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.

Will Books Be Different?

Zatko, Ruzena

Guthrie, K. K. (2012). Will books be different?. Journal of Library Administration, 52(5), 353-

369.

Summary:

This literature provides a lot of coverage on how far we have come with journals for research from the early 1990s up till now. It also covers aspects of books (for leisure) and how the reading patterns changed. The author has extensive background working for JSTOR so he has seen the evolution of trends from the printing of research article trends to now being able to access it from your own home or from anywhere. The paper is broken into two parts: The print-to-electronic transition for journals and the print-to-electronic transition for books. Overall, the focus is on the transition of both mediums and how print and electronic book and journals are looking in the future.

 

Evaluation:

This paper was well written and flowed smoothly. The reason I felt this literature would be important to include is because I wanted to focus on some past history of library trends with research journals and book from then and now. I was very impressed with the insight Gutherie provided that was acquired by his extensive knowledge from his position. What could have be included is a chart demonstrating our reading habits and acquiring of journals, then and now. Also, since Gutherie mentions the demand for articles and that publishers are willing to provide a bundle savings rather than purchasing select titles. However, some libraries lack the funds and cannot bundle. What could have been included is some examples of the size of bundle a well-funded library can buy compared to a low-budget library.

In all, this was informative insight because this was the first mention of the raw, behind-the-scenes of libraries’ eBook acquisitions through publishers and the concerns we often don’t hear about. Overall, libraries are indicating they expect to spend nearly half of their budget on electronic books and changing their model for patron-driven approaches for acquisitions.