Collection Creation as Collection Management: Libraries as Publishers and Implications for Collection Development

Corley, Jennifer

Gwynn, D., Henry, T., & Craft, A.R., (2019). Collection Creation as Collection Management: Libraries as Publishers and Implications for Collection Development. Collection Management, 44(2-4), 206-220.

In this article, Gwynn, Henry, and Craft examine the activities at the University of North Carolina - Greensboro's library in creating open education resources, establishing digital archives, publishing journals and acting as an institutional repository for collaborative scholarly projects. The authors contend that by creating content and facilitating the publication of digital items that libraries are acting as outlets for spreading scholarly content and creating their own collections as needed by their community. The article also examines how the addition of metadata from the library leads to improved access for users and supports the dissemination of published information.

While the article claims to examine libraries acting as publishers across the spectrum of academic libraries, the authors mainly focused on UNC Greensboro, an institution which is not necessarily representative of the majority of academic libraries in the nation, as the university itself has over 1,000 faculty members and much more financial support in the terms of digital infrastructure and full-time staffing for their digital publication initiative. The primary challenge for other universities and college libraries to act as a publisher of open educational resources, open textbooks, and digital journals will be both funding and staffing. As current technology and digital resources allow for libraries to find more and more open resources to meet the needs of their patrons, being a publisher will become a more viable option for academic libraries seeking to enhance their collection.