Makeover For The Academic Library, ACRLog, January 9, 2006. Six suggestions on what libraries can learn from newspapers about responding to disruptive technologies. I'm less interested in the blog posting itself than in these two comments on it:
Excerpt from David Lewis:
First we need to be clear, we are not just competing against Google. We are competing against the web. We also need to be clear in which realm we are competing. We are competing to proide content. Library’s models for providing content — purchased collections — will not win this battle. And they shouldn’t. Open access and all of our efforts at creating digital collections will and should win this battle....What libraries need to do is to find services and products that are themselves disruptive and use the strategies [Clayton] Christensen suggests to deploy them. I would suggest two areas where this is possible. First, as suggested above, open access and repositories have the potential to disrupt traditional scholarly publishing. Libraries can be one of the agents for this disruption and we should push in this area. Free access to large digital collections also have the potential to be disruptive and they should also be agressively pursued.
Excerpt from Barbara Fister:
Yay, people can find their own information without calling the library. That’s not competition, that’s success. Think how successful we are becoming at letting people get it themselves as open access takes off. Aren’t we trying to make some of this information available through other channels? If we really bought into competition, we’d either try to take over those channels or shut them down. In fact, we’re doing the opposite. Information to the people!
Posted by
Peter Suber at 1/15/2006 10:59:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
