Re: The role, if any, of librarianship journals

[Aline Soules <asoules@csuhayward.edu>]

This is an important topic that has been debated before, but never quite
gets off the ground.  I agree with Goodman's perspective.  Look, for
example, at ALA Publishing practices for journals and monographs, which
are traditional and have not yet embraced the online environment.  The
challenge is not only "re-tooling" the operation, but finding the funds to
do it.  Aline

Aline Soules, Associate University Librarian
California State University, Hayward
tel. 510-885-4596
e-mail:  asoules@csuhayward.edu

David Goodman wrote:

> This continuation of Phil's important work brings to mind the following
> question:
>
> His downloaded ms. is a preprint. The "real" article will not be published
> for 6 months.  Everyone who is likely to be concern will see it here, or
> when it is mentioned on other lists and blogs.
>
> Nonetheless it must be published in a conventional journal to be part of
> the formally indexed literature (or to count for promotion or tenure,
> though I am not sure that is relevant for this instance).  There probably
> also are people who have not yet made the transition from reading out of
> date journal articles to reading up to date Internet discussions, and of
> course authors would generally want to include even them.
>
> On this list, we talk about how people in other fields should publish. If
> instead, we ourselves published only like arXiv, then those would read the
> article either because the topic seemed interesting and important (which
> it certainly is) or because they recognized the author's name and knew
> from previous articles that it would be likely to be very much worth
> reading. Those are the ways I'm told people use with arXiv, and it would
> work just as well for us. If our database had a good index, and there are
> many examples, we'd have everything we needed. Those used to journals as
> such would soon make the transition.
>
> Even if librarians were less clever than physicists, we could learn from
> their example.  I do know the physics journals continue. (It may not be
> irrelevant that physics research departments are inherently very well
> funded.)
>
> Apparently physicists have not yet convinced either themselves or senior
> academic administrators that the journals aren't necessary for promotion.  
> Maybe we will find aspects where we are the smarter.
>
> Dr. David Goodman
> Associate Professor
> Palmer School of Library and Information Science
> Long Island University
> dgoodman@liu.edu