Melody's Blog

(The first half of a blog post that was written as a guest post for my friend Anthony's blog, On Books and Biblios .) What does a theological librarian and book lover do when spending a few days in London? Obviously, Charing Cross Road would be a good choice, but not this trip, so make a plan to see some interesting libraries AND find some astonishing places where books are hiding out! As a Catholic theological librarian, I was interested in seeing three Catholic libraries in or near London—the library at Heythrop College, the library at Allen Hall, and the Catholic National Library. As I am hoping to soon publish an article on these libraries and their collections, I will just mention how these fit on my tour. Heythrop College, the specialist philosophy and theological school of the University of London is just off Kensington High Street on Kensington Square. It started life in the 1600s as a Jesuit school and has moved several times due to Jesuit suppressions. Its fascinating ...

Today I received a notice from a journal asking me to subscribe. Here is my response: I received your notice of the journal XXXX . I would love to subscribe to it, but I will not be doing so. Currently, I have NO plans for adding subscriptions with models of pricing which I believe are not sustainable. I do not believe that scholarly societies that have sold their journals to for-profit publishers are generally operating in a model which supports their own mission. If you do truly believe that no minister or theologian “can be adequately educated who is not acquainted with the debates this journal compasses,” you would charge a price for it that was sustainable for theological schools like my own and most of the other small seminaries that cannot afford to add journals at this price. I notice from the publisher's website that most of your board comes from large institutions that may be able to support prices such as these, but the large majority of seminaries are like my own that h...

A few days ago, Lorcan Dempsey posted about the decision of JISC to stop funding Intute . I don't regularly use Intute myself, but now that I have looked at it again, I wish I thought of it more often! I have never been quite sure what I think about "subject gateways" to the web. I maintained a Reference Resources page at a Jesuit college for many years and we have a few things on our website here at CTU (but haven't developed any kind of massive lists of resources--instead usually pointing our students to the Wabash guide and a couple of other selected resources). I've always been intrigued by the ATSRW project of ATLA; not a subject gateway, it is designed to get bib records for websites into the catalog. I thought this might be a better way to curate the web, but it hasn't gathered huge momentum. All this to say, the FAQ at the Intute website is really a mini-primer on scholarly sustainability--it outlines some of the funding problems they have and vari...

Barbara Fister has a great post   on why libraries are sometimes loath to embrace open access; why they keep deepening the hole by continuing to go for Big Deals in periodical subscriptions. I am starting this blog because I want to keep preaching the gospel of open access, but I also think there are other sustainable models. I attended the JSTOR/Portico Forum this past Tuesday and I am really excited by the possibilities which seem to be coming along with JSTOR. With the Current Scholarship Program , a library will be able to purchase one (1) title. It seems likely that by purchasing that one title, the library will gain search capability of the entire JSTOR archive--delivering lots of discoverability to their users. I am sold on the JSTOR collections as a way to gain access to multi-and interdisciplinary journals (and other material) and have no plans to discontinue any collections, but the ability to add specific journals in addition to the collections is an awesome idea. Theolo...

From description of blog: An eclectic blog on sustainable scholarship and libraries, book jaunts and research, and odd interests like vocation, children's lit, and ??? So, why? And why these topics? OK, lots of reasons. I've been thinking about it for quite a while. I wrote a couple of guest blogs for my good friend Anthony's blog, On Books and Biblios , which I highly recommend, and it began to become clear that Anthony would NEVER run out of ideas on his own and publish mine! My daughter started a blog. I gave a presentation at the American Theological Library Association conference in June and some colleagues asked if I had plans for continuing the conversation I had started there on scholarly sustainability, then one emailed to ask if I blog. I had been feeling the need to figure out a way to keep track of some of my research and ongoing thoughts about my work. I don't consider myself an expert and I am always hoping to learn. So I decided to go for it. So, why th...