So many editors!
Posted on September 22, 2012 in Uncategorized by Eric Lease Morgan
There are so many editors of serial content here at the University of Notre Dame!
In a previous posting I listed the titles of serials content with editors here at Notre Dame. I identified about fifty-nine titles. I then read more about each serial title and created a sub-list of editors which resulted in about 113 names. The original idea was to gather as many of the editors together as possible and facilitate a discussion on scholarly communication, but alas, the number of 113 people is far too many for a chat.
Being a good librarian, I commenced to classify my list of serials hoping to create smaller, more cohesive groups of people. I used facets such as student-run, peer-reviewed, open access, journal (as opposed to blog), and subjects. This being done I was able to create subsets of the titles with much more manageable numbers of editors. For example:
- 15 science publications (19 editors)
- 10 student-run publications (24 editors)
- 12 open access publications (26 editors)
- 17 humanities publications (41 editors)
- 31 peer-reviewed publications (43 editors)
- 26 social science publications (50 editors)
- 28 published here at Notre Dame (56 editors)
One of our goals here in the Libraries to play a role in the local scholarly communication process. Exactly what that role entails is yet to be determined. Bringing together editors from across campus could build community. It could also make it easier for us to hear, learn, and prioritize issues facing editors. Once we know what those issues are, we might be able to figure out a role for ourselves. Maybe there isn’t a role. On the other hand, maybe there is something significant we can do.
The next step is to figure out whether or not to bring subsets of these editors together, and if so, then how. We’ll see what happens.
