I think we have a very dreary ‘published’ literature. We have a set of niche publications, many of little sustained interest. The literature is a citation farm for those involved in formal research activity, and in the US, a necessary career convenience for those librarians who work within the tenure system.
At last winter’s London presentation, I made the point at some length that communication is no longer the central purpose of the “scholarly communication” system; there are too many faster, easier ways to communicate. The central purposes of the scholarly communication system are marking territory (for authors and for disciplines) and lengthening CVs.
I’m glad to be out of the tenured-librarian rat race—not because I don’t have anything written to contribute to the profession, but because I don’t have to play CV-puffery games. Last year at this time, I was working on three-four written things at once. This year, I’m tying up one thing from last year and working on one other thing. (Okay, and a review… but reviews, I am discovering, don’t take me long. It helps when the book I’ve been handed is pure effluent, too. We don’t do technical reviews any more, I take it, Neal-Schuman? “XML is a language” on the very first page, sheesh.)
As for the literature… when I put together my syllabus for this fall’s course, I ended up with one book and two articles from “the literature.” (The book was Putting Content Online, because I think it kicks butt. The articles were on RFID. Couldn’t find anything suitable in the blogosphere. That probably says something about RFID’s future, but I’m not sure I should speculate as to what.) The rest is cobbled together from good tech sites, blogs, the tech-news site Ars Technica, and yes, Wikipedia.
Because our literature, it reeks, and we don’t read it anyway, so what’s the point?
