Three lessons learned from ten years in academic librarianship

"The story of institutional repositories is a complicated one, but one (perhaps over-simplified) way of seeing it is that librarians created expensive repository systems naively expecting researchers to self-deposit their articles into it. Not only did most of them resist this, we were shocked when some of them started self-depositing in commercial systems like ResearchGate, Academia.edu which had unclear business models and licensing when there were perfectly trustworthy alternatives in institutional repositories.

Related to this is many librarians have been guilty of not looking beyond the library at the wider environment we work in. By this, I don't just mean look at higher education trends but also learning about how businesses in the publishing and library tech industry work. This reluctance to look beyond the library, assuming things will remain unchanged and learn how the business environment works perhaps explains the shock librarians express when Elsevier purchased SSRN and then again when they purchased Bepress.

Adding to the danger is the problem of library bypass. Librarians serve as intermediaries and like all intermediaries today, we are in danger of been cut out as the middleman. Publishers can market directly to our users using social media and email, when say JSTOR goes down, our users directly feedback to JSTOR on their Facebook pages. One thing that academic libraries used to have on their side was a better understanding of local conditions, on the needs of our users. Today, many companies, like Elsevier, Digital Science are working their way into our user's workflow and with superior analytics they are starting to get better data on what our users want.

Changes in scholarly communication may also result in many publishers moving towards a services based company and some of the services such as benchmarking analytics reports, research Information Management systems would be marketed directly to non-library campus units like research office/provost office etc."