The Future of Scholarly Communication

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The Future of Scholarly Communication the Role
of Libraries

• Roy TennanteScholarship, The California Digital
  Library

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Opinion

• Faculty dont need us as much as we would like to
  believe that they need us
• We have an opportunity to make ourselves
  indispensable
• If we dont take advantage of this opportunity,
  others will
• Soact now or live with the consequences

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Reasonable Predictions

• We can expect the following
• More of the same
• More of whats new
• Some of what we havent even imagined yet
• What we will do about it
• Adapt as well as we can within our funding and
  staffing limitations

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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?)
• Andwe will increasingly become involved with the
  publication of these new forms

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A Simplified Scenario
reviewed by peers
can be made public?
No
edited
published
scholar submits paper
Yes
Yes
Selected for publication?
Remains available as is, or edited by author
No
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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

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A Role for Libraries
Metadata captured at every step
reviewed by peers
can be made public?
No
edited
Infrastructure managed maintained
published
scholar submits paper
Yes
Yes
Collaboration with scholars to build new systems
that support scholarship
Content archived preserved
Selected for publication?
Remains available as is, or edited by author
No
Interfaces designed
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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

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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.

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Typical Day in the Life

• ?

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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

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Skills Required of Staff

• Imaging
• OCR
• Markup languages (HTML, XML)
• Cataloging metadata
• Indexing and database technology
• User interface design
• Programming
• Web technology
• Project management

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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

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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

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• 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.