2019 Charleston Library Conference

Increasingly reductive and adversarial framing of academic vendor/library interactions can provide a tempting lens through which to view the scholarly communication landscape, where vendors are unrepentant villains that act in bad faith and librarians are tragic heroes fighting (and often losing) for patron rights. However, upon further examination, the truth is far muddier and brings us to a reckoning.

Do we prefer the ease of a simple narrative to a truthful examination of the complicated and interconnected circumstances of libraries and publishers? It seems clear the answer is yes, but that preference and the simplification it provides dampens discourse rather than serving patrons. Further- in an era of excessive costs, return-on-investment obsession, and the corporatization of higher education can academic libraries be framed as “good” or so different from vendors? With the publishing marketplace an inequitable quagmire of multinational corporations and floundering small presses, can we call all publishers as “evil”?

We contend that this narrative is naive at best, willfully ignorant at worst, and unproductive regardless. This panel will grapple with the maddening nuance, unsatisfying ambiguity, and ultimately shared fate of libraries in higher education and their resource suppliers. This panel of acquisitions and collections librarians and vendor representatives will seek to engage in a productive conversation that acknowledges our current and unsustainable present and posits paths forward beyond Twitter.