Abstract
I will offer reflections and speculations on the circumstances and prospects of universities (especially public flagships). How are we to understand the changes in the technical and political environments that seem to be putting the quality of U.S. public universities at risk, and what might we do about it? Answers to both of these questions will be incomplete and speculative (as we would expect from an experienced administrator) and will be informed by my experience as an economist, a provost, and a university librarian. The university librarian part turns out to be more important than one might think a priori, because changes in information technology and associated markets become apparent in the library before they become apparent in the Dean’s office. I hope to stimulate vigorous discussion of these and related matters. And I might also talk a little about the phenomenon that is known as grade inflation.

BIO
Paul N. Courant is the University Librarian and Dean of Libraries at the University of Michigan. He is also Harold T. Shapiro Collegiate Professor of Public Policy, Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of Economics, Professor of Information, and Faculty Associate in the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan. From 2002-2005 he served as Provost and Executive Vice-President for Academic Affairs, the chief academic officer and the chief budget officer of the University. He has also served as the Associate Provost for Academic and Budgetary Affairs, Chair of the Department of Economics and Director of the Institute of Public Policy Studies (which is now the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy).

Courant has authored half a dozen books, and over seventy papers covering a broad range of topics in economics and public policy, including tax policy, state and local economic development, gender differences in pay, housing, radon and public health, relationships between economic growth and environmental policy, and university budgeting systems. More recently, he is studying the economics of universities, the economics of libraries and archives, and the changes in the system of scholarly communication that derive from new information technologies.

Paul Courant holds a BA in History from Swarthmore College (1968); an MA in Economics from Princeton University (1973); and a PhD in Economics from Princeton University (1974). He rides a BMW R1150R motorcycle.

Sponsored by University Library, School of Information, and Center for Studies in Higher Education.

With the advent of electronic publishing, the scholarly communication landscape at universities has become increasingly diverse. University “publications” not only include those of the university presses and society journals but can also include forms as diverse as preprints, digital library collections, databases, personal webpages, and lecture webcasts. The discussions will consider the possibilities that the academic community, in some structure, could take over essentially many, if not all, aspects of scholarly publishing. This is a complex issue and one that can profit from the attention of persons who have comprehensive experience with university and pan-university organizations, as well as the nature of and needs for scholarly publication.

This event is part of the CSHE research project funded by the A.W. Mellon Foundation on The Future of Scholarly Communication, which is under the direction of C. Judson King and Diane Harley.
http://cshe.berkeley.edu/research/scholarlycommunication


Institutional Roles in Evaluation, Quality Assessment, and Selection

Laura Brown, Senior Advisor, Ithaka; Former President, Oxford University Press, Inc.
Donald Kennedy, President Emeritus, Stanford University; Editor-in-Chief, Science
Mark J. McCabe, Visiting Assistant Professor, School of Information; Lecturer, Ross School of Business, University of Michigan
Kate Wittenberg, Manager of Electronic Publishing, Center for Digital Research and Scholarship, Columbia University
Diane Harley, Senior Researcher, CSHE, UC Berkeley (moderator)


Structuring and Budgeting Models for Publishing within the University Community

James L. Hilton, Vice President and Chief Information Officer, University of Virginia
Donald Kennedy, President Emeritus, Stanford University; Editor-in-Chief, Science
Mark Rose, Professor, English Department, UC Santa Barbara; Director Emeritus, UC Humanities Research Institute
Ellen Wartella, Chair, UC Systemwide Library and Scholarly Information Advisory Committee; Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost, UC Riverside
C. Judson King, Director, CHSE, UC Berkeley (moderator)

Abstract: The Digital Library Federation seeks to provide scholars, particularly social and cultural historians, literary scholars and scholars working in interdisciplinary fields, with consistent access to digital library collections pertaining to nineteenth and twentieth century United States social history across numerous institutional boundaries through it's DLF Aquifer initiative. The project is designed to address the difficulty humanities and social science scholars face in finding and using digital materials that are often located in a variety of environments with a bewildering array of interfaces, access protocols and usage requirements. By gathering distributed collections and integrating them into a variety of local environments, the project will bring the resources to the scholar and make material from remote repositories available through locally supported tools. This presentation will describe the initiative, which is in the project planning stage and solicit suggestions from participants for successful implementation.

Bio: Katherine Kott is the director of the Digital Library Federation's DLF Aquifer program. Her professional career has included a wide range of responsibilities in libraries and information services. Prior to beginning her work with the Digital Library Federation in 2005, Kott was the head of cataloging and metadata services at Stanford University, where she is based. Before arriving at Stanford, she led the implementation services department at Innovative Interfaces, Inc., managing the installation of integrated library systems around the world. She has promoted the idea of leveraging resources through collaboration throughout her career, including work as a systems librarian at Bates College and in law library technical services at Duke University.

ABSTRACT:
In 2000, 2003, and 2006, Ithaka and JSTOR conducted nationwide surveys of faculty members in an effort to understand their attitudes and perspectives towards new technologies for finding, accessing, and communicating information. One of the most important broad findings from these studies has been about the importance of discipline in driving faculty attitudes and needs. At the same time, the cultures of specific disciplines are not static, but have quite clearly been evolving over the past six years. This presentation will focus on several specific disciplines and the changes afoot within them in their attitudes towards electronic journals, the transition away from print format, the role of the campus library, preservation and archiving, and more. Some limited comparisons will be made with a related survey of academic librarians, and significant discussion of our findings and their implications will be encouraged.

BIO:
Roger Schonfeld is Manager of Research for Ithaka , a not-for-profit organization working to help higher education transition take advantage of advances in information technologies. Roger is the author of JSTOR: A History (Princeton University Press, 2003), which examines business models for the shift to an online environment for scholarly texts by focusing on how JSTOR developed into a self-sustaining not-for-profit organization. He has also published The Nonsubscription Side of Periodicals (Council on Library and Information Resources, 2004) and, with Brian Lavoie, the most comprehensive examination of the systemwide print book collection, "Books without Boundaries: A Brief Tour of the System-wide Print Book Collection," Journal of Electronic Publishing, 2006. Previously, Roger was a research associate at The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Abstract: The Digital Library Federation seeks to provide scholars, particularly social and cultural historians, literary scholars and scholars working in interdisciplinary fields, with consistent access to digital library collections pertaining to nineteenth and twentieth century United States social history across numerous institutional boundaries through it's DLF Aquifer initiative. The project is designed to address the difficulty humanities and social science scholars face in finding and using digital materials that are often located in a variety of environments with a bewildering array of interfaces, access protocols and usage requirements. By gathering distributed collections and integrating them into a variety of local environments, the project will bring the resources to the scholar and make material from remote repositories available through locally supported tools. This presentation will describe the initiative, which is in the project planning stage and solicit suggestions from participants for successful implementation.

Biography: Katherine Kott is the director of the Digital Library Federation's DLF Aquifer program and the interim Executive Director for DLF. Her professional career has included a wide range of responsibilities in libraries and information services. Prior to beginning her work with the Digital Library Federation in 2005, Kott was the head of cataloging and metadata services at Stanford University, where she is based. Before arriving at Stanford, she led the implementation services department at Innovative Interfaces, Inc., managing the installation of integrated library systems around the world. She has promoted the idea of leveraging resources through collaboration throughout her career, including work as a systems librarian at Bates College and in law library technical services at Duke University.

Presentation Slides

Discussions of the current state of scholarly communications tend to be binary, with Open Access advocates lining up on one side against their foes in the traditional publishing world, often called “toll-access publishing.” Within the traditional world, however, there is an important distinction between the for-profit and not-for-profit organizations. The future of scholarly communications is likely to have all three kinds of activity - sometimes operating independently, sometimes competing, and often working together. The aim of this seminar is to propose what kind of activities are best suited for each publishing venue and to make a case for renewed support of not-for-profit toll-access publishing.

Joseph J. Esposito is President of Portable CEO, an independent consultancy providing strategy assessment and interim management to the information industries. Over the course of his career, Mr. Esposito has been associated with various publishers in all segments of the industry and was involved from an early time with new media publishing. He has served as an executive at Simon & Schuster and Random House, as President of Merriam-Webster, and CEO of Encyclopaedia Britannica, where he was responsible for the launch of the first Internet service of its kind. Mr. Esposito has also served as CEO of Internet communications company Tribal Voice and SRI Consulting, both of which he led to successful exits. Among Mr. Esposito's clients have been such technology companies as Microsoft and Hewlett Packard, various publishers of all stripes, and a growing number of not-for-profit organizations (e.g., Ithaka Harbors/JSTOR, the University of California Press, and the American Nationals Standards Institute). Recent projects range from business development for a large not-for-profit institution, electronic textbooks, The Processed Book Project (experimental interactive texts), and consultation on mergers and acquisitions. He has participated in numerous trade shows and has written extensively in trade magazines and journals. He is currently researching new economic models for a post-copyright age and can be reached at espositoj@gmail.com.

Presentation Slides

Presentation Notes

Scholarship is built on the cumulative record of the past and the well-tended, authentic, and readily accessible data of the present. Current federal efforts to build a digital information preservation infrastructure at the Library of Congress and the National Archives assume that research institutions responsible for producing large quantities of research data, such as the University of California, will take responsibility for ensuring its long-term access. Is that a reasonable expectation? What is at risk if they do not?

Abby Smith is a historian and consulting analyst with special interest in the creation, preservation, and use of the cultural record in a variety of media; the impact of digital information technologies on cultural heritage institutions; and the evolving role of information as a public good. Until her recent relocation to the Bay Area, she was director of programs at the Council on Library and Information Resources in Washington, DC. Prior to that, she worked at the Library of Congress managing programs relating to preservation of and access to cultural heritage collections.

She currently works with the Library of Congress’s National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP) in development of its national strategy to identify, collect, and preserve digital content of long-term value. She is an advisor to the ACLS Commission on the Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences and serves as Senior Advisor to the Scholarly Communications Institute at the University of Virginia. She consults with several universities on identifying content of long-term value, understanding various risk factors to its persistence, and analyzing organizational strategies for its long-term access.

She holds a doctoral degree in history from Harvard University and has taught at Harvard and Johns Hopkins Universities. She has published most recently on the Library of Congress’s digital preservation initiative (“Distributed Preservation from a National Perspective: NDIIPP at Mid-Point,” in D-Lib Magazine). Other recent publications include: Access in the Future Tense; New-Model Scholarship: How Will It Survive?; Strategies for Building Digitized Collections; The Evidence in Hand: Report of the Task Force on the Artifact in Library Collections; and Authenticity in the Digital Environment.

The goal of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP) project is to produce an authoritative, comprehensive, and open access dynamic reference work in philosophy that will (a) be useful both to academics and the general public and (b) stay responsive to new research. In this seminar, Zalta describes how the key elements of the SEP's publishing model and funding model will help us to reach this goal. The publishing model guarantees high quality and revisable content, but efficiently produced with a low overhead. (1004 volunteer authors and 101 volunteer subject editors are managed by a staff of 1.7 FTE, using a web-content management system built and customized with grants from the NEH and NSF.) The funding model constructs a true partnership between Stanford University and the world-wide library community, to build a protected operating fund for the SEP so as to maintain permanent free access. I outline how the protections and perks for the libraries built into the partnership work to the libraries' advantage. Finally, Zalta says a bit about the success they have encountered thus far in implementing their funding model.