Interview — Carol Tenopir from page 51 What changes will be required of libraries and librarians? CT: Libraries and librarians that actively seek and take a visible leadership role will have a significant role, but those that remain quiet, invisible, or siloed run the risk of being made obsolete. Research data services and evaluation/assessment are two examples of areas where the institution has a need and the library can play important roles in leading or fulfilling those needs. ATG: Carol, given your highly active research and teaching schedule, making time for fun and relaxation strikes us as being necessary to keep your batteries re-charged. Are there specific activities that you enjoy when not focused on research and teaching? CT: Does it sound like a cliché if I say I like to read?! I read widely but am particularly interested in arctic and Antarctic exploration (and I have quite a collection of books from and about the golden age of Antarctic exploration), mysteries, and classic fiction. I travel a lot for work and always try to do one interesting thing on each trip in addition to work, like an extended walk or a concert or a visit to a cultural attraction. I like to explore the countryside and cities on foot and spend lots of time walking in such diverse locales as my family’s home in the rural foothills of California or my adopted home of the city of Helsinki. ATG: Thank you so much for taking time to talk to us. We really appreciate you sharing your perspectives on these key issues.
The Scholarly Publishing Scene — Two and a Half Cheers for A&I Services Column Editor: Myer Kutz (President, Myer Kutz Associates, Inc.) <myerkutz@aol.com>
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suppose it was because I came out of book publishing (I’d been an author of an engineering book, a book about the Rockefeller family, and half a dozen paperbacks, including novels and quickie biographies, as well as an acquisitions editor for monographs in mechanical engineering and related fields ) that it wasn’t natural and thus slow for me to develop a real appreciation for the usefulness, if not majesty, of abstract and indexing (A&I) services. Oh sure, I’d used The Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature now and then. Did I thumb through print volumes of Engineering Index in the old Engineering Societies Library in New York after I moved to Manhattan in the late 1960s? That I might have done so does ring a bell, but its sound is very faint. In any case, shortly after I established an electronic publishing division at Wiley in the early 1980s and we were approached by the business people at the Harvard Business Review (HBR) to put their bibliographic information online, I agreed to do so if we could pair it up with full text of the articles. I believed that the bibliographic information wasn’t enough to attract users. We couldn’t put any illustrations online, as I remember, but we got enough usage overall to exceed the $75,000 annual revenue guarantee that I’d given HBR. When it came to Wiley’s own journals, there was great consternation that if I put full text online, I would cannibalize revenues. How quaint such an attitude seems now. As it happened, there were no composition tapes for the journals, so any loss-of-revenue fears were moot. But there were composition tapes at Mack Printing Company for the 26-volume Kirk-Othmer Encyclopedia of Chemical Technology. It was a heavyweight product, but I was permitted to put full text online anyway. Bibliographic Retrieval Services (BRS) had the technical chops to mount the full text, including chemical formulae, etc. (before Chemical Abstracts had the technology), so we could just go ahead. I gave a talk once in which I said that putting Kirk-Othmer online was as much a market research project as a
52 Against the Grain / February 2020
effort to make money, and I can remember Bill Marovitz, the BRS honcho, sitting in the back of the room smiling and nodding. In the end, of course, I didn’t lay a glove on Kirk-Othmer’s revenue stream. It was too early, and besides, librarians were complaining of “false drops,” which must have depressed usage. Diane Hoffman was one of the people I met at BRS at this time. Trained as a librarian, she’d worked at the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI), Gene Garfield’s indexing company. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that Diane reveres him. “He’s the most fascinating person I ever worked with,” she said during a recent telephone conversation. “He used to think, what else can we do with this data? What does our database teach about science?” Diane and I kept in touch after I moved on at Wiley to run all of the scientific and technical publishing. We began working together again when she was vice-president of marketing and distribution at BIOSIS and I’d left Wiley and was working as an independent consultant. (She was VP there from 1992 to 1998 and an independent contractor in 1999. In addition to BRS and BIOSIS, her long and what she calls “chequered” career creating and marketing information products to life science researchers and librarians includes stints at ProQuest and Cambridge Scientific Abstracts. Her retirement activities include a bit of gardening, birding, museum-going, and reading. We’ve been friends all the while.) BIOSIS started in 1926 as Biological Abstracts. (There are two published histories, one covering the first 50 years, another the first 75.) It partnered with life science researchers; it was sold by teaching biology students and faculty how to use the volumes, which came out every two weeks. Biological Abstracts was divided into subject areas, so faculty could visit their library every two weeks to quickly catch up on what was being published of immediate interest to them. Biological Abstracts actually started out writing abstracts, but eventually took abstracts that journal articles made available. BIOSIS continued on page 53
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