New Report From Ithaka: “Office of Scholarly Communication: Scope, Organizational Placement, and Planning in Ten Research Libraries”
“The following report from Ithaka (published on November 18, 2015) was researched and written by:
From the Introduction:
The phrase “scholarly communication” appears often in the description of library roles and responsibilities, but the function is still new enough that it takes different forms in different institutions. There is no common understanding of where it fits into the library’s organizational structure. This landscape review of offices of scholarly communication grows out of research originally conducted by Ithaka S+R for the Harvard Library.
Dr. Sarah Thomas, Vice President for the Harvard Library, University Librarian and Roy E. Larsen Librarian for the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, asked Ithaka S+R to undertake a review of how peer institutions support the scholarly communication function in their libraries. Dr. Thomas wanted to understand the scope of activities, staff size, and budget of similar units in peer institutions.
The project was designed to gather basic information about these issues at some of the largest research-intensive university libraries. It finds categorical differences in the vision for the scholarly communications unit and its organizational placement, as well as associated differences in staffing and budget.
List of Libraries (in Addition to Harvard) Included in Study
- Columbia University
- Cornell University
- MIT
- Purdue University
- Stanford University
- University of California, Los Angeles
- University of California System
- University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
- University of Michigan
- University of Oxford
- Yale University
From a Blog Post by Deanna Marcum:
What we learned from talking with ten research libraries is that there is no common model for offices of scholarly communication. In some cases, the OSC is the vehicle for adding scholarly content to the library’s collections; in some cases, it is the mechanism to support research efforts on campus; and in some, it is a way to envision the digital library and its services.
Direct to Full Text Report ||| PDF Version
Direct to Blog Post Overview by Deanna Marcum”
Stephen
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