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Librarians do not select, acquire, organize, and provide access to all forms of 'literature' in the traditional sense today.   Where would you or others,  put all the changes in new scholarly communication today?  When I was an assistant editor for OCLC PAIS, back in 2000, I indexed internet documents ten years ago that were not part of any library collection, but freely available on the Internet for access by anyone. The items we indexed then, were only a small chip in the iceberg of the vast amount of materials out there, that never reached the index pages. Each week we also would spend several hours physically sorting through publications at the NYPL new acquisitions section to review materials, there were too many to ever be able to index.  Would they ever reach the shelves and the catalog, and the user?
The library indexes do not do it all either.

In the public affairs/social sciences especially, a large amount of important research is left out of mainstream library collections and indexes to that literature.   Grey literature is another example.  Library collections from African, Francophone, Latin American, Caribbean etc countries are examples of others that are left out of the literature too--in traditional print collections and indexes.  

re: Prof Robbins comment about bibliographies published from ALA LGBT also made me think of the fact that in 2010, a significant percentage of print materials from Mansell's NUC National Union Catalog of imprints pre 1956, STILL remain hidden i.e. unknown from major online bibliographic databases such as WorldCat.  Yet in an age of Google, people still believe everything is online.   To most people however, that is a low priority of concern, unless you are looking for special collections or older print materials. 

What about open access journals today, and institutional repositories--are they going to count that as a library collection or a university / organization collection instead?
I think that there are many changes to the traditional perspectives of peer review today, what do you see changing or not in terms of this?    Will peer review journals and publications still remain the same as it did 30 years ago?    

These are some of the questions new faculty will be dealing with in the years ahead.
I have many cataloging students do research papers as well, using a large number of freely available internet documents, by well respected researchers in the field.  Most papers will also include other articles and a few books too, but a large amount of literature today is freely available online to users and faculty.  Google Scholar is a very popular source for finding materials online, but the users do not need to go via the library itself. 

How are faculty weighing in on the discussion of open access journals and publications for tenure these days?  Is that going to change in 2-3 years, 5 years ?

Just some thoughts & questions,
Karen W.
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Karen Weaver, MLS, Adjunct Faculty, Cataloging & Classification, The iSchool at Drexel University, Philadelphia PA email: [log in to unmask] / Electronic Resources Statistician, Duquesne University, Gumberg Library, Pittsburgh PA email: [log in to unmask]

"Not everything that can be counted counts, and
not everything that counts can be counted."
--Albert Einstein

On Sun, May 2, 2010 at 9:37 AM, Suzanne Stauffer <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
As Louise implies, the original question is based on a faulty assumption, which is that the only value of a library is direct reference assistance.
 
What academic researcher could even begin to do a literature review if librarians did not select, acquire, organize, and provide access to that literature? I don't know any academician who could afford to subscribe to every journal in her area of expertise, let alone every subject index, and purchase every relevant monograph -- assuming that she had the time to wade through all of the reviews of published works to determine which journals and monographs were relevant, as well as reliable and valid.
 
As for discovering the weaknesses of the research -- isn't that what peer review is for? I suggest that if a researcher does miss significant works in the field, the work is never published, making it impossible for the reference librarian to make the statement below.
 
As we all know, it is impossible to either prove a negative or demonstrate what would have happened if only history had been different. It must be obvious to any competent researcher that there is no way to "produce valid and reliable evidence that ... the state of knowledge at the moment is less advanced, or the achievements to date less impressive, than they might have been, namely because its specialists have made insufficient use of  librarians, librarians' methods, or recommended library resources ?" How can one possibly produce evidence for something that is, by definition, non-existent?
 
Let me reverse the question -- can you produce even one published research paper for which the author did not make use of library collections?
 
Suzanne M. Stauffer, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
School of Library and Information Science
Louisiana State University
275 Coates Hall
Baton Rouge, LA 70803
(225)578-1461
Fax: (225)578-4581 


Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?



--T.S. Eliot, "Choruses from The Rock"