2015 Charleston Library Conference

Library employees do research and investigation as part of their responsibilities in carrying out the operations of a library; however, much of this work is not published in the professional literature and is only inconsistently recorded in committee documents. As such, this work is hidden both from others in the Library who might use it and from the profession at large, meaning that other libraries were not able to benefit from it. To address this problem, the University of Illinois Library (Urbana-Champaign) established the Library Occasional Report Series (LibORS) in 2015.

The process of establishing LibORS included exploring what it would mean to commit to publishing and promoting the University Library’s work as an organizational practice as well as creating workflows, acquisition criteria, editorial guidelines, a report template, and a blog as well as other communication mechanisms. The LibORS team also had to make important decisions about preservation and impact evaluation, including the use of alt-metrics, for this digital only series.

This session will explore the value of this type of series while discussing the specific case of LibORS, including the challenges faced in establishing a completely new publication series. This session will be of interest to participants hoping to curate and publicize their organization’s work as well as librarians generally interested in the process behind establishing a publication series. We will invite discussion of others’ experiences establishing journals or series publications.