What Would An Open Access Academic Library Look Like, and What Would an Open Access Academic Librarian Do? | OUseful.Info, the blog...

"In the context of something else, I mooted whether a particular project required an “open access academic library” as a throwaway comment, but it’s a phrase that’s been niggling at me, along with the associated “open access academic librarian”, so I’ll let my fingers do the talking and see what words come out… Traditional academic libraries provide a range a services: they’re a home to physical content, and an access point to online subscription content; they provide managed collections that support discovery and retrieval of “quality” content; they promote skills development that allow folk to discover and retrieve content, and rate its quality, as well as providing expert levels of support for discovery and retrieval. They support teaching by forcing reading lists out of academics and making sure corresponding items are available to students. They have a role to play in managing a university’s research knowledge outputs, maintaining repositories of published papers and, in previous years, operating university presses. They are looking to support the data management needs of researchers, particularly with respect to the data publication requirements being placed on researchers by their funders. If they were IT empire builders, they’d insist that all academics can only engage with publishers through a library system that would act as an intermediary with the academic publishers and could automate the capture of pre-prints and supporting data; but they’re too gentle for that, preferring to ask politely for a copy, if we may… And they do cake – at least, they do if you go to meetings with the librarians on a regular basis."