RE: open access to dissertations

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

Good library sales of the books by Okin and Evans are not 
surprises. In the era in which they were published, there was no 
practice of discriminating against revised dissertations, and 
they sold on average about as many copies as other books in their 
fields. They were also heavily used in courses, which accounted 
for them surpassing the 20,000 level.

I understand that information accessible to librarians is limited 
at the time of purchase. It is a shame that there is not some way 
to make the information about what revisions were made to a 
dissertation in transforming it into a book available to 
librarians. Maybe that could somehow be added to the book's 
metadata? Choice, of course, does review many books within six 
months after publication. And there are now many more online 
journals that review books much more does an excellent job of 
reviewing many books in that field within only a few months after 
publication. This increasing availability of authoritative 
assessments earlier in the process than traditionally was the 
case ought to help PDA work better, too. And I hope librarians 
will decide to order revised dissertations that fit their 
collections later in the cycle even if they are automatically 
excluded from approval plans at the outset.

Of course, publishers make mistakes. In the files at Princeton i 
discovered that the Press had turned down Herbert Marcuse's 
"One-Dimensional Man," which became a best seller for another 
publisher, on the basis of a report written by--would you believe 
it?--John Rawls. (I later tried, but missed, persuading Rawls to 
publish his "Theory of Justice" with Princeton, which was his 
alma mater.) Every publisher has his or her favorite story like 
this of "one that got away."

Sandy Thatcher '65


At 5:49 PM -0400 4/14/11, Elizabeth E. Kirk wrote:
>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