1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8

New flows of scholarly materials

It is clear that a new ecology and a new economy for scholarly information are being formed. At this early stage the players are working through issues, roles and responsibilities, models, territorial disputes and change. Because there is a lot at stake, it is difficult to know how things will turn out. We have moved from a landscape with well-understood contours to one that is still “under construction.” The following figure (adapted from Lyon21 with permission) aims to show how the new environment might look. Changing research and learning behaviors results in a flow of research and learning outputs that, in turn, form the inputs for new research and learning activities. In the past, such flows tended to be concentrated through formal, linear publishing mechanisms; we are now seeing the emergence of a variety of repository frameworks, metadata aggregation services and richer content interconnection and repurposing that are changing how we think about data and its uses. Elements in the flow include:

• Repositories. These may be institutional, personal22 or community-based. They may be disciplinary or general. They may be specialized by format or general. (Try using Google to search “personal repository.”23)
• Aggregator services. These may be commercial services or provided through community or central funding of some sort. ResearchIndex (formerly CiteSeer) is an interesting example of a popular aggregator for particular disciplinary communities.
• The library. Clearly, the library potentially intersects with this cycle at many points: as a manager of institutional repositories, as a licensor of external services, as a facilitator for deposit or self-archiving, as a local persistent repository provider. The role of the library as aggregator has yet to be worked out. But, the library has the opportunity to take a leadership role in developing policies and programs that contribute to a coherent, institution-wide knowledge management system.

Scholarly information flow—Then

Libraries are ideally placed to continue to build relationships and to provide the services that create value to their communities, and which corroborate their role as trusted hubs of community and learning.

Scholarly information flow—Now

Research and Learning Landscape: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8