Julie Speer
Head, Scholarly Communication and Digital Services
Georgia Institute of Technology
Allyson Mower
Scholarly Communications
and Copyright Librarian
University of Utah
Sylvia K. Miller
Project Director
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Library Publishing Services: Strategies for Success (Speer, Mower)
In 2007, 65% of ARL members were reported to be either offering or developing publishing services (Hahn, 2008). A new survey, conducted by Purdue University, Georgia Tech, and University of Utah Libraries, as part of a research project funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services, suggests that 78% of ARL members are now offering publishing services and that this is also an active area of interest in Oberlin Group (liberal arts college) and medium-sized institutions. It also provides a richer picture of an increasingly mature area of academic library service provision, well aligned with issues of emerging roles and new models of scholarly communication.
This session reports on this important year long research project surveying the state of “library publishing services” in 2011 and provides case studies of different strategies being adopted, from collaboration between libraries and existing university presses, through organic single institutional library services, to the creation of multi-institutional consortial publishers. As many larger university presses move even further away from alignment with their parent institutions and wrestle with business models, the new “university press” may well be based in the library. This presentation will provide information about opportunities to become involved in providing publishing services from within the library, practical tips on growing existing programs from librarians active in this space, and some assessment of the challenges institutions involved in this area of new entrepreneurship have faced and how they have overcome them.
The LCRM Project (Miller)
Funded since 2008 by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill, the “Publishing the Long Civil Rights Movement” collaboration (the “LCRM project”) challenges UNC Press, the UNC Library, and the Southern Oral History Program at the Center for the Study of the American South to expand the boundaries of civil rights scholarship and to explore new modes of scholarly publishing. Developed under the grant and hosted by the Library, the LCRM Online Publishing Pilot collected 87 full-text monographs, journal articles, conference papers, and reports online. Components of the system were designed to support ingest of structured content, registration/access, searching, and user commenting at the paragraph level. The pilot’s test period ran 15 months, April 15, 2010-July 18, 2011.
The pilot tested a new online relationship between published humanities scholarship and the primary sources that inform it: the historian’s “data set.” It suggested a new role for archivists in the scholarly publishing process, and it tested the possibility that a press-library publishing collaboration could guide archival digitization projects. Scholars, librarians, archivists, publishers, and students were invited to contribute annotations at the paragraph level and links to online multimedia primary sources. In addition, the pilot featured multiple outbound linking strategies (OpenURL, DOIs, and WorldCat links) to enable seamless discoverability and linking of related published scholarship online and in print.
The project team will report on usage statistics, user behavior, and lessons learned, and will share plans for a future implementation of the pilot as a library subscription product, as well as plans to publish spinoff enhanced e-books with outbound linking (“portal books”).
https://lcrm.lib.unc.edu/blog
https://lcrm.lib.unc.edu/blog/index.php/works/