Library in Transition

According to Robin Murray, libraries are transitioning from an acquire-catalog-circulate model to one that could be described as synthesize-specialize-mobilize. Discuss.

Key sentence (influenced by IF Book): "We need to stop thinking about the future of publishing and think instead about the future of reading."

Abstract from the Website: "This paper is the third in a series of studies emanating from the UK JISC-funded RoMEO Project (Rights Metadata for Open-archiving). It considers previous studies of the usage of electronic journal articles through a literature survey. It then reports on the results of a survey of 542 academic authors as to how they expected to use open-access research papers. This data is compared with results from the second of the RoMEO Studies series as to how academics wished to protect their open-access research papers. The ways in which academics expect to use open-access works (including activities, restrictions and conditions) are described. It concludes that academics-as-users do not expect to perform all the activities with open-access research papers that academics-as-authors would allow. Thus the rights metadata proposed by the RoMEO Project would appear to meet the usage requirements of most academics."

O'Reilly experience w/ digital publishing

"Earlier this week the University of Michigan Press announced it is shifting its center of gravity from print to digital publishing, at least for monographs -- a change that will be reflected in its catalog within two years. It is the shape of things to come. Or rather (given what I've heard at the annual meetings of the Association of American University Presses over the past few years) the shape of what everyone has known is coming for some time now, without quite relishing the prospect."

MIT is going to start publishing faculty papers in their own online repository, bypassing commercial publishers altogether.