http://acrlog.org/2007/03/14/building-the-house-we-shall-live-in/ Blogging by and for academic and research librarians Fri, 03 Sep 2010 00:48:11 -0500 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.4 hourly 1 http://acrlog.org/2007/03/14/building-the-house-we-shall-live-in/comment-page-1/#comment-30612 Lousy Publishers! Wed, 13 Jun 2007 20:40:27 +0000 http://acrlblog.org/2007/03/14/building-the-house-we-shall-live-in/#comment-30612 [...] Peter Brantley (whose interesting thoughts have been blogged about here before) has an interesting post on university presses, scholarly communication, and what it is that libraries don’t get when it comes to publishing. Putting it bluntly, he says “I am coming to the conclusion that librarians are likely to be lousy publishers.” The publishing work flow is intense: it requires significant hand- and thought-work. Editors don’t sit around at their desks waiting for pretty, tightly-formed, well-argued drafts to come floating by. There is a lot of work in finding, attracting, grooming talent; encouraging the actual writing; producing coherent drafts; editing; presentation; administration; rights; marketing; and distribution. Some of these things are made easier by Web 2.0 and social computing, but in most cases, the workload has only increased, at least in the short term…. Not everything is going to be improved by being processed through a collaborative, social mill. The best things are always going to take somebody’s care, and love. [...] [...] Peter Brantley (whose interesting thoughts have been blogged about here before) has an interesting post on university presses, scholarly communication, and what it is that libraries don’t get when it comes to publishing. Putting it bluntly, he says “I am coming to the conclusion that librarians are likely to be lousy publishers.” The publishing work flow is intense: it requires significant hand- and thought-work. Editors don’t sit around at their desks waiting for pretty, tightly-formed, well-argued drafts to come floating by. There is a lot of work in finding, attracting, grooming talent; encouraging the actual writing; producing coherent drafts; editing; presentation; administration; rights; marketing; and distribution. Some of these things are made easier by Web 2.0 and social computing, but in most cases, the workload has only increased, at least in the short term…. Not everything is going to be improved by being processed through a collaborative, social mill. The best things are always going to take somebody’s care, and love. [...]

]]> http://acrlog.org/2007/03/14/building-the-house-we-shall-live-in/comment-page-1/#comment-27217 Siva Vaidhyanathan Questions Google Book Search Mon, 23 Apr 2007 10:57:42 +0000 http://acrlblog.org/2007/03/14/building-the-house-we-shall-live-in/#comment-27217 [...] These are serious charges, some of them have surfaced in a previous ACRLog post. As for the Google Library Partners side of the story, their public statements do point to the public good as a motivation for making their collections more widely accessible, and it’s hard to fault them for that. Vaidhyanathan’s comparison to the Human Genome Project seems unfair–no governments were willing to step up to digitize books on anything like the scale of Google Book Search as far as I know. According to the University of Michigan, it would have taken them more than a thousand years to digitize their collection on their previous pace of digitizing. New York Public Library strikes a cautious tone in their statement and hardly seems to be rushing into anything. As for quality control and metadata issues, I don’t know, but the FRBR Blog has reported that a Library of Congress working group on bibliographic control has recently met with Google. It’s an interesting point about library’s relationship with publishers–however there is an argument that GBS will help publishers to sell more books from their back catalogs. [...] [...] These are serious charges, some of them have surfaced in a previous ACRLog post. As for the Google Library Partners side of the story, their public statements do point to the public good as a motivation for making their collections more widely accessible, and it’s hard to fault them for that. Vaidhyanathan’s comparison to the Human Genome Project seems unfair–no governments were willing to step up to digitize books on anything like the scale of Google Book Search as far as I know. According to the University of Michigan, it would have taken them more than a thousand years to digitize their collection on their previous pace of digitizing. New York Public Library strikes a cautious tone in their statement and hardly seems to be rushing into anything. As for quality control and metadata issues, I don’t know, but the FRBR Blog has reported that a Library of Congress working group on bibliographic control has recently met with Google. It’s an interesting point about library’s relationship with publishers–however there is an argument that GBS will help publishers to sell more books from their back catalogs. [...]

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