The roles of libraries in access to networked information: Cautionary tales from the era of broadcasting

published or submitted for publicatio

Updating the Agenda for Academic Libraries and Scholarly Communications

This issue of C&RL is focused on scholarly communication, and it seems appropriate, in this invited guest editorial, to step back and examine the broader agenda that academic and research libraries need to consider today in engaging with scholarly communications as a way of framing the issue. My view is that this agenda is ripe for re-thinking. The overall environment has changed significantly in the last few years, underscoring the growing irrelevance of some long-held ideas, and at the same time, clearly identifying new and urgent priorities. What I hope to do here is to summarize very succinctly my thoughts on the most pressing issues and the areas most needing reconsideration. Articles in this issue touch upon aspects of many of these topics; I hope that future authors may also find topical inspirations here. You’ll note that many of these are issues that have been important to the CNI agenda in recent years, and I’ve included a few references to some of these materials

Updating the Agenda for Academic Libraries and Scholarly Communications

This issue of C&RL is focused on scholarly communication, and it seems appropriate, in this invited guest editorial, to step back and examine the broader agenda that academic and research libraries need to consider today in engaging with scholarly communications as a way of framing the issue. My view is that this agenda is ripe for re-thinking. The overall environment has changed significantly in the last few years, underscoring the growing irrelevance of some long-held ideas, and at the same time, clearly identifying new and urgent priorities. What I hope to do here is to summarize very succinctly my thoughts on the most pressing issues and the areas most needing reconsideration. Articles in this issue touch upon aspects of many of these topics; I hope that future authors may also find topical inspirations here. You’ll note that many of these are issues that have been important to the CNI agenda in recent years, and I’ve included a few references to some of these materials

Rethinking Institutional Repository Strategies

At the spring 2017 CNI meeting in Albuquerque, New Mexico, we held an Executive Roundtable on the topic of Rethinking Institutional Repository Strategies. We knew this was a timely topic for many of our member institutions, and we anticipated that many CNI member institutions would seek to attend this roundtable. To meet the demand, we offered two sessions of the roundtable (with different institutions participating in each) on sequential days, and even then had to turn away many who expressed interest. At the main CNI meeting, CNI’s executive director Clifford Lynch offered a summary of the roundtables during one of the breakout sessions. This report expands upon the themes Lynch described and adds more details about participants’ observations and current activities

Libraries, Networks and OSI: A Review, with a Report on North American Developments

Lorcan Dempsey made a study trip to North America in May 1990 as part of a British-Library-funded study of library networking (i.e., use of computer networks by libraries) in North America. Based on this trip, as well as on extensive literature research and follow-on electronic mail and phone discussions, he prepared the report reviewed here. The prospective reader should understand that this book is in fact a published report. Some sections assume considerable familiarity with the subject matter; extensive quotations from the literature are included. Some sections are quite detailed and discuss work in progress (and some of this material will date quickly). Sometimes, the coverage is a bit encyclopedic, which makes for slightly tedious reading, but such detail is necessary in a comprehensive report