(ALA) - The Library as Electronic Publisher: New Models of Dissemination of Scholarship
American Library Association (ALA) Annual Conference
The Library as Electronic Publisher: New Models of Dissemination of Scholarship
Hui Hua Chua
This is a report of the LITA Digital Technologies Interest Group program titled "The Library as Electronic Publisher: New Models of Dissemination of Scholarship." The idea of the library as publisher has become so widely accepted that for many libraries the question is no longer why libraries should become publishers, but how to do so. This session provided two different perspectives on the practicalities of electronic publishing.
Guylaine Beaudry, from the University of Montreal, described two collaborative projects, Erudit (www.erudit.org)and Synergies, for the publication of electronic journals and other materials in the humanities and social sciences. The foundation for these projects was the belief that humanities and social science journals confined to the "paper ghetto" would eventually disappear if not available electronically, and also the desire to retain control of scholarly publishing within the scholarly community.
Erudit, a consortium of francophone universities and university presses in Canada, was developed to fill this need. The consortium works with individual publishers and provides a range of services from digital publishing(retrospective and current), user interface creation and site hosting, metadata creation and reference linking, marketing and subscription management and usage statistics to search and alerting services. Currently most materials, which include journals, theses, preprints, books and proceedings, are available free on the Erudit Web site.
Erudit is based on a regional network strategy with staff and equipment in multiple geographic locations. Synergies will be a national Canadian network composed of similar geographically dispersed nodes. Other Erudit collaborations include an international linguistic collaboration with libraries in France and Belgium. The institutions are developing tools for electronic publishing collaboratively and actively working to transfer expertise. Beaudry stressed that, while the geographic dispersion of these networks presented co-ordination difficulties, the projects were much more sustainable in the long term because of the commitment of multiple institutions.
David Ruddy's description of Project Euclid (http://projecteuclid.org), Cornell University Library's partnership with publishers of mathematics and statistics journals, highlighted some interesting similarities and differences between the two projects. Both involve working with small, independent publishers to produce electronic versions of pre-existing high-quality, relatively low-cost,low-volume scholarly print journals. Euclid and Erudit provide the technical and marketing infrastructure these publishers lack. In the case of the math and statistics journals, this included the technical challenge of working with TeX(a mathematical typographical standard). Both were working with markets deemed relatively difficult to penetrate and unprofitable by commercial publishers. Both projects have undertaken responsibility for long-term preservation of data,with Érudit using DSpace (www.dspace.org)software. Both wish to preserve the diversity of scholarly publishing and provide an alternative model for scholarly communication. Ruddy also underlined the benefits for individual libraries in becoming electronic publishers. Libraries can develop and extend valuable skill and tool sets and infrastructure(human and technical), which can then be transferred to other projects.
While the market served and services provided by these projects are similar,the business model and technical implementation of these projects are slightly different. Unlike Erudit, Euclid journals are only available by paid subscription. Erudit marks up all articles in XML using a custom DTD and presents articles for Web access in HTML and PDF. Euclid does not provide XML mark-up for its articles, preferring to maintain the presentation format selected by publishers as closely as possible, and also because of the subject expertise required for XML mark-up of its highly technical content. Euclid has concentrated on developing tools for automated reference linking within articles and journals, to articles within other Euclid journals and to and from abstracts or reviews provided by other publishers using Euclid IDs and DOIs. It also makes its article metadata available for harvest using the OAI-PMH 2.0. This feature along with CrossRef linking is also being planned for Erudit. Ruddy emphasized that the technical aspects of creating linking services are far less complex than developing the relationships with other service providers and publishers necessary to facilitate linking.
While Erudit uses open source software for 80 per cent of its requirements and intends to use 100 per cent open source software for Synergies, Project Euclid has developed its own software entirely. This will not be made publicly available unless funding is provided to do so. Both speakers emphasized the necessity for a balance between the benefits of using open source software and the development and support costs of doing so.
As more libraries move into electronic publishing, it is reassuring to hear about the successful experiences of two often-similar but slightly divergent approaches to complex issues. The speakers' emphasis on the importance of relationships and networks and standards-based electronic publishing provide a framework for other libraries thinking of embarking on electronic publishing.
Hui Hua Chua (chua@gwm.sc.edu)is the Electronic Government Information Librarian, Thomas Cooper Library, University of South Carolina, Columbia, South Carolina, USA.
