Re: open access to dissertations

[Rick Anderson <rick.anderson@utah.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?

Sandy, it's important to bear in mind that "excluding from 
approval plans" is not the same thing as "not buying."  When a 
library excludes revised dissertations from its approval plan, 
that probably reflects the library's long experience with 
dissertations that are either way too narrow in focus to be 
useful in its particular collection or (more perniciously) with 
dissertations that the publisher _claims_ are "revised" but which 
have turned out to be little more than holographic reproductions 
of the original.

So excluding "revised dissertations" from the approval plan 
usually just means that the library intends to acquire such 
publications selectively. This hardly seems either short-sighted 
or ignorant.  In fact, it kind of sounds like exactly what 
libraries are traditionally expected to do.

-- 
Rick Anderson
Assoc. Dir. for Scholarly Resources & Collections
Marriott Library
Univ. of Utah
rick.anderson@utah.edu