Over the last half-year or so, OCLC Research has been running a series of symposia exploring what they are calling the “evolving scholarly record”; the final symposium in the series was held June 2 in San Francisco. CNI has been participating in these meetings as part of our efforts to understand the broader landscape of preservation challenges, as well as due to our ongoing interest in the evolution of scholarly communications practices.
With that context, I wanted to share the announcement below with the CNI community about OCLC’s latest report on this work, which has just been released. The report is at
http://www.oclc.org/research/publications/2015/oclcresearch-esr-stewardship-2015.html
and if you are not familiar with the project, you may also want to look at the earlier report at
Material on the June 2, 2015 workshop (and pointers to summaries of earlier workshops) can be found at
http://www.oclc.org/research/events/2015/06-02.html
Clifford Lynch
Director, CNI
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OCLC Research published a new report today, Stewardship of the Evolving Scholarly Record: From the Invisible Hand to Conscious Coordination, written by Brian Lavoie and Constance Malpas.
This report describes the key features of future stewardship models adapted to the characteristics of a digital, networked scholarly record, and discusses some practical implications of implementing these models.
Key highlights include:
- As the scholarly record continues to evolve, conscious coordination will become an important organizing principle for stewardship models.
- Past stewardship models were built on an “invisible hand” approach that relied on the uncoordinated, institution-scale efforts of individual academic libraries acting autonomously to maintain local collections.
- Future stewardship of the evolving scholarly record requires conscious coordination of context, commitments, specialization, and reciprocity.
- With conscious coordination, local stewardship efforts leverage scale by collecting more of less.
- Keys to conscious coordination include right-scaling consolidation, cooperation, and community mix.
- Reducing transaction costs and building trust facilitate conscious coordination.
- Incentives to participate in cooperative stewardship activities should be linked to broader institutional priorities.
Conscious coordination calls for stewardship strategies that incorporate a broader awareness of the system-wide stewardship context; declarations of explicit commitments around portions of the local collection; formal divisions of labor within cooperative arrangements; and robust networks for reciprocal access. Stewardship strategies based on conscious coordination involve an acceleration of an already perceptible transition away from relatively autonomous local collections to ones built on networks of cooperation across many organizations, within and outside the traditional cultural heritage community.
