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.