The Structure of Scholarly Communications within Academic Libraries

Abstract

Academic libraries often define their administrative structure according to services they offer, including research services, acquisitions, cataloging and metadata, and so on. Scholarly Communications is something of a moving target, though. How are Scholarly Communications positions defined, what duties do they often include, and how do they fit within the library’s administrative structure? Some of the first positions devoted to Scholarly Communications required JD’s and focused on Author’s Rights, copyright and fair use. Yet other positions recently advertised group Scholarly Communications librarians within Digital Scholarship units, which not only create and maintain institutional repositories, they also publish electronic journals and offer services related to data curation. This presentation will quickly review the findings recently published in a SPEC Kit, findings which focus on ARL Libraries. The main portion of the presentation, though, will move beyond the SPEC Kit by concentrating on non-ARL Libraries, reviewing their relevant position descriptions and library organization charts, among other resources, to uncover common duties for Scholarly Communications librarian positions and the variety of administrative structures in which they work.