59 SPEC Kit 357: Libraries, Presses, and Publishing
There is much campus demand for publishing help. It is prudent that tiers of service be established to
guide conversations. Establishing memoranda of agreement help to manage expectations and increase
satisfaction. Consultations with library experts in the realm of publishing are very much valued as a
service by the campus community and help to reinforce an appreciation of deep library expertise in
this area.
Try to avoid taking on too many “special projects.” Focus on one area and platform, i.e., open access
journals on OJS and do that well.
Understanding the organizational structure of universities is key to effectively promoting library
publishing services like the institutional repository and the journal/ conference proceedings service.
Given the teaching and research demands on faculty, it is often the administrators and research support
staff who are most excited about library publishing initiatives.
We need to have a less ad hoc approach we are working on documentation and check lists, for example
in setting up an OJS instance. We need to define the service rather than responding to individual
requests. Researchers are only interested at time of need, therefore need constant promotion to catch at
the right time.
With regard to hosting journals: when starting hosting/publishing activities, the library should define
the level of support they want to offer (from very hands-on or a more hands-off service approach). When
supporting a large number of journals, a hands-on approach may be difficult to sustain over time. Digital
collections right now is treated as project-based work in the sense that there are start and finish dates.
However, maintenance is an essential part of this even when the project is technically ‘completed’. What
happens to maintenance post development and launch? This is something that needs to be considered in
the process.
You need to be clear with the faculty you are providing the services to what the library will and won’t do
on behalf of the journals.
ADDITIONAL COMMENTS
38. Please enter any additional information about publishing activities at your library that may assist
the authors in accurately analyzing the results of this survey. N=21
A formal library press is a challenging initiative given the present economic climate and
technological environment.
After early experimentation (beginning 15+ years ago) with Parallel Press and using the institutional
repository and library website for hosting materials generated by groups not interested in working with
a traditional publisher, we’ve learned some lessons. It feels like we’re now poised to learn from other
library publishing activities and take advantage of a growing relationship with our university press to
create a vision for the library’s role in this space on our campus. The need to support faculty production
and publishing of course-related content, along the lines of OERs, seems likely to lead to our library
developing more formal services around publishing sooner.
CSU does not provide publishing activities as a service other than organizing and hosting final
publications in an institutional repository most of them are ETDs but we have a fair amount of journal
articles and data sets. We have decided that we simply do not have the resources and we support the
University Press of Colorado in lieu of functioning more fully as a publisher or press. The value added
we provide is in managing a stable platform and persistent URLs, optimizing, bundling, and linking files
as appropriate, and providing and enhancing metadata.
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