day three of scholarly communication institute

This was day three of the scholarly communication institute. Here's a shot of the three WSU team members who attended the session: (l to r): me; Joel Cummings, Collection Manager for Science, Engineering, and Agriculture; and, Kay Vyhnanek, Scholarly Communication Librarian.

One high point of today's session was a keynote by Peter Lange, Provost of Duke University. Lange described his own work as a graduate student to explain how much that the research process has changed in recent decades, in part because of increased faculty specialization, and the need for the librarian role to change as well. Lange cited the need for a "filtration" of information on behalf of scholars. To be successful, librarians must have a strong understanding of the problems faced by researchers; Lange envisions clusters of librarians and scholars working outside of the traditional organization structure to address (in effect) the ranking of information according to quality.

During the afternoon, Francis Malloy of Emory University provided some info on a system that I first saw demo'd in fall 2005, Reserves Direct. This open source software is now available for use in electronic reserves systems.