The future is production
Now, anybody reading this post should keep observer bias in mind. I have strong reason to want the construction I’m placing on the observations I’ve made to be true. Check with your own experience and your own sense of logic.
The trend I’m seeing, in presentations and poster sessions relating to everything from institutional repositories to electronic resources to campus copyright offices to library design, is the gradual but accelerating movement of libraries and librarians into the production of knowledge, in addition to our more traditional roles.
I don’t just mean digitization projects; as often as not, they’re recasts of existing knowledge preserved in other forms. I mean that we are waltzing into faculty offices caroling, “Got knowledge? Give it here.”
I don’t think we’ve done that before. Knowledge production was a partnership between faculty and artisans belonging to publishers. We only got hold of the knowledge after those folks were done with it.
The publishers should indeed be afraid of us, but not for the reasons they’re citing. It’s not that we’re flouting copyright or demanding that knowledge be free or maliciously threatening their revenue streams. It’s that we are bloody well muscling in on their turf. They ought to fear that. They ought to. They can’t do what we do—but we’re just starting to find out that we can do what they do, and that doing so may be advantageous to us and the populations we serve.
This is, I suppose, nothing I haven’t said before. Bears repeating, though, and perhaps even a little emphasis.