Re: open access to dissertations

[Sandy Thatcher <sandy.thatcher@alumni.princeton.edu>]

Are librarians really this short-sighted, or ignorant even? Are 
they not aware that some of the classics of various disciplines 
were revised dissertations? In my article, I cite a number that i 
handled at the two presses where I worked, books that became 
pioneering works in their fields, like Susan Moller Okin's 'Women 
in Western Political Thought"  or Peter Evans's "Dependent 
Development," books that (contrary to Kevin's presumption) were 
neither narrowly specialized nor expensive and that ended up 
selling well in excess of 20,000 copies.

Kevin may think that these are very rare exceptions. Based on 44 
years of acquiring scholarly books for Princeton and Penn State, 
i can tell you that they are not. If librarians are making these 
decisions about not buying revised dissertations on the grounds 
that Kevin imputes to them, they are making a very serious 
mistake indeed. I'd like to hear from other librarians on this 
list whether they think Kevin has accurately characterized their 
decisionmaking.

Sandy Thatcher


At 10:14 PM -0400 4/12/11, Kevin Smith wrote:

>Sandy's research confirms what librarians are usually perfectly 
>ready to admit, that they often must exclude revised 
>dissertations from approval plans.  The problem with the 
>Chronicle article, however, is that it correctly notes the 
>effect but selects the wrong cause.  I doubt any librarian 
>excludes dissertations because of open access ETD repositories 
>or even because of ProQuest availability.  Being based on a 
>dissertation is simply a surrogate, in approval plan profiles, 
>for weeding out books likely to have a very high cost and a 
>limited audience.  As monograph budgets shrink, libraries simply 
>cannot afford to buy books that will have only very specialized 
>readerships and will sometimes cost over $100 per title.  If 
>such purchases are to be made at all, they have to be made in 
>response to an expressed need, not included in a blanket 
>approval plan where very limited returns are permitted.  And 
>from this perspective, information about the scope of revisions, 
>will it would be helpful, is probably not determinative.
>
>Kevin L. Smith, M.L.S., J.D.
>Director of Scholarly Communications
>Duke University, Perkins Library
>P.O. Box 90193
>919-668-4451
>kevin.l.smith@duke.edu
>
>
>On Apr 11, 2011, at 8:28 PM, "Sandy Thatcher"
><sandy.thatcher@alumni.princeton.edu> wrote:

>>  For those of you who cannot access the full article, I'll reprint
>>  my comment on it here:
>>
>>  I addressed this question in "Dissertations into Books? The Lack of
>>  Logic in the System" (Against the Grain, April 2007), which can be
> > found at Penn State Press's web site here:
> >
> > http://www.psupress.org/news/S