Digital libraries and the continuum of scholarly communication

Abstract

This article explores the relationship between scholarly communication, an established research area receiving renewed interest, and digital libraries, a relatively new area of research. Scholarship is inherently a social process and it is embedded in a structure of relationships with other scholars, with scholarly societies, and with publishers and libraries. These stakeholders agree that the relationship has become unbalanced with the advent of electronic publishing, digital libraries, computer networks and associated changes in pricing, intellectual property policies and contracts, but they do not agree on solutions to redress the balance. Several problems worthy of research lie at the intersection of scholarly communication processes and digital libraries. These include the ability of digital libraries to support the cycle of information seeking, using and creating; the 'social life' of documents; and electronic publishing. Other interesting problems exist at the intersection of structures of scholarly communication and digital libraries. These include increased interdependency of scholarly documents, as links are embedded between documents, both within and between digital libraries; the indefinite preservation of digital documents; business models for electronic publishing and digital libraries; and conflicts between the physical and virtual aspects of libraries.

Extracting macroscopic information from Web links

“…These include convenience in accessing material and the desire to link to illustrative graphics. With, in addition to this, the relationship between scholarly documents undergoing changes in the digital era (Borgman, 2000), it is not immediately apparent that electronic backlinks or citations will yield similar information. It should be noted, however, that the distinction between electronic and paper publication is becoming increasingly blurred in the era of digital libraries, and with initiatives such as the OpCit project adding hyperlinks to traditional articles, allowing new on-line informetric analyses (Harnad & Carr, 2000).…”

Perceptions of Scholarly Communication Among Library and Information Studies Students

“…Next, participants were asked to define SC in their own words. There were 35 responses to this prompt-some pithy and others verbose, though all were to varying degrees in alignment with standard definitions of SC as given by Borgman (2000) and the Association of College and Research Libraries' (2003). Eighty-six percent (n=30) of the respondents' definitions included language to the effect that SC involved the "advertising," "communication," "dispersal," "dissemination," "exchange," "sharing," or "spreading" of scholarly production.…”

Challenges of serials text encoding in the spirit of scholarly communication

“…Borgman (2000) notes the duality of the publication workflow today; one that is largely electronic in terms of editorial and assemblage practices yet yields a print artifact. One of the primary goals of the IMH editorial staff is to support an online publication while maintaining a subscription-based print model and the DLP has treaded new ground: forging a partnership with the IMH print publishers sothat we can leverage the existing electronic output of the print publication workflow in support of an ongoing, online publication workflow.…”

“…25), these partnerships benefit the library as well, since, in her view, "enriched electronic texts also have the potential to showcase the university as an electronic publisher." Beyond collaborations historically forged with electronic text centers, academic libraries are now increasingly engaged in online publishing of scholarly journals (Alexander and Goodyear, 2000;Borgman, 2000;McGann, 1996;Rao, 2001;Thomas, 2006;Waiijers, 2002), and have developed software platforms in support of electronic publishing such as DPubs and the Open Journal System (OJS). DPubs (http://dpubs.…”