|
New ARL/Ithaka Report on Digital Scholarly
Communication
The Association of Research LIbraries has just released the final
report of a study that they funded through Ithaka on new practices in
digital scholarly communication. In addition, they've made an
underlying database of example projects gathered as part of the study
available for searching. The report can be found at:
http://www.arl.org/bm~doc/current-models-report.pdf.
I have reproduced the longer ARL announcement below.
There will be a session discussing this report at the upcoming
fall CNI meeting.
Clifford Lynch
Director, CNI
----------------------------
Karla Hahn
Association of Research
Libraries
202-296-2296
karla@arl.org
Nancy L.
Maron
Ithaka
212-500-2349
nancy.maron@ithaka.org
Current Models of
Digital Scholarly Communication
ARL Releases
Final Report from Ithaka Study
Washington DC--The
Association of Research Libraries (ARL) has released the final report
from a study that ARL commissioned Ithaka to conduct, Current
Models of Digital Scholarly Communication, by Nancy L. Maron and
K. Kirby Smith, along with the database of exemplars that the study
produced.
In the spring of 2008,
ARL engaged Ithaka's Strategic Services Group to conduct an
investigation into the range of online resources valued by scholars,
paying special attention to those projects that are pushing beyond the
boundaries of traditional formats and are considered innovative by the
faculty who use them. The networked digital environment has enabled
the creation of many new kinds of works, and many of these resources
have become essential tools for scholars conducting research, building
scholarly networks, and disseminating their ideas and work, but the
decentralized distribution of these new-model works has made it
difficult to fully appreciate their scope and number.
Ithaka's findings are
based on a collection of resources identified by a volunteer field
team of over 300 librarians at 46 academic institutions in the US and
Canada. Field librarians talked with faculty members on their campuses
about the digital scholarly resources they find most useful and
reported the works they identified. The authors evaluated each
resource gathered by the field team and conducted interviews of
project leaders of 11 representative resources. Ultimately, 206 unique
digital resources spanning eight formats were identified that met the
study's criteria.
The study's innovative
qualitative approach yielded a rich cross-section of today's state of
the art in digital scholarly resources. The report profiles each of
the eight genres of resources, including discussion of how and why the
faculty members reported using the resources for their work, how
content is selected for the site, and what financial sustainability
strategies the resources are employing. Each section draws from the
in-depth interviews to provide illustrative anecdotes and
representative examples.
Highlights from the
study's findings include:
* While
some disciplines seem to lend themselves to certain formats of digital
resource more than others, examples of innovative resources can be
found across the humanities, social sciences, and
scientific/technical/medical subject areas.
* Of all
the resources suggested by faculty, almost every one that contained an
original scholarly work operates under some form of peer review or
editorial oversight.
* Some of
the resources with greatest impact are those that have been around a
long while.
* While
some resources serve very large audiences, many digital
publications--capable of running on relatively small budgets--are
tailored to small, niche audiences.
*
Innovations relating to multimedia content and Web 2.0
functionality appear in some cases to blur the lines between resource
types.
*
Projects of all sizes--especially open-access sites and
publications--employ a range of support strategies in the search for
financial sustainability.
The report is freely
available on the ARL Web site at
http://www.arl.org/bm~doc/current-models-report.pdf. Search the database at
http://www.arl.org/sc/models/model-pubs/search-form.shtml.
|