Today: #LibPub Session 7: Learned Societies and Libraries as Publishers

~ Ernesto Priego
Title: "[Illustrated Official Handbook of the Cape and South Africa. A résumé of the history, conditions, populations, productions, and resources of the several colonies, states, and territories. Edited by John Noble. [With a map.]]", "Miscellaneous Official Publications" Contributor: NOBLE, John - Clerk of the House of Assembly, Cape of Good Hope Shelfmark: "British Library HMNTS 010095.de.1." Page: 671 Place of Publishing: London Date of Publishing: 1896 Publisher: J. C. Juta & Co. Edition: Second edition. Issuance: monographic Identifier: 000598049
“[Illustrated Official Handbook of the Cape and South Africa. A résumé of the history, conditions, populations, productions, and resources of the several colonies, states, and territories. Edited by John Noble. [With a map.]]” Via the Mechanical Curator, British Library, Flickr Collection

Today in our Libraries and Publishing in an Information Society module at City University London we’ll have the opportunity to zoom in at two key issues in contemporary scholarly publishing. One is the role of Learned and Professional Societies and the other is the role of libraries and institutional repositories.

To guide the discussion we’ll have two guest talks:

  1. “The A-to-LPSP Guide to Scholarly Publishing: what does the future hold for learned and professional society publishers?”, by Suzanne Kavanagh (@sashers).
  2. “Libraries, Institutional Repositories and Digital Collections: What is ‘Publishing’ Anyway?”, by Neil Stewart (@neilstewart).

Suzanne Kavanagh is Director of Marketing and Membership Services at the Association for Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP). She has 20 years’ experience of working for academic and professional publishing companies in marketing and sales roles.

ALPSP works with not-for-profit organisations and those who work with them to publish scholarly communications. ALPSP’s members work closely supporting library and scholarly communities. Drawing on ALPSP’s own research into the challenges they face, as well as wider political, economic, social, cultural and technological factors, Suzanne will challenge the students to consider what the future holds for scholarly publishing.

Neil Stewart is the Repository manager at City University London, and a fellow member of the Library Tech Committee of the Open Library of Humanities. City’s repository is called City Research Online, it comprises CRIS (Current Research Information Systems) and an open access repository.

Neil will consider in which concrete ways libraries and repositories can be considered to be doing publishing, and will invite us to consider critically what the meaning of ‘publishing’ is.

Librarians and information professionals require a critical and informed understanding of the multiple aspects of the scholarly publishing landscape of today. How can libraries harness the experience of Learned Societies? How can libraries turn the current financial, cultural, political, and technical challenges that scholarly publishing faces today into opportunities to diversify and enhance their remit? These are some of the issues we can start thinking seriously about in our roadmap towards a librarianship of the future… for the present day.

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As usual this post was also blogged at my City blog: http://blogs.city.ac.uk/epriego/2014/03/21/libpub-session-7-learned-societies-and-libraries-as-publishers/

Published by Ernesto Priego

I'm a lecturer, researcher and editor. I'm interested in many things and do work in many areas. I'm into human-computer interaction design, digital humanities, comics studies, scholarly communications, open access, open data, ethics, public health, politics, media, journalism, human rights. You can follow me on Twitter @ernestopriego.