CIC's Armstrong Presents at EDUCAUSE 2009

CIC's Armstrong Presents at EDUCAUSE 2009

CIC's Armstrong Presents at EDUCAUSE 2009

Nov 13, 2009, 12:36 PM

Kimberly Armstrong, assistant director of the CIC’s Center for Library Initiatives, delivered a talk at the 2009 EDUCAUSE Annual Conference in Denver on Nov. 4. Armstrong’s presentation focused on how collaboration may help solve “the scholarly communication problem." Scholars and...

Kimberly Armstrong, assistant director of the CIC’s Center for Library Initiatives, delivered a talk at the 2009 EDUCAUSE Annual Conference in Denver on Nov. 4. Armstrong’s presentation focused on how collaboration may help solve “the scholarly communication problem."

Scholars and researchers publish articles in journals both to share their work and to participate in the promotion and tenure reward structure, and libraries in turn, must buy back that published scholarship in the form of subscriptions, increasingly in digital form. The cost of journal subscriptions has long outpaced library budgets and the effect is that less scholarship is available to fewer people.

But if academic libraries consolidated their purchasing power, pooled their resources, and approached publishers collectively, Armstrong presented, the results could be transformational for both higher education and the public good as the end result would be more scholarship being available to more people.

Armstrong delivered her presentation with Jay Starratt, dean of libraries at Washington State University. The EDUCAUSE Annual Conference is the higher education community’s premier information technology event.