Monday, January 25, 2010

Group 2 discussion: Relationship to Information Providers

Recorder name and email: Lucia Diamond

How can universities and faculty influence providers? Librarians don’t have the clout except through consortial arrangements and CDL, for example, has been successful in some negotiations.

We should do more to get control over what the university (i.e., the faculty produces and make better use of and provide more access to this material for the student users, who are faced with increasing textbook costs. Need to look to some models of compensation for the creator of the product (as opposed to the publishers who only do marketing and distribution). Lecture notes could become content that publishers might purchase and distribute. Don’t want every user to have to pay individually for what they need. Want to be able to borrow e-books as we do print.

Multiple models of providing information, peer-reviewed e-publishing, working papers, etc.

2 comments:

Matt said...

There has been some discussion at UC Davis--on the topic of budget savings--about how consortial commitments like to "Tier 1" have a way of trapping libraries into commitments to material that they do not necessarily need or want.

I am not in tech services, so I have a very hazy idea of what this involves. However, what would be the pluses and minuses of remaining in consortia like this, and is there an alternative?

Anonymous said...

I assume that most posts on this topic will be about costs and contracts. But the recent Library Connects from Elsevier has an article by Cliff Lynch on information trustworthiness. A brief quote:

Here, I think that the key characteristics are the ability to cite or reference an information object persistently and reliably across time; the assurance that responsible provision has been made for the preservation of the information object and its access across time; and the assurance that the integrity of the information object will be managed in some transparent and formal way.

See http://libraryconnect.elsevier.com/lcn/0801/lcn0801.pdf

(I'll stop being anonymous as soon as I get an account set up. -Bev)