RE: open access to dissertations

[Kevin Smith <kevin.l.smith@duke.edu>]

Really, Sandy, your choice of examples is indicative of where the 
problem lies.  Both of these works were published over thirty 
years ago.  Times have changed dramatically since then.  Library 
purchasing power is a fraction of what it was when these books 
were issued.  It is easy to dispute any particular decision when 
one is not in the position of having to make that decision, but 
librarians must decide the best way to spend those very limited 
dollars.  For each revised dissertation that is bought, some 
other deserving book is not purchased, and the decisions are made 
in that balance, not in isolation.

I do not know if librarians would buy some modern day equivalent 
of these examples; to know that we would have to also know what 
they would not be able to purchase as a consequence.  What I 
suggested, and what I believe to be accurate, is that librarians 
often have to exclude revised dissertations from approval plans 
precisely because they so often involve this difficult decision 
about relative value.  It is not ignorance or willfulness, it is 
simply the necessity of dealing responsibly with the money we are 
given in a market where we can purchase but a fraction of what we 
would like to buy.

I do not understand why the message that we do not have unlimited 
money, so that we can simply evaluate each book on its own merits 
and buy all that are worthwhile, is so hard to communicate.  I 
suppose one reason is that recognizing that fact would involve 
acknowledging that it is the pricing policies of publishers, 
albeit a different group of publishers from those who usually 
publish revised dissertations, that are partly responsible for 
the situation.

Kevin L. Smith, M.L.S., J.D.
Scholarly Communications Officer
Duke University
kevin.l.smith@duke.edu<mailto:kevin.l.smith@duke.edu>

________________________________________
From: owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
On Behalf Of Sandy Thatcher [sandy.thatcher@alumni.princeton.edu]
Sent: Wednesday, April 13, 2011 4:58 PM
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: Re: open access to dissertations

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
>kevin.l.smith@duke.edu