Because I am a bad person, I spent yesterday’s cataloguing class listening with rather less than half a brain to my colleagues’ project presentations. (Except for the one about dinking around with MARC records in Perl. How come Python doesn’t have anything as keen as Perl’s MARC module? Because, wow. What even I could get done… I know about MARC21.py, but it doesn’t seem to be nearly as mature. Days I wish I didn’t hate and fear Perl.)
The rest of my brain occupied itself on some recent periodicals, specifically the latest issue of Searcher. Said issue contains a brief, circumspect, toe-in-the-water look at academic libraries becoming publishers, especially serials publishers.
Some especially good quotes near the end of the article pointed up the possibilities of partnerships with university presses. I hadn’t thought about that before, but it makes sense… and just now, something jogged loose in my head that makes it seem even more sensible.
That something being: Publishers, including university presses, do not know how to do electronic-text production. Libraries do not know how to do print-text production. A few exceptions in both directions, of course, but by and large, this has been and still is the case—meaning that libraries and university presses are in a fantastic position to shore up each others’ shortcomings, because publishers obviously do know how to do print, and libraries do know about doing electronic (they just call it “digitization,” is all).
The folks I’m keying Greek for (who as far as I know won’t mind me mentioning them here) appear to be just such a collaboration, though for books rather than serials. (Figures that this project comes out of Michigan. Those people are so far ahead of the curve that they’re close to running out of curve altogether.) When I got started on the work, I let slip for all the obvious reasons that I was a soon-to-graduate student librarian. My correspondent also has a library degree, and asked if I was interested in jobs at university presses.
I didn’t think I was, at the time, but now I’m starting to wonder. Somebody’s got to do the production-liaison work if these partnerships are going to fly. Who’s hiring that somebody, then? Is it the libraries or the presses?
