OPEN ACCESS AND THE PRACTICE OF ACADEMIC LIBRARIANSHIP: STRATEGIES AND CONSIDERATIONS FOR "FRONT LINE" LIBRARIANS.

Librarians working in academic libraries are often exhorted to advance the cause of open access through their daily work with scholars and students in the institution. For experienced librarians as well as those new to the profession, there may be some confusion about how to carry out this work. There may be a lack of understanding about potential roles in a changing vision of scholarly communication that includes advocacy for openness as well as a responsibility for participation in local, national and global efforts. Librarian roles may not have changed to incorporate new models of scholarly communication. Library leaders may be using a level of rhetoric that may not resonate with the actual experience of librarians in their work in reference, instruction, collection development, or liaison work with teaching faculty. Librarians, often seeing themselves as members of a service profession seek to make available and provide services around the traditional library collections desired by institutional faculty and students. Incentives may not exist to produce the kinds of changes to collections or services that are held up as the future vision of the library. Also, whether they hold professional staff or faculty appointments, librarians endeavor to publish their own research in the established corpus of scholarly literature of library and information science (LIS). Librarians may not be invested in changing their own publishing behavior to match the messages they are asked to convey about open access to those in other disciplines. In library schools, LIS educators may not be integrating scholarly communication topics of relevance to future public services librarians into their curricula. The focus may be on digitization efforts and less on the types of services that librarians offer every day to faculty and students in reference encounters, liaison work, instruction or collection development work. After more than a decade of open access advocacy in libraries, it may be time to focus on the practical side and to move toward the promulgation of specific actions that are likely to produce real and positive result. Librarians working on the front lines will benefit from a better understanding of the type of contributions they can make. This paper is focused on the practical impact of open access on public services, collection development and other common academic librarian roles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]