In their very own words: authors and scholarly journal publishing

This paper presents the results of a major investigation by questionnaire of author attitudes towards scholarly publishing, which was funded by the Publisher's Association. Altogether, the views of nearly 4,000 authors were obtained and this paper concerns just those thousand or so authors who accepted the invitation to write freely about their own personal feelings and experiences. Using QSR N6 textual analysis software, their comments were processed and themes extracted. While the rest of the questionnaire, which was formed of closed‐question, tick‐box type questions, clearly must have had some impact on their thinking, the authors had considerable latitude in regard to what they could say. The paper provides a unique opportunity to hear their views directly. The pressing topics turned out to be (in rough order of concern): the peer‐review system, copyright, journal prices, alternative business models for journal publishing, big deals, Elsevier, electronic publishing and digital journals.     

In their own words: Perspectives on collection weeding from library employees and teaching faculty

Following a Science and Engineering collection weeding project of over 350,000 print items, our research team conducted interviews with 20 library employees and 19 teaching faculty involved in the project. The purpose of the interviews was to assess the interviewees' perspectives and feelings relating to the time required to complete the project, inter- and intra- library communication, the decision-making processes, and their personal assessment of the costs and benefits of the project. The interviewees also offered their views of the overall project's successes and areas for improvement. Drawing from a qualitative analysis of the interviews, we provide guidance for other academic libraries preparing to undertake their own collection weeding projects including suggestions for what to expect and what to manage throughout the process.     

Our words,our story: a textual analysis of articles published in the Bulletin of the Medical Library Association/Journal of the Medical Library Association from 1961 to 2010

Purpose:

This lecture explores changes in the medical library profession over the last fifty years, as revealed by individual word usage in a body of literature.

Methods:

I downloaded articles published in the Bulletin of the Medical Library Association and Journal of the Medical Library Association between 1961 and 2000 to create an electronic corpus and tracked annual frequency of individual word usage. I used frequency sparklines of words, matching one of four archetypal shapes (level, rise, fall, and rise-and-fall) to identify significant words.

Results:

Most significant words fell into the categories of environment, management, technology, and research. Based on word usage changes, the following trends are revealed: Compared to 1961, today''s medical librarians are more concerned with digital information, not physical packages. We prefer information to be evidence-based. We focus more on health than medicine. We are reaching out to new constituents, sometimes leaving our building to do so. Teaching has become important for us. We run our libraries more like businesses, using constantly changing technology. We are publishing more research articles.

Conclusions:

Although these words were chosen by individual authors to tell their particular stories, in the aggregate, our words reveal our story of change in our profession.The Janet Doe Lecture on the history or philosophy of medical librarianship: I will warn you right now that you will get very little philosophy out of me today, for two reasons. First, my predecessor T. Scott Plutchak, AHIP, was a philosophy major, and I knew that a zoology major like myself could not compete with that. Second, “philosophy” in many Janet Doe lectures is actually a strong personal viewpoint of medical librarianship—what it is or what it should be. I do collection development, where things change so much and so rapidly that I have not had time to develop a strong viewpoint like many of my Doe predecessors. Like most of my collection development colleagues, I''m just trying to survive day to day. That tends to create a very pragmatic attitude. If I believe in anything strongly, it is that I believe I''ll have another cookie.Without philosophy, I am left with history. And here I will echo the complaint of many Doe lecturers by stating that I have a severe lack of historical research skills. I became painfully aware of this lack as I read previous Doe Lectures, such as David Kronick''s 1980 lecture 1. Kronick was a true scholar, with a doctorate in librarianship. We honor him to this day with the Medical Library Association''s (MLA''s) David A. Kronick Traveling Fellowship. In his Doe Lecture, Kronick quoted H. Curtis Wright''s “The Oral Antecedents of Greek Librarianship,” Francis Bacon, and the fifteenth-century Abbot Johannes Trimethius. In contrast, later in this speech, I will quote the Talking Heads.While I am totally unqualified for traditional historical research, that still leaves informal, or personal, history. Although I am old enough to be in my anecdotage, I just do not have many interesting stories to tell. And as Thomas Basler, FMLA, told us in his 2008 Doe Lecture, there are no more giants. While I met some of those giants, I did not know them, and I certainly do not have any stories to tell about them. I suppose I could tell stories about some of the taller than average individuals I have met in my career, but that does not sound very exciting.