The History Librarian

Actually, a few short things:

• During active times, I get about 5-10 blog-views/day, but mostly from people who seem to be looking for history librarian jobs; these last two posts have netted me ten times that amount.
• I want to emphasize that Dorothea’s “Nine Commandments” for increasing access to library literature rock and are much more sensible steps than my own mania for starting OA journals. I recognize that my desire to have all library-related literature under my control is a problem and am seeking help from various sources.
• I searched in LISA for articles about the information seeking habits of public librarians as well as articles about professional development for public librarians and came up with nothing of interest. Am I missing something? This would be an interesting avenue of research if it hasn’t been covered.
• (added later that very evening) I forgot that I wanted to address one other matter: in the first OA post, I wrote: “there needs to be an open access journal for librarians that can be the equivalent of Library Journal or better.”  I meant this in terms of ubiquity, not in terms of content – LJ gets eyeballs; I’m not so sure that the present OA library journals do to the same extent (noting, as I did before, that I’m thinking here of general librarianship, not digital libraries or information science – I recognize the importance and visibility of, for example, D-Lib and First Monday).  For example, how many librarians have read Elaine Peterson’s “Librarian Publishing Preferences and Open-Access Electronic Journals” (not the best example, but it’s interesting in light of the present discussions)?

Okay, my meanderings have probably scared most people off by now.

This is a response to Dorothea’s post “Open Access to the Library Literature” (at least, a response to some parts of it), but also a continuation of yesterday’s thoughts on an OA alternative to Library Journal.

While public librarians are not required to publish to the same extent that academic librarians do, this does not mean that they don’t want to publish.  This also does not mean that articles written by academic librarians might not be of interest to public librarians; for example, research relating to use of instant messaging would be of interest to both groups (here’s an example of one public librarian frustrated at lack of access to professional literature, which is what originally started me thinking about public librarians and access).  Academic libraries, like public libraries, can be used by a wide variety of people – at GSU, we have a large population of so-called non-traditional students who might have a lot in common with public library users.   I doubt that we are unique in this.  Our younger students were only recently potential YA users of their local public library; there are many connections here.

More importantly, while much of what appears online on blogs, wikis, and listservs is very valuable and stimulating, not much of it ranks as research – online activity is predominantly a vehicle for anecdotal discussions, sharing of information, that sort of thing.  Very important, yes; but not really the kind of treatment one expects from an article (which can be more developed than, say, a blog post, but of course this is not necessarily so).  Furthermore, research done by my colleagues suggests that many librarians are not tuned into blogs and do not look to blogs as a source of professional information (something that I lament, but there it is).  While I really respect and value the professional discussions that happen online, we don’t want to limit public librarians to a situation where their opportunities for learning are ALA vehicles and what they can discover via blogs and listservs.  If we truly value our professional research literature, then we need to make sure that it is readily available to our profession as a whole and not just to a segment of it.