Evolution of Faculty Publications and Changing Role of Law Librarians

Jan Ryan Novak of the Cleveland-Marshall College of Law Library and Leslie A. Pardo of the John J. Ross-William C. Blakley Law Library, Arizona State University, have co-authored an article entitled The Evolving Nature of Faculty Publications published on the Social Science Research Network:

"Technology increasingly drives the evolving nature of the library's role in managing faculty publications. Libraries not only create physical archives of faculty scholarship, but take on the active role of facilitating immediate access to content. Trends in legal scholarship, including new formats such as blogs and podcasts and the open access initiatives, compel libraries to develop creative solutions such as enhanced bibliographies, searchable databases, and digital repositories to manage access, preserve, and disseminate faculty writings".

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"Digital publishing and the Open Access Movement are rapidly impacting, and decreasing, the role of traditional, print journal literature as the predominant expression of faculty scholarship. Librarians’ roles as archivists, preservers, mediators, and promoters of access to faculty scholarship are as essential for electronic media as they have traditionally been in the print environment. Moreover, librarians need to embrace the roles of aggregating, distributing, and disseminating formerly performed almost exclusively by publishers. At the very least, librarians should be organizing all the access points to all manifestations of their institution’s faculty’s scholarship. Librarians can contribute expertise and skills to the management of their institutions’ participation in the SSRN or bepress initiatives. It is critically important for librarians to assume leadership roles and maintain responsibility for institutional repositories if they are to remain relevant during this next phase of the technological revolution".