Open access and collection development in academic libraries: digitization to discovery

All librarians in the academy have a responsibility to promote the value of open access scholarship. Alongside the strident open access rhetoric heard in the academic library world is the need for continued emphasis on practical strategies for adding relevant scholarly “free to reader, free to library” materials to collections. Librarians involved in collection development roles must now reach as far as possible into the larger world of web scholarly content to add, organize, promote and make quality material discoverable and accessible. Librarians need to expose the research materials housed in repositories and on the open web, even as these materials are often hidden from scholars due to lack of indexing, inadequate crawling by major search engines, existence of poor quality metadata, or a lack of librarian effort at marketing of material that might maximize usage and accessibility. Collection development librarians and subject specialists are best poised to know which public domain materials might best be digitized and made more accessible to institutional scholars and to local communities. Collection development librarians can identify new digitization initiatives, seek grant funding, and leverage collaborations and partnerships to maximize the availability and dissemination of open web scholarly research materials. These are new roles for collection development librarians, many of whom have seen other changes to their positions in an increasingly digital age. Collection development librarians add value by integrating valuable open web content alongside traditional library materials. Organizing available quality scholarly materials through weblists, research guides, LibGuides, course management systems, and integrated library systems can and must include free web materials. Collection development with open access materials requires a different skill set; one not dependent on traditional patterns of acquisition or the usual benchmarking for quality that may be dependent on traditional metrics or publisher reputation. Vetting of relevant, quality open access resources requires knowledge of all sources of such materials, whether the products of disciplinary or institutional repositories, open access journals and articles of all types, open educational resources, large monograph digitization initiatives, and indexes to the open access literature such as DOAJ(Directory of Open Access Journals). These materials represent a treasure trove of content, and extend the library’s traditional holdings out into the open web. Continued relevance for collection development as an “art” hinges on librarians’ willingness to embrace and add scholarly content regardless of business model. There are no barriers to adding open access content to the academic library, and the collection development policies will not have to be redefined to integrate the many sources of this “free to reader, free to library” content. Partnering with public services librarians to integrate this content into user services initiatives will result in further showcasing of these nontraditional materials. Collaboration and partnerships in promoting library production of open scholarship as well as librarians’ participation in shared open access discussions and initiatives can be seen as an appealing future scenario for collection development in academic libraries. Smaller or less well funded libraries can take advantage of material being made available by research libraries with robust repositories and journal and even book publishing programs. Along with purchasing or licensing content, many libraries are becoming “knowledge creators” and are eager to share the material with other libraries and scholars.