From: Eric Elmore <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Fri, 8 Sep 2017 15:51:41 +0000

Nancy makes fantastic point.  The metadata portion of our entire
academic/scholarly universe is foundering and it shows.  Discovery
systems are only as good as the metadata fed into them, and the
quality varies tremendously.  Publishers put just enough effort into
their metadata to keep librarians from squawking too much, while still
paying the bills.  If the publishers don’t fix the problems (which
they show no inclination to unless we pay even more money them to do
it) we’ll need to shore it up ourselves.

And Joe’s question makes a YUGE assumption – that scholarly journals
and books universally become open access and available to everyone
everywhere AND that’s the entirety of what we provide and are asked to
provide  There are no other resources needed to fulfil our collective
mission?  I’m afraid that scholarly output(journals and books) is only
part of the materiel needs we provide to our researchers and students.
What about all that business intelligence, datasets/compilations,
newspaper and miscellaneous archival collections(especially print
based collections being digitized)?  Do those resources magically
become free as well? Hmmm…doubtful.

So even in an ideal open-access world we’re still going to need some
staffing to manage an admittedly smaller portfolio of
subscription/leased resources.  I can even see the possibility that
the amount of work the acq/er folks do wouldn’t go down that much.
With funds not going towards journals & books, the requests for those
other types of content would likely go up.

Happy Friday allJ

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Eric Elmore                                                             |
Electronic Resources Coordinator                     |
The University of Texas at San Antonio            |
One UTSA Circle                                                     |
San Antonio, TX.  78249-0671                             |
(O)210-458-4916/(F)210-458-4577                    |
[log in to unmask]                                         |

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++


To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: The future of libraries
From: Nancy Herther <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Wed, 6 Sep 2017 21:28:37 -0500

Joe -

Open Access is wonderful - although the standards of many OA journals
are somewhat lax today.  The real problem for researchers is that OA
means little if you can't find the articles that you need when you
need them.  Google Scholar is as hopeless as Google. The shift to so
many preprint/repository/OA publications begs the need for a strong,
comprehensive indexing system - which is woefully lacking today.

I did a study in the field of Disability Studies a few years ago and
found that the majority of DS journals are OA and freely available on
the web - but only ONE was comprehensively indexed cover-to-cover and
that was in Web of Science.  If you can't find the articles integrated
into the traditional indexes of the scholarly fields, we are only
taking a major step backwards - not forward.

Is this a slam-dunk for the future of libraries or indexes?  No.  I'm
shocked at the number of libraries/librarians so openly talking about
canceling scholarly indexes in favor of (lord help us) Google Scholar.
Librarians and their institutions should be putting a whole lot more
effort into quality control and access; however, it doesn't seem to be
happening.

Just my thoughts

Nancy Herther