Anita Coleman

What better way to join our friends in the U.S. in their Thanksgiving celebrations than by giving thanks for the driving force behind DLIST: Anita Coleman, just one of the very many American open access librarian leaders!

Anita's presentation DLIST and Dl-Harvest: Open Access for LIS: presentation Sept. 2005, outlines the history of DLIST and DL-Harvest, a metadata harvester providing cross-searching for 11 repositories. DLIST was started with a budget of $5000 for a server, and relies entirely on volunteer labor - including the labor of a number of Anita's students, graduate research assistants, and interns over the years. Anita also talks a little bit about the OA movement - some familiar figures - George Soros, Peter Suber, Stevan Harnad - and others, whose connection with the OA movement isn't quite so familiar for me. I'm intrigued that Anita lists S.R. Ranganathan, 1892 - 1972. Anita, care to elaborate?

DLIST has an international advisory board, which includes ALA President Michael Gorman. Did you know that Michael practices self-archiving? There are a couple of his articles in DLIST!

Anita, of course, self-archives her own work as well - a substantial body of it, as she serves as Assistant Professor, School of Information Resources & Library Science, University of Arizona. Recently, Anita released a survey instrument for a work in progress - the DLIST Survey 2005: Self-Archiving and Scholarly Communication Behaviors in LIS. This item was featured in the Nov. 26 Open Access News.

If you are a librarian and debating whether to self-archive - whether in DLIST, E-LIS, or your institutional repository: here is a thought. We librarians experience all the beneifts of self-archiving of every other discipline - enhanced impact, more citations - but, for us, there is another important reason to self-archive. That is, once those mandates come into play, our faculty will be looking for help to archive their own works - and what better way for us to gain experience, than by starting with our own works - or encouraging and helping friends!


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