From: Rick Anderson <[log in to unmask]> Date: Mon, 2 Jun 2014 11:12:32 +0000 >Rick, I take your point, but I'm puzzled by your claim that "an awful >lot of these books probably shouldn't be published." Why not? Because in the case of many of these books, virtually no one needs to use them or wants to read them. They are purchased by institutions in the (mistaken) hope that they will prove useful to the scholars or students those institutions serve, but instead they end up sitting on shelves and are never (or virtually never) used. This is not necessarily any reflection on the quality of the scholarship they contain ‹ it¹s a reflection on their relevance, which is, very often, so narrow and limited as to make them effectively useless to anyone except the authors (whose tenure bids they made possible). Please note: I am not saying this is the case for all scholarly monographs, only that it is the case for too many of those that are published and then purchased by libraries. --- Rick Anderson Assoc. Dean for Scholarly Resources & Collections Marriott Library, University of Utah [log in to unmask]