I amar prestar aen
Something is changing. Not to get mystical on all y’all, but I do smell something in the air, and for once it’s not cow leavings. (What? I live in Wisconsin.)
I heard through the grapevine that open access in general and institutional repositories in particular got quite a bit of exposure at ALA. I saw a librarian or two at MPOW regarding me with a little more than “what is that person doing here?” afterwards.
As I recounted, I made another librarian convert last week. This week, I’m meeting with a librarian from engineering to discuss some working papers. This morning, I answered a cataloguer’s email about green and gold open access.
Librarianship takes a while to assimilate new ideas. Academic librarianship tends to be slower still, and academic librarianship at large institutions, positively snail-paced. I have been known to utter the sentence “I love librarians except when I hate them.” This is why.
Still, open access seems to be water-cooler talk at MPOW. That’s optimistic.