Digital Scholarship, Scholarly Communication, and Disconnects
As I prepare to attend the American Historical Association in Boston, it is interesting to note how use of digital publishing and technology is slowly creeping into the consciousness of historians. At the 2011 meeting there are a few sessions which Dan Cohen’s blog mentions (Cohen is a professor at the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University). Particularly interesting is the session on dissertations.
The meeting I will be missing this weekend is the American Library Association where there will be many sessions on “scholarly communication” and the like, but interestingly these discussions do not seem to be making a great impact on practicing scholars. The questions for me are:
1) How do we bridge this disconnect between what librarians discuss and what scholars are actually doing?
2) Are librarians not promoting the issues of scholarly communication well enough?
3) Are the issues of “digital scholarship” (as for instance what historians are doing) and “scholarly communication” (as understood by librarians) actually different problems?
Obviously dissertations seem to be a common issue, but there are many other common issues and it seems that librarians and scholars (at least this particular group of scholars) are still not communicating as much as they need to about them.
I’d be interested if others have ideas about how to change this.
