Long Live the Library: The Place of Print in an Age of Electronic Information

Americans tend to embrace new technologies and assume they are revolutionary. We believe that any new technology may be a silver bullet that renders obsolete our previous ways of doing things. We sometimes cling to those beliefs in the face of contradictory evidence. A current example of this kind of thinking is the notion that libraries are no longer necessary.Why do we have a perception that all information is becoming electronic

The Other Sustainability Problem

The problem has been around for some time. It’s been called a “crisis” and a “tragedy.” Experts have been questioning the sustainability of the current model for over two decades. The evidence points to the need for change, but it is so hard to break from old habits and patterns, from the tried-and-true ways. And then there are the politics. Many people have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo, and they oppose any discussion of alternatives

Of Birth-Mother and Daughter

A story from the book Risk, Courage, and Women: Contemporary Voices in Prose and Poetry

Request for Proposal or Run for Protection? Some Thoughts on RFPs from a Librarian and a Bookseller

Increasingly, academic librarians are using the RFP (Request for Proposal) to assist them in selecting materials vendors. While this has been a common practice for integrated library system selection for some time, it is still a relatively new phenomenon in the acquisitions field. The authors, one a library administrator and the other a bookseller, review the pros and cons, pitfalls and benefits of using the RFP method for purchasing library materials

Report from the “What is Open?” Workgroup

The scholarly community’s current definition of “open” captures only some of the attributes of openness that exist across different publishing models and content types. Open is not an end in itself, but a means for achieving the most effective dissemination of scholarship and research. We suggest that the different attributes of open exist along a broad spectrum and propose an alternative way of describing and evaluating openness based on four attributes: discoverable, accessible, reusable, and transparent. These four attributes of openness, taken together, form the draft “DART Framework for Open Access.” This framework can be applied to both research artifacts as well as research processes. We welcome input from the broader scholarly community about this framework