide services to the local community that help them find information, or learn how to find information. With the advent of online resources, librarians developed skills in accessing and managing online data. It therefore is not surprising that many faculty members and students have turned to librarians for assistance in producing electronic resources. One librarian stated that “Faculty are coming to us to help them with their electronic publishing needs. We have the technical expertise on staff to help them push the envelope of new forms of scholarship.” Another stated that “The library’s task is to create the online research environments of the future – collections, accessibility, tools.” Some librarians see themselves as pioneers and innovators in bringing scholarship online.

Because their budgets are relatively large (certainly compared to those of presses), libraries can often find room for experimentation. We heard a number of press directors opine that libraries are receiving large sums to launch institutional repositories and pursue other online initiatives, many of which have unproven value, while presses fight to keep their meager subsidies and have very limited access to investment funds for anything new. These perceptions are probably overstated, as many librarians feel that their budgets are also increasingly squeezed, but it illuminates the need for better understanding of publishing resource allocation between presses and libraries.

At the same time, several librarians conceded to us that they are good at organizing information but lack expertise in choosing or prioritizing what merits publication. Libraries provide tools and infrastructure to support new forms of informal publishing, but these tend to be inward focused (toward the home institution) rather than externally focused (towards the best scholarship in a given discipline), limiting their appeal to users. As a result, institutional repositories so far tend to look like “attics” (and often fairly empty ones), with random assortments of content of questionable importance. Attempts by librarians to create new online resources by digitizing special collections often fail to take into consideration the potential market for those materials or what is really needed. One librarian remarked that putting these resources online for free is much easier than charging for them, because then they would actually have to consider who the user base would be. Another talked about the challenge of maintaining library-digitized material once launch funding has run out. Likewise, librarians have limited skills and experience in marketing content to build awareness and usage. Institutional repositories have struggled in this respect as well. And no library publishing alternative can begin to compete with the prestige that a university press imprint confers on scholarship, nor replace the credentialing power that presses have developed over decades. These are all areas in which the librarians consulted believe that university presses can play an important and ongoing role.