Scholarly Communication

2118 Words5 Pages

The current age of digital information has brought many changes to our culture. We see clear evidence of this within the area of scholarly communication. These changes involve the significant increase in the amount of information that is available, the variety of the type of content included in scholarship, the dissemination process and the way scholars access and interact with this information. The academic library has traditionally strived to build collections, organize them for access and facilitate retrieval to support the research and teaching objectives of their students and faculty. Currently, the library is engaged in a redefining process in light of these transformations. It was thought that the dawn of digital content would provide increased and timelier access to a larger collection of scholarship and at the same time provide libraries with some economic benefit. Although the amount of scholarship that is digitally available certainly has increased, many would contend that the ability to access it has been curtailed. As for the economic advantage for libraries, that has never materialized. According to Mary Case of the Association of Research Libraries, “Electronic versions of their [publishers’] journals are produced as add-ons, at the end of the print process. As a result, those added costs are passed on to the subscriber.”1 But as scholarly research abounds and traditional avenues for dissemination and preservation have become more cost prohibitive and scholars are exploring new avenues for maximum distribution and exposure, libraries continue to search for their role in this endeavor.

In his work, Linked: How Everything is Connected to Everything Else and What it Means, Barabasi explores the idea that o...

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