Re: Funding OA, part one

[heatherm@eln.bc.ca]

On Fri, 19 Aug 2005 20:52:59 EDT David Goodman's post included many very
interesting ideas - I'll comment on just one, for starters:

> Who might not benefit:
> 
> Librarians: The librarians and library staff necessary for the complex
> procedures of purchasing journals and arranging access would not be needed
> for these functions. The part of public service librarian's work involved
> in helping people navigate the maze to find their articles would not be
> needed either.  The proper functions of librarians would continue, to
> provide indexing and to help users match their problems to the material
> which would meet their needs.  There is a large unmet need for such help--
> but institutions and users would have to be convinced of that, and there
> might be a better name for these information intermediates than
> "librarians"	It's a role that should convey high prestige.

With all due respect, I disagree.  The work of librarians will change in
an OA world.  Today's tasks may well not be the same as tomorrow's tasks.  
However, I believe that librarians will be needed more than ever.  
Collections staff may focus more on collecting and preserving, rather than
licensing and purchasing, particularly locally produced materials, but I
do not foresee any lack of work.  Many librarians are already working on
institutional repositories.  More will be needed.  The production of
information will continue to accelerate as production and publication
becomes easier.

For example, rather than simply one article in pdf format, a faculty
member may - for very good reasons, post to the IR a pdf, an html version
(for easy crawling, discovery, and linking), a word version for better
accessibility for the print disabled, a text version for those who may not
have access to word, plus original research data, perhaps a video
illustrating some of the concepts discussed, comments, and updates.  
There will be work to do, organizing all this material and making it
accessible. There will be work to do, helping people to develop
information literacy skills to cope with all this material, and helping
them to find - not some information, that is already all too easy - but
the right information.

I'm hoping that the work of librarians can be reduced, so that academic
librarians can become research librarians (a service enjoyed by clients in
special libraries, but not generally academic ones).  Personally, I think
I could be more effective in my own academic work, with the help of a
research librarian.  However, I don't think this is realistic - I think
librarians will continue to have far too much to do, for the foreseeable
future anyways, alas.

Further thoughts, with the assistance of SCHOLCOMM participants and SFU
librarians, are linked to from my blogpost, Librarians and Open Access,
at:
http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com/2005/08/librarians-and-open-access.html

Charles Bailey has written a very interesting article on the role of
librarians in the institutional repository - a link can be found from
SPARC OA News for Aug. 14, at:  
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/fosblog.html

cheers,

Heather Morrison