A pair of reports from OCLC discuss how the boundaries of what constitutes the ‘Scholarly Record’ are expanding, and how those tasked with stewarding this record need to respond in order to preserve and make it accessible:
The Evolving Scholarly Record (Lavoie et al, 2014) — since “the scholarly record is evolving to have greater emphasis on collecting and curating context of scholarly inquiry”, the report introduces a framework that provides “a high-level view of the categories of material the scholarly record potentially encompasses, as well as the key stakeholder roles associated with the creation, management, and use of the scholarly record.”
Stewardship of the Evolving Scholarly Record: From the Invisible Hand to Conscious Coordination (Lavoie, Malpas et al, 2015) — building off the previous report, this report argues that “uncoordinated, institution-scale efforts of individual academic libraries acting autonomously to maintain local collections” are unsustainable for full stewardship of the expanded Scholarly Record, and calls for “conscious coordination” between institutions involving “a broader awareness of the system-wide stewardship context; declarations of explicit commitments around portions of the local collection; formal divisions of labor within cooperative arrangements; and robust networks for reciprocal access.”
While both reports are well worth reading and comparatively short, this post from the OCLC Research blog summarizes discussion from a related series of workshops into thought-provoking lists of potential action for research libraries, especially the “things that institutions should consider doing” and “things to consider as a community” lists at the bottom of the page.
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