Re: open access to dissertations

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

Well, that would be good, if that is actually what is happening. 
And, as I've said, it may be the best thing i can say about PDA. 
We'll see over time if revised dissertations continue to do more 
poorly in the market than other books. If PDA works as it should, 
they shouldn't do any worse.

Sandy Thatcher

P.S. I should add perhaps, to be fair, that there are of course 
many, many highly specialized and narrowly focused dissertations, 
and i don't mean my claim for the value of dissertations to 
extend beyond those that have been successfully revised. I just 
want to push the case that books based on dissertations should 
not be discriminated against just because of their origin.



At 5:38 PM -0400 4/14/11, Rick Anderson wrote:

>>  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