The Ant, the University Press, and the Librarian

Against the Grain, Dec 2014

By Patrick H. Alexander, Published on 01/01/14

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The Ant, the University Press, and the Librarian

The A nt, the University Press, and the Librarian Patrick H. Alexander 0 1 0 Th e Pennsylvania State University Press , USA 1 by Patrick H. Alexander , Director , The Pennsylvania State University Press , USA Part of the Library and Information Science Commons Recommended Citation - Article 9 Follow this and additional works at: https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/atg The Ant, the University Press, and the Librarian. Reflections on the Evolution of Scholarly Communication Ttablished a press-library collaboration in he Pennsylvania State University es2005. In due course, under the auspices of a newly created Office of Digital Scholarly Publishing, it successfully launched an Open Access monograph series, collaborated on several library book-publishing projects, a journal archive, a reprint series from the libraries’ special collections, and another monograph/ database project. I arrived in 2007, when things were just beginning to take shape. We were probably not unlike many press-library relationships that were being formed, doing our best to “make our way in the world today.” It wasn’t perfect, but it was decidedly a step in the right direction. One aspect of the partnership became clear early: Our respective, different cultures did not always make communication or working together intuitive or straightforward. In an Against the Grain article that appeared in an issue co-edited with my friend and former colleague at the Pennsylvania State University Libraries, now the executive director of the HathiTrust, Michael Furlough,1 I wrote about those different cultures. I reflected on a university press’s “assets” in the press-library relationship. I proposed that presses were “assets,” and I discussed these, not in contrast to the liabilities of a library or vice versa, but in terms of how presses and libraries differ culturally. I was spinning the differences between presses and libraries using the language of finance, but, in reality, I was obliquely pointing out that businesswise we were from two different planets, even if located on the same campus. Over time my take on the cultural differences in the ATG article was reinforced, and I pointed to those differences whenever I talked about Penn State’s press-library relationship. Three assets — more properly cultural differences — continue to hold import for me, and I suspect they could hold for other press-library relationships. Understanding and managing these cultural differences, as nearly as I can tell, continues to play an ongoing and determinative role in how presses and libraries will or will not work together. With a little elaboration, I review them below. Although presses range widely in terms of size, audience, and mission — University of Chicago Press is not like the University of Oklahoma Press, and University of Michigan Press is not like Kent State University Press — most generally face outward to scholarly associations, researchers, and society writ large, rather than inward toward their campuses. Libraries, however, typically look inward, locally, toward their faculty and students. Understandably, that means libraries, comparatively, have enviable influence and power inside the university. They have solid networks and access to campus resources. They have the ear of the provost, may have contact with the president, and have a deep institutional history. Plus, people — donors — give libraries money. In contrast presses construct networks with societies, researchers, institutes, and authors, often in subject areas only loosely connected with the university. Consequently, presses historically built few if any powerful allies inside the university. Moreover, presses only rarely receive significant capital support. Once a press was moved under a library, for good or for ill, it quickly learned what a difference a library could make vis à vis recognition and access on one’s own campus. For the first time, a few presses found institutional support and political cover in their relationship with the library. Presses operate on the basis of a (theoretically) revenue-generating, cost-recovery market model; libraries operate on a subsidized, expenditure-based budget. As I have said often, libraries are given a pot of money out of which they must control their expenditures and operate successfully. Presses, in contrast, are given a largely empty pot (an average allocation applied to operating expenses is 8%–13%2) and are told to fill it with money. While neither is easy, those two approaches to managing finances are wildly different. Understanding existentially the difference between the two approaches is nearly impossible for either side and is the source for ongoing misunderstanding. A third difference is linked both to the inward/outward and to the difference in how finances operate. On the one hand, libraries Academic Publishing Is Not ... from page 14 orders at library wholesalers. The concept of plugging books into a traditional profit-andloss (...truncated)


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Patrick H. Alexander. The Ant, the University Press, and the Librarian, Against the Grain, 2014, Volume 26, Issue 6,