The Future of Scholarly Communication & the Role of Libraries

Roy TennanteScholarship, The California Digital Library

Opinion

• Faculty don’t need us as much as we would like to believe that they need us

• We have an opportunity to make ourselves indispensable

• If we don’t take advantage of this opportunity, others will

• So…act now or live with the consequences

Reasonable Predictions

• We can expect the following:– More of the same– More of what’s new– Some of what we haven’t even imagined yet

• What we will do about it:– Adapt as well as we can within our funding and

staffing limitations

Additional Predictions

• Digital forms of “publication” will diversify and gain in importance

• We will select, acquire, organize, provide access to, and preserve these new forms (so what else is new?)

• And…we will increasingly become involved with the “publication” of these new forms

A Simplified Scenario

scholar submits paper

reviewed by peerscan be made public?

Yes

No edited

Yes

Selected for publication?

NoRemains available as is, or edited by author

“published”

The Role of Libraries• What is the acknowledged role of libraries?

To select, acquire, organize, provide access to, and preserve information useful to the clientele they serve

• This role need not change, only the methods used and services provided

• Academic and research libraries can play a key role in helping faculty change scholarly communication

A Role for Libraries

scholar submits paper

reviewed by peerscan be made public?

Yes

No edited

Yes

Selected for publication?

NoRemains available as is, or edited by author

“published”

Content archived & preserved

Metadata captured at every step

Infrastructure managed & maintained

Collaboration with scholars to build new systems that support scholarship

Interfaces designed

Implications• If content can be made widely available without print

publication, a great deal more content will become available• New methods of determining quality may be needed,

perhaps things like:– Editorial “scoring”– Reader “scoring”– Reader comments– Information on Linkages (numbers and kinds)

• We will be faced with an ever diversifying universe of information resources

The Role of Libraries• New kinds of services will be needed, or variations on

existing services:– Infrastructure support– Document format translation– Structured text markup (XML)– Metadata capture and management– Filtering (identification of content important to particular

audiences or purposes), also called bibliography– Current awareness services– Etc.

Typical Day in the Life

?

Roles for Librarians• Information Aggregators:

– Imagine, specify, and manage the creation of systems that knit together access to information from a wide variety of sources in a transparent fashion

• Catalogers– Specify, collect or create, and manage metadata

• Bibliographers:– Identifying key resources, whether they be print or digital

• User Interface Designers

Skills Required of Staff Imaging OCR Markup languages (HTML, XML) Cataloging & metadata Indexing and database technology User interface design Programming Web technology Project management

A Few of the Most Meaningful Changes

• The fall of barriers to publication:– Anywhere, anytime, with or without peer

review– Reduction of cost

• Libraries and others becoming publishers• New and better forms of scholarly

communication

Caveats• Any scholarly communication model must

acknowledge extreme differences in how scholars in different disciplines communicate

• Change is likely to happen slower than we would like, with new techniques forming islands in a sea of status quo

• A challenge we face will be to find ways of linking those islands together to form a virtual continent

• An initiative of the California Digital Library (http://www.cdlib.org/)

• Come see us at http://escholarship.cdlib.org/ after July 19th

• Key strategies:– Identify scholarly communities actively experimenting and

support them – Form partnerships with others working for change:

SPARC, scholarly societies, university presses, etc.