Taking a Longer View | Inside Higher Ed

"As I mentioned last week, I’m working with a group of liberal arts college librarians to explore the question of whether we can contribute something valuable to the open access movement by founding a press. (It's not too late to tell us what you think. Scholars, we have a survey for that, and it's open for a few more days.) This puts participating librarians on the horns of a dilemma because it would involve taking money that we use to provide our local communities access to published scholarship in order to publish scholarship anyone can access. The practical and the ideal are in direct competition for resources. This is an example of what Mita Williams meant when she addressed the question of 'why librarianship is difficult and contentious.' Of late, we have sacrificed the larger question of the value libraries have for society for the smaller question of what the library can do for its institution and its immediate constituents. This is something happening in education generally during our age of austerity. The underlying assumption is that what benefits society generally will be revealed by completion once we run the numbers, because the market knows best and numbers don’t lie. As the demand to justify every move we make with metrics trickles down to the day to day operations of the library, an obsession with metrics that Jonathan Rochkind warns can (mis)lead us to focus on only that which can be easily measured and/or that which will make us look good, Mita charges library directors to do a better job of articulating the broader mission of libraries. Those broader goals are far more universal and enduring and, in the end will be our saving grace ..."