2015 Charleston Library Conference

The recently published The Once and Future Publishing Library (Okerson & Holzman 2015)* tracks the development of library publishing from the 1990s to the present. With the formation and continuing growth of the Library Publishing Coalition, now open to international as well as North American membership, plus the unification--at minimum through reporting lines--of about twenty percent of American university presses with their institution’s library, it seems a good time to evaluate where we are and, perhaps more importantly, where library publishing might be going. Using the report as a starting point, panelists will consider such questions as the large and small goals of library publishing initiatives, the types of materials libraries are best at and perhaps not as good at publishing, creating sustainable business models, peer review, disseminating and marketing library materials, and curation. Panelists will include librarians active in publishing activities, university and/or commercial publishers, and disseminators of scholarly content (eg., Project Muse, JStor, EBSCO). Perhaps a practicing scholar as well to comment on what a scholar would expect a library publisher to provide among its services. The tentative format would be for the session chair to pose questions for each of the panelists to address.

*--to be published by CLIR summer 2015