RE: open access to dissertations

["Elizabeth E. Kirk" <elizabeth.e.kirk@dartmouth.edu>]

Sandy,

Librarians are not more or less ignorant or omniscient than any 
other profession, including publishers. What librarians rarely 
have (besides sufficient $$) is the time or the information to 
know what will--and I use your word here--**become** a classic, 
unless there is a good deal of advance conversation about a book. 
Selectors can almost never wait for reviews to appear (two years 
in many cases, well after initial print runs have been sold) and 
need to make timely decisions based on conversations with 
scholars and colleagues. Selectors often work from jobbers' slips 
or databases that pull in ONIX feeds. Titles like those you 
mention are going to be bought. According to OCLC, Okin's book is 
held in over 1,400 libraries, including mine, and Evans' work is 
in around 800, again including mine. It appears that many good 
decisions are in fact being made.

Scholars themselves are not always aware of great new scholarship 
and not all publishing decisions are great, either (think of 
publishers who turn down great new work, or titles that get 
published that frankly shouldn't have been). Publishers' catalogs 
praise all new titles. I think it's a bit much to ask that 
librarians be more discriminating than the rest. Surprisingly, 
libraries seem to do a fair job buying what you sell and 
providing it to scholars who are delighted to discover it.

Elizabeth E. Kirk
Associate Librarian for Information Resources
Dartmouth College Library
6025 Baker Library, Rm. 115
Hanover, NH, USA
elizabeth.e.kirk@dartmouth.edu


-----Original Message-----
From: owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
[mailto:owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu] On Behalf Of Sandy Thatcher
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