New blog! Announcing...OA Librarian

OA Librarian is a blog with two purposes.

The blog is designed to gather together major search sources for freely available information in library and information science. See the top right hand corner of the blog, which features links to the DOAJ LIS journal collection - 52 titles as of today, along with links to E-LIS and D-LIST, as well as key advocacy resources particularly relevant to libraries and librarians. The result is a combined pathfinder / news resource blog. The idea is to bookmark the page, for handy reference particularly to the free resources, a tool which will become of greater importance as the OA resources grow.

From my point of view, it is becoming more and more attractive to begin research with international resources such as DOAJ and E-LIS. I find that the results give me a much broader perspective than searching in a package including only articles in english, written by people whose background is very similar to mine. For LIS faculty, here is a thought: what about an assignment that actually requires the use of DOAJ and/or E-LIS, to take advantage of this broad, global perspective?

Postings are on topics relating to open access that are particularly relevant for libraries and librarians: comments on open access activities from our perspectives, thoughts about what librarians will be doing in an open access world, celebrations of OA library accomplishments and stories about OA advocate librarians.

OA Librarian is a team effort. Founding team members are Lesley Perkins, a recent graduate of UBC's SLAIS program, and member of the BCLA Information Policy Committee, Andrew Waller from the University of Calgary, who has done some co-writing and co-publishing on open access with me, and Marcus Banks from NYU, who is on the editorial board at the open access journal, Biomedical Digital Libraries. Marcus' own blog, Marcus' World, includes the journal-within-a-blog Politics With Perspective, one of the inspirations for the Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics, which is a blog which is a journal - sort of. Comments are welcome on OA Librarian, and there is room for more on the blog team, so if you would like to join, let one of us know!

This post reflects my personal opinion only and does not represent the opinions or policy of the BC Electronic Library Network or the Simon Fraser University Library.