Wednesday 24 February 2010

The view from the other side

Steven Bell writes in Library Journal about attending a meeting of scholarly publishers:
"If I had one thought to sum up the experience it would be that the publishers seem genuinely more worried about the future than academic librarians. Despite how academic librarians tend to obsess about the future, we have little reason to believe our libraries and our jobs won’t be a part of it.

Scholarly publishers, however, see deep library budget cuts, institutional repositories, open access mandates, the growing need to offer their wares for an expanding array of platforms and devices, libraries with more and more consortial power, and other threats to their survival"

Worth a read:
http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6719631.html