Newsletter 2673 Issue 26732009521143951

Editor's Note

Last week, faculty and students at Ohio State University protested the library's weeding of more than 300,000 items from the library's collections since 2005. The protesters are concerned that the print collection is being deprecated, causing certain collection areas to suffer disproportionately. The library administration counters that space is at a premium, and that all of the library's usage statistics show researchers increasingly rely on digital materials.

Some faculty at the University of San Francisco are also upset, in this case over the financial appraisal of the library's Rare Book Room items that "may be expendable in an economic emergency." The library says it has no plans to sell the materials, but certain faculty members contend that raising funds for the library by auctioning off its collections is self-defeating under any circumstance. Besides pointing to the differing views of a library's obligations to its community of students and scholars, these two conflicts also highlight two nearly opposite ways to consider the instrumental versus intrinsic value of a collection.

In other news, the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) and the International Publishers Association (IPA) yesterday released a joint statement on Open Access (OA). The statement does not espouse any particular position, but instead offers a few "shared ground" principles agreeing that scientific freedom is paramount, and that access to scholarly work must be sustainable under any model. With the statement, the two groups hope to raise the level of OA debates that have "been harmed by unnecessary polarisations and sweeping generalised statements."

As always, enjoy the Newswire, and keep us posted—Josh Hadro, Editor, Academic Newswire