Isn’t it ironic, don’t you think?
I’ve had Brian Kenney’s An Open and Shut Case sitting around in a browser tab for days now, and its appearance today on LISNews prompts me to finally post about it. In a nutshell, he writes:
This is all, of course, very ironic. After all, librarians are the most vocal advocates for open access to journal content—except, apparently, when it’s their own publications. I suspect this is because of ALA’s outdated, carrot-on-the-end-of-the-stick, publishing model: keep the publications locked away as the supreme benefit of membership.
Well, yeah. For how many of you reading this right now has American Libraries been the swing vote in your decision to retain membership in ALA? OK, maybe a bad example… but, what divisions or roundtables have you joined largely for their literature? I’m surely guilty of this: I joined LAMA for a while mainly because I liked reading Library Administration & Management so much, but, no more.
The real question here becomes: What can associations offer us so that their publications become a bonus, rather than a sine qua non?
(Psst — want some free LIS-related reading material? Check out today’s Info Career Trends for a bunch of articles on nontraditional careers.)
Angel:
_American Libraries_ is a bad example indeed. Anyhow, I used to keep my ALA membership for some of the journals. However, since my library subscribes to some, and I have the rest on TOC alert, anything I may want to get I don’t subscribe to I get on ILL. ALA needs to do a heck of a lot better to get me back than the journals. Once I figured out I could get them elsewhere, I dumped the membership. Not like it did much for me otherwise besides a big expense every time on renewal.
2 September 2008, 3:29 pm