RLI 287  5 RESEARCH LIBRARY ISSUES: A REPORT FROM ARL, CNI, AND SPARC 2015 recently affected the work of librarians and archivists as well as to envision future changes in not just libraries, but also those needed to sustain scholarly communications more broadly. Scholarly publishing had long coped with a series of issues that one press director characterized as a “chronic illness” going back to at least the 1970s, but also continued into the 1990s as libraries bought fewer books and journal subscriptions.10 In the early 1990s libraries had already been under tremendous strain because of increasing journal subscription fees, the proliferation of cross-disciplinary journals, the growing demands for ever-more specialized monographs for tenure and review (even though fewer were selling to libraries), and the burgeoning amount of scholarship being produced by faculty under greater demands to publish more and faster. As Buckland’s manifesto suggests, libraries were also under pressure to alter the way they provided services to readers who were quickly being redefined as “users.” The Internet spawned the open source movement for computer code, which provided a model for new initiatives pushing for the free and open access to information—including scholarship and the vast field of gray “unpublished” literature. The Internet also quickly offered novel options to disseminate research and create new forms of scholarship and revolutionary experiments in academic narrative and argument as hybrid or emerging scholarship. Between the economic instability of the traditional print forms and the need for libraries to use the latest technology to fulfill their core services, both short-form and long-form scholarship had to transform. This transformation started with digitized forms made available online, but quickly began to evolve new features and hybrid forms. Endnotes 1 Stanley Chodorow, “Scholarship & Scholarly Communication in the Electronic Age,” EDUCAUSE Review 35, no. 1 (January/February 2000): 88–89, http://www.educause.edu/ero/ educause-review-magazine-volume-35-number-1-januaryfebruary-2000. 2 Board on Agriculture, National Research Council, Colleges of Agriculture at the Land Grant Universities: A Profile (Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1995), 9–10. 3 Chodorow, “Scholarship & Scholarly Communication in the Electronic Age,” 89. 4 David Lewis, “Inventing the Electronic University,” College & Research Libraries 49, no. 4 (1988): 298, doi:10.5860/crl.76.3.296. 5 Martin M. Cummings, The Economics of Research Libraries (Washington, DC: Council on Library Resources, 1986), 26–29. 6 Ibid., 58–65. Between the economic instability of the traditional print forms and the need for libraries to use the latest technology to fulfill their core services, both short-form and long-form scholarship had to transform. This transformation started with digitized forms made available online, but quickly began to evolve new features and hybrid forms.
Previous Page Next Page