Pelikan's Antidisambiguation: Moirologists, Authority and the Academy

Pelikan's Antidisambiguation: Moirologists, Authority and the Academy Michael P. Pelikan Follow this and additional works at: https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/atg Part of the Library and Information Science Commons Recommended Citation From the University Presses from page 60 cousins. Some librarians have even told me, when I mentioned that some anti-commercial press policies were badly hurting university presses, that the latter were unfortunate collateral damage. But if university and commercial presses are cousins with occasional common interests, libraries and university presses are siblings, birthed by the same institution and living under the same collective roof. We may resent each other at times, be jealous at other times, but at the end of the day we’re family, and the family can only prosper if we develop and cultivate cooperation. This can be done both by finding new projects to work on together and by evolving our institutional relationships. To start with the latter, I can offer a specific example. My successor as director at Temple University Press will also serve as the library’s (which really means the university’s) scholarly communication officer, in which capacity she/he will work with both library and press staff on an everyday basis. This is to some extent modeled on the Purdue University library-press model and will include moving the press into the library as a way of a) getting it back on campus after a four-year exile to a three-miles distant satellite building and b) giving the library and press staffs real opportunities to get to know each other and start thinking together. Other presses also live in actual libraries — Indiana, Arizona, and Georgia come to mind — and I hope they will periodically report, as they did at the 2013 AAUP meeting, on their successes and their difficulties. At this writing, something like twenty presses report to libraries. It would make sense for them to meet at ARL or ALA or AAUP conferences to compare their experiences and perhaps to foster cross-institutional partnerships to deal with some of the larger issues that simply can’t be resolved by individual institutions alone. These include tackling the problem of the massive outflow of university money to commercial presses (mostly, but not always for STM materials); the outflow of student funds to commercial textbook publishers; the free rider problem, whereby universities and colleges without presses allow those that have them to bear by far the lion’s share of the costs; and the honest consideration of whether all scholarship needs to be open access or whether alternative solutions might offer OA where it’s most needed while revenue-producing items — more affordably priced to be sure — would help build a sustainable system. Indeed, as Temple Dean of the Libraries Joe Lucia has suggested, we need to work better together to define what constitutes success in scholarly communication. There is so much to do, and we can do it so much better if really engage each other so that we take full advantage of our complementary skills. With that I bid you all adieu. Many thanks to those who have read any of the pieces I’ve contributed in the past couple of years. If some of them have sparked a thought or two, then the effort has been worth it. I hope to find new ways to contribute to the scholarly communications ecosystem in the months and years ahead, so you may from time to time hear from me again in this space. Meanwhile, my thanks to Katina Strauch for the opportunity to share my thoughts and to Tom Gilson and Toni Nix for putting up with my challenges to the concept of a fixed deadline. You folks are great! Pelikan’s Antidisambiguation — “Moirologists, Authority, and the Academy” Iindustry is in trouble. You can’t swing heard someone say recently, “The textbook a dead cat without hitting someone who thinks they can write the next textbook replacement...” Huh? Who would want to swing a dead cat? How would such a person be regarded in a professional setting? And where does the expression “you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting (this or that),” come from, anyway? The World Wide Web seems to be, well, not-fully-informative on this last question. Yahoo Answers labels as “Best Answer” a meandering set of data points touching variously upon “the hit TV show Cheers,” the idea that the gestured form of the expression is performed “by circling of one hand in the air like a lassoing action,” and the assertion that “the term ‘dead cat’ is an expression from the mide-70s… not referring to our kitty friends though.” Finally, the Yahoo Answers entry links to an etymology site according to which, “…there is no trace of this phrase, [sic] before the last twenty years.” Hmmm. If I remember my Tom Sawyer correctly, it was Johnny Miller who, for the privilege of helping Tom whitewash the fence, “…bought in with a dead rat and a string to swing it with…” continued on page 62 Pelikan’s Antidisambiguation from page 61 (...truncated)