From: Allan Scherlen <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Fri, 25 Jul 2014 09:52:58 -0400

Which leads to the subtopic of the need for a Sherpa/Romeo type
database for book chapter publishers to help IR managers determine
which are "green" and permit OA archiving.

Allan Scherlen
Appalachian State University Library



> On Jul 24, 2014, at 9:26 PM, LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> From: Jim O'Donnell <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Thu, 24 Jul 2014 21:24:06 -0400
>
> This is a fascinating topic to the practicing academic.  I can think
> of a lot of good reasons why the interest in chapters would increase.
> (1) We've always done it, but when it required taking the book
> physically out of circulation for a semester and putting it on the
> Reserve Desk, we probably did less of it.  (2) It used to be a lot
> harder to assign articles for the same reason until the coursepack was
> invented; so the coursepack got us used to the idea that we could do a
> mix and match of half a dozen shorter readings a week easily.  (3)
> Lots more "books" now are collections of articles.  We talk a lot in
> my neck of the humanities of the growth and flourishing of the
> companion, the handbook, and the volume of conference papers, to which
> many of us contribute far more than we do to peer-reviewed journals.
> That produced objects that pass as "books" in the world of publishing
> and libraries but contain a disparate and uneven collection of
> articles and make sense when assigned as such.  (4) And e-availability
> makes the book chapter, at least in principle, exactly equal to the
> article as a knowable, assignable, downloadable, useable intellectual
> object.
>
> So people like me assign more chapters and publishers and librarians
> work to figure out how to improve the ways and means.  Well and good.
> But .  .  .
>
> The result of this thread is to make me make a note to ask my freshmen
> this fall to look at their syllabi and tell me how many books they are
> going to read in their first semester at University. Then I'll ask
> them to break down between book-books and textbooks -- that is, omit
> introductory language and biology and econ books written and published
> to be used as the backbone of a course and list just books assigned
> for reading and discussion.  My guess is that more than a few of them
> will list the three books I'm telling them to read for *my* course and
> none other.  That begins to be a worry for me.  How many of them are
> going to the bookstore and buying a serious book and sitting in their
> room or the library or under a tree and reading it from cover to
> cover? Do I really want to know the answer to that question?
>
> Now, many readers will ask, why does he care?  Why does this make him
> nervous?  Two answers:  (1) We have a long history built up in the
> production and consumption of what we now call "long-form
> scholarship".  The notion of the "book" as something coherent and
> important that is really qualitatively different from a series of
> articles is deeply embedded in our culture.  I don't just use books, I
> believe in them.  At a minimum, we should reflect on whether it's an
> historical accident that there have been people like me around for a
> couple of thousand years and whether it's essential to go on having
> and reading such things; and even if we decide we can move on to an
> intellectual galaxy defined by the bite-sized chunk, we should think
> about how our students should be introduced to that older world even
> if they are not going to be part of it.   (2) But we also still
> require our rising scholars to produce these objects as a condition of
> their prospective exaltation in rank and status.  If we're not
> actually *reading* these things, then do we have another reason to
> worry about why we require the writing of them?  Do we have a
> collective cognitive dissonance we should be addressing?  Is the
> crisis of the scholarly monograph perhaps *not* a function of rising
> serials prices squeezing us out and falling library sales but
> something entirely different:  a decline verging on collapse in
> readership?
>
> Jim O'Donnell
> Georgetown U.