What Can “Marriage Announcements” Tell Us? A Content Analysis of News Articles on Library-Press Collaboration

Mei Zhang and Xiaofei Wei*

More university presses and academic libraries have started to collaborate in the scholarly publishing field, and it becomes important to investigate how this message of collaboration has been delivered to the academic community, since this community includes both creators and users of scholarly works. This study collects 23 news articles on the collaboration between university presses and academic libraries from the formal news sites of the affiliated institutions and then conducts content analysis on these articles, focusing on their content coverage and purposes. These news articles covered topics including the background and benefits of collaboration, how the collaboration worked/would work, and how libraries and presses can contribute to the collaboration. The analysis reveals that these news articles aim not only to inform their readers about the collaboration, but also to provide rationales to the collaboration. The news articles also demonstrate an unbalanced depiction between press and library by focusing more on the press, and this study interprets this phenomenon as a result of two assumptions held by the news articles: the audience’s unfamiliarity with the press and more challenging financial viability issues the press encountered.

Introduction

The Wayne State University Press reinstated its terminated leadership and switched its reporting from the Dean’s Office of University Libraries to the Office of the President in February 2020—it had only been a few months since it joined the university library in fall 2019. This unsuccessful partnership between university press and the library immediately sparked discussions within and outside the scholarly publishing community. As people also noticed the existence of many successful library-press collaborations, they asked questions about the reasons to form such collaborations, as well as the problems and future of similar partnerships between university presses and academic libraries.

Although studies show an upward trend of the collaboration between university presses and academic libraries, we notice an uneven representation in the scholarly literature on the library-press collaboration, emphasizing the perspective of insiders—librarians and professionals in the scholarly publishing industry over the perspective of the wider academic community—including but not limited to faculty, researchers, students, and staff. Not surprisingly, librarians and scholarly publishing professionals have published a large body of scholarly library literature examining the library-press collaboration in terms of its background, benefits, collaboration details, and challenges, either theoretically or through case studies. However, much less attention has been paid to the academic community’s perception or reaction of such collaboration, and none of the literature explores how this library-press collaboration has been communicated with the academic community, even though the academic community plays a critical role in scholarly publishing as the creators and consumers of scholarly works.

The lack of research on the academic community’s perception and reaction of library-press collaboration encourages us to explore how the differing stakeholders—the library, the university press, and others in the university—inform the academic community about such collaborations. As the message communicated to the academic community would impact how they understand and respond to the new collaboration initiative, it is important to first explore what message has been delivered to the academic community about library-press collaboration before we can really understand and interpret, or even predict reactions to such collaborations. In this study, we borrow the term “marriage” to describe library-press collaboration from Charles Watkinson when he used it to depict the “long term, and deeply embedded partnership” in such collaborations.1 We examine how this “marriage” has been communicated to the academic community through official “marriage announcements”—news articles published on the official websites of affiliated institutions, and we focus on answering the following two research questions:

1. What information is covered in the news articles about library-press collaboration?
2. What are the purposes of these news articles on library-press collaboration?

Literature Review

Background of Library-Press Collaboration

Current literature from both library and publishing communities discusses several background factors that encourage the collaboration between university presses and academic libraries. Some studies view this collaboration as a way for presses to solve the financial pressures when publishing scholarly monographs.2 This type of pressure was largely brought by the increasing price of monographs and diminishing sales of titles; consequently, presses cannot meet researchers’ demands to publish many scholarly monographs, which was described as the “crisis of the scholarly monograph.”3 As scholarly monograph publishing is considered to be university presses’ “truly unique contributions that are essential to academic,”4 university presses take multiple strategies to reduce their financial pressures in this crisis, such as moving from publishing hard copies to paperbacks and expanding the list of titles to include some trade books or textbooks.5 Meanwhile, some presses decide to collaborate with academic libraries to solve the sustainability issues in their scholarly monograph publishing based on the “natural” partnership between press and library.6

Another factor mentioned by several studies as a background for the press-library collaboration is the academic libraries’ intention to enter into the scholarly publishing field, particularly through open access publishing. As more academic libraries started their publishing programs or projects, one issue discussed by both librarians and presses is the relationship between library and press.7 Some practitioners recognize that library publishing cannot replace university presses in scholarly publishing, since the reputation of library publishing cannot really compete with the long-term established prestige of university presses in the field. They point out that libraries and presses should be collaborators rather than competitors due to their complementary skills.8 This attitude also echoes with the findings from a 2012 AUP survey of libraries and university presses about the library-press collaboration, where 69 percent of participants believed that library publishing should “complement” rather than “reinventing or duplicating” press publishing.9

Additionally, a few articles have depicted the library-press collaboration as both parties’ reactions to the rapidly changing scholarly publishing environment brought by the developments or even revolutions in information technology and digital scholarship.10 Based on the shared mission/values between libraries and press in disseminating and preserving the scholarly works, their collaboration seems to be natural along with the various benefits it can bring to both parties.

Types of Library-Press Collaboration

Many researchers and practitioners agree that the library-press collaboration should have various formats as the collaborating institutions have different needs and contexts, and no “one size fits all” model could work for all cases.11 Raym Crow, in his widely discussed work on issues in campus-based publishing partnership, identified five types of library-press initiatives within a same institution, including the following: backfile digitization projects, library online provision of press print titles and supplements, press distribution of library content, creating digital research or reference services, and providing digital publishing platform.12 However, as Richard Clement pointed out that Crow’s classification primarily focuses on the collaborations that are “programmatic”, which suggests the press and library collaborate in a program/project with shared expertise and resources while still “remaining an independent unit.”13 Clement then identified another type of library-press collaboration, where the press reports to the university library under the same organizational structure. Clement called this reporting structure “library and press integration,” and he noticed that there are different degrees of such integration.14 Watkinson further created a taxonomy to systematically describe the different types of library-press relationships, including five types from the least integrated type as “little evidence of currently active relationships between press and library” to the most integrated type as “shared vision approaches.”15 Detailed information about Watkinson’s five types of library-press relationships will be provided in the methodology section, as it inspires us to develop our classification of different types of library-press collaborations.

Benefits of Library-Press Collaboration

Many articles examine how libraries and presses can benefit from the library-press collaboration. One common way to frame the benefits is to discuss mutual advantages for both parties. Several scholars claim that the collaboration would enhance library and press’s mutual understanding of scholarly publishing;16 others mentioned some general benefits of collaboration, including shared expertise, reduced cost, and broadened perspectives, which would better prepare both parties responding to the rapidly changing scholarly publishing environment.17 Additionally, literature also outlines the benefits for press and for library separately, as described below.

The most-discussed benefit for the press is that the collaboration could improve the press’s organizational visibility in its home institution. Scholars claimed that the press, before the collaboration, used to be treated as an auxiliary unit in university; the collaboration with library allows the press to better demonstrate its value in disseminating scholarly works to the affiliated university, which then help the press move from the marginalized position to the center of the university.18 Another benefit for the press is the collaboration would provide the press with financial and technical support to experiment with different publishing models.19

The benefits libraries could gain from the collaboration with the press focus on helping the library enter into the publishing field. Press’s expertise and skills in the acquisition, design, and production of books could help libraries better interact with scholars as the content creators rather than library patrons; and eventually the partnership with press will allow libraries to improve the legitimacy and reputation of library publishing, especially outside the affiliated university.20

Challenges of Library-Press Collaboration

Some articles describe the challenges for library-press collaboration. Cultural differences between library and press is an often-mentioned challenge for the collaboration. Particularly, Mary Alice Ball claimed that library usually treats scholars as researchers; thus, its focus is service and access. Conversely, university press treats scholars as content providers, thus focusing on content production and protection of the intellectual rights.21 Patrick Alexander further argued that library focuses on serving patrons inside a university, while press often serves scholars outside its home institution.22 Monica McCormic noted that library tends to say “yes,” as its main function is to provide services to patrons, while university press tends to say “no,” as it cannot publish everything submitted to the press.23 All these cultural differences between two organizations make it challenging for library and press to build a mutual respect and understanding environment and thus find a common ground to “be nimble and experimental together.”24 Another main challenge of library-press collaboration lies in their different financial operations: university press is a revenue-generating organization, whereas library operates on “subsidized, expenditure-based budget”;25 therefore, library sometimes does not fully understand press’s revenue-driven operations to maintain its financial viability.26

Limitations of Current Literature

The literature review demonstrates that the majority of these articles were written by stakeholders either from libraries or university presses and have covered a relatively comprehensive range of the topics on the library-press collaborations. However, what we do not know from these articles is how the library-press collaboration has been communicated with a wider audience beyond the library and press communities. Since the collaboration not only affects the two parties—libraries and university presses—but also impacts the academic community, which are the actual creators and users of the content in scholarly publishing, it is important to investigate how this larger academic community perceives library-press collaboration. Surprisingly, little scholarship exists on both parties’ or universities’ efforts to actively communicate this collaboration with a wider audience; therefore, our study aims to investigate such efforts of library/press/university by analyzing articles from university news sites that officially announced the formation of the collaboration.

Methodologies

Data Collection

We focus on investigating how an institution informed its academic community about the library-press collaboration through formal news channels; therefore, the first step is to identify these news articles. We conducted three rounds of web search to collect news articles in April, June, and July of 2020 to ensure we captured the latest news on targeted topics. Specifically, we used keywords (“university press AND librar*) combined with one of the following verbs—(merge/join/collaborat*/partner*/ integrat* /report /unite / move/ work together / transfer / embed)—to initiate multiple Google searches, and then we went through the inclusion and exclusion criteria, as listed below, for the first 100 web pages returned by each Google search.

Inclusion criteria: 1) We collected only news articles from the university/institution’s formal news website. Particularly, we used two ways to identify formal news sites: first, a report is found on the news site with a URL of the institution’s official website, like .edu or .org; second, the report is found on the campus newspaper, even though its URL ends with .com, like The Michigan Daily (https://www.michigandaily.com/). Among our collected 23 news articles, all but two were identified in the first category, and table 1 provides detailed information about the news sites that held those news; 2) The news articles should primarily focus on the library-press collaboration; 3) The academic library and the press in the collaboration should be located in the United States.

Exclusion criteria: 1) We did not collect any news article published on a national news platform, like Inside Higher Ed, or The Chronicle of Higher Education; 2) We did not collect news articles where the reported collaboration was NOT between library and press. For instance, if a news article reported on the collaboration between a press and a scientific society on open access publishing with the funding from a library, then we will not collect this report in our dataset; 3) We did not treat a library’s purchase of resources published by a university press as library-press collaboration; 4) We did not collect multiple reports of the same collaboration. Therefore, if there are multiple news articles found on the same collaboration at different stages, we only collected the first report on the launch of this collaboration.

After applying the inclusion and exclusion criteria to the webpage returned by Google search, we identified 23 news articles from 2007–2020 as our dataset for further analysis. Table 1 demonstrates the basic information about these 23 news articles. The discussion of how we developed the types of collaboration can be found later in this methodology section.

Data Analysis

Coding Process

We conducted a content analysis on the collected news articles to systematically capture the meaning of materials. Specifically, we divided the 23 articles into five groups, with four to five articles in each group. Then one author inductively developed the initial codebook from the first group of four articles, and then discussed the codebook with another author to ensure we developed the same interpretation of the codebook. We further revised our codebook together based on the coding of another four articles in the second group. Later, two of us used the revised codebook to code the articles in groups 3–5 separately. After coding articles in one group independently, we compared and discussed our codes one by one before we moved to the next group; this comparison and discussion process helped us agree and remain consistent with our assignments of codes. Finally, we turned to the four articles in the first group and updated our coding based on the revised codebook.

In our codebook, we identified two categories of codes: the codes about the content coverage of the news articles and the codes about the identified interviewees. Table 2 provides the list of our primary codes along with their descriptions, and we also identified subcodes for some of our primary codes.

Identifying the Type of Collaboration

As we intended to identify different types of library-press collaboration in the news articles, we first planned to use the classification developed by Watkinson, which includes five types of library-press collaboration:

• Type 1: little evidence of currently active relationships between press and library
• Type 2: good relationships between the press and one or more libraries, but no reporting
• Type 3: reporting and joint projects, but relative autonomy and no physical collocation
• Type 4: physical collocation, reporting, but relative autonomy
• Type 5: more integrated, shared vision approaches

However, we encountered two challenges when applying this classification to our data: first, indicators of Types 1 and 2 cannot be found in the news articles, probably because these two types of collaboration were either very common across different institutions or were less worthy to report on; second, key information needed to distinguish Types 3, 4, and 5 were missing in the news articles, as the information might be too granular for most readers of the news articles.

Because of these challenges of applying an existing classification to our data, we decided to develop our own classification of library-press collaboration inductively from the collected news articles, which also includes five different types:

• Type 1: established a new office that includes components from both library and press
• Type 2: launch of a new press under library or supported/funded by library
• Type 3: joint projects
• Type 4: structure reorganization, including merge or integrations between library and press, reporting structure between two parties
• Type 5: library becomes a member of a consortial press

Table 1 under 3.1 demonstrates the different types of library-press collaboration we identified based on our own classification.

Methods Used for Code Coverage and Bigram Analysis

To better understand the focus of our news articles, we calculated the coverage percentage of primary codes and the most frequently used bigrams throughout these news articles. The results of both analyses can be found in the Findings section. Specifically, we took a few steps to calculate the coverage percentage of primary codes. First, the coverage percentage of each code was calculated by dividing the sum of the coverage percentage in each source by the total number of sources (23). Then, the percentage of each code was converted proportionally such that the sum of all the percentages is 100 percent.

In this study, we used bigrams to display the most mentioned topics in the news articles. Bigram is a sequence of two words extracted from a text, and the most frequently occurred meaningful bigrams in a text can largely reflect the important topics of the text. Particularly, we used the following process to identify the most frequently occurred bigrams in the news articles. We first exported the references of each primary code in NVivo as separate word documents and then combined them into one document. Only the texts from the news articles were kept. Then we removed some property phrases, like the names of university/library/press, and the names of interviewees. We also removed “university press,” “university library,” and “university libraries,” as these bigrams do not provide substantive information to our analysis. Then we conducted general text cleaning process, including converting text into lower case, removing common stop words, removing punctuations and extra white spaces. After the preparation, the document was processed using R and a few packages, including “tm,” “RWeka,” “wordcloud,” and “ggplot2,” to calculate the most frequently occurred bigrams and generated an initial bigram cloud. We further identified and removed irrelevant bigrams from the bigram list, like “he said” and “press will,” and then generated the final frequency list and bigram cloud, as shown in figure 3.

Findings

Basic Information about the Reports

Type of Collaboration

Table 1 shows basic information of our news articles, which range from 2007 to 2020, and more than 65 percent of them were released in 2015 and after. As for the types of collaboration covered in these reports, 12 articles (52.2%) reported a Type 4 collaboration, which brings organizational structure changes to library and press; six articles (26.1%) represented Type 3 collaboration about joint projects between library and press; two articles (8.7%) covered Type 2 collaboration on the launch of a new press supported by library; we only found one article (4.4%) reported on Type 1 collaboration, where a new scholarly publishing office was launched to include the press and component of library; and one article (4.4%) on Type 5 collaboration, where a library became a member of a consortial press. Figure 1 further depicts the distribution of news articles by their publishing year and type of collaboration.

News Titles and Primary Codes Coverage

We found some interesting patterns in the titles of the news articles. Among the 23 news articles, eight of them used the pattern “press joins library,” while none of them used “library joins press”; four used pattern “university press merges with University library”; two used pattern “University launches press.” Additionally, four articles included the purpose of library-press collaboration, like “open access” or “make publications freely available online.”

Figure 2 illustrates the coverage of our primary codes. Here we further create a parent code for the primary codes with related/similar meanings. For instance, we created a parent code “benefits” to include all four primary codes on benefits. The codes in the outer circle in figure 2 are our primary codes identified in the coding process, as shown in table 2, while the codes in the inner circle are the parent codes we created for the coverage analysis. Both the percentage of the original primary codes and their parent code can be found in figure 2.

Figure 2 shows that the codes with widest coverage are “benefits” (33.5%) and “how the collaboration worked/would work” (20.5%), followed by background of the collaboration (16.6%), brief history of the press/library/host institution (14.9%), and other codes. Among the primary codes under “benefit,” the coverage of “benefit for others” (17.7%) makes up more than half of the coverage of “benefits” (33.5%). Besides, it is worth noting that the coverage of “benefit for press” (8.8%) is almost twice as much as that of the “benefit for library” (4.6%). Further, when it came to the history/description, the news articles mainly provided history of the presses (12.7%), while very few coverages were on the history of the library (1.9%) or of the host institution (0.3%).

Most Frequently Used Bigrams

We identified the most frequently used bigrams in our dataset. Figure 3 shows the bigram cloud of references from all codes on the left and lists the frequency of most-used bigrams on the right. As shown in figure 3, “open access” is the most frequent bigram, followed by bigrams related to scholarly publishing, such as “scholarly publishing,” “access publishing,” “digital publishing,” “access journals,” “peer review,” “access models,” and “business model.” We found some frequent bigrams indicating the disciplines/domains of the publishing involved in the collaboration, including “social sciences,” “humanities social,” and “educational resources.” Another bigram worth noting is “business model.”

Interviewees and Their Sentiment in the News

We also identified the interviewees covered in the news articles, which depicted the stakeholder’s information in the collaboration. Among our 23 articles, 22 interviewed librarians, mainly library director/dean or similar position; 14 included staff from press—mainly press director; two included persons holding dual positions at both library and press; 10 individuals were interviewed outside of library and press, including (vice) president of a college/university, provost, and professors in humanities.

The stakeholders interviewed in the news articles expressed an overall positive sentiment toward the collaboration. For example, some press directors said they were “excited,” “thrilled,” or “enthusiastic” about the collaboration, and some mentioned “exciting things” they can do together. Some library staff praised the role of the press; for example, the MIT libraries director said the MIT press “has long been an innovator in digital publishing and open access” (#19). Another librarian was enthusiastic that the collaboration was a good opportunity for the library to become the producer of knowledge: “this is a historical turning point for libraries” (#20).

Themes Covered in the News

Background of the Library-Press Collaboration

We identified three major themes in the news as the background of the library-press collaboration.

1. Demand for new publishing model

   Most news articles depicted the library-press collaboration as a response to the academic community’s demand for a new publishing model, especially a demand for open access publishing in humanities. Those articles outlined the drawbacks of traditional publishing models by focusing on the increasing price of books and the reduced number of published titles, which created barriers for academic communities to disseminate and get access to knowledge. For instance, one article (#7) claimed that “current models of scholarly publishing do far more to lock down information than to disseminate it to those who need it.” Additionally, we identified two other factors that generated the demand for a new publishing model, including university presses’ technical and financial challenges in digital publishing and the lack of online publishing venues in humanities and social sciences. Then these articles introduced library-press collaboration as an opportunity for the two parties, especially for university press, to engage in a new publishing model—primarily the open access model—to solve the problems brought by traditional publishing models, since open access would provide free access to the scholarly works for all readers around the world.

2. Following vs. leading

   Interestingly, we notice that about half of collected news articles framed the library-press collaboration as the local press/library’s move to follow the trend in scholarly publishing. These articles emphasized that many peer presses and libraries, including some leading ones, had established collaboration especially in open access publishing, and thus the local press/library collaboration was an effort to join the “emerging trend” or “national trend” (#4).

   Different from the “follower” perspective, we also observed the “leader” perspective in several articles. Although these articles covered a wide range of time periods in our data, all of them either emphasized the leading roles of the local press/library in library-press collaboration or open access, or, addressed their all-time “innovative” characteristics in digital publishing.

3. Positive relationship between press and library

About 30 percent of the news articles discussed the positive library-press relationship in the background of the collaborations. These positive relationships came from two sources: prior partnership and shared missions. Specifically, some of these articles reported that the library and press had already partnered in different projects, while other articles addressed the shared missions or visions between the two parties in creating, disseminating, and preserving knowledge, all of which would allow them to better understand the other party’s needs in the collaboration.

Benefits Brought by the Library-Press Collaboration

All articles outlined some benefits of the library-press collaboration. Compared to the eight reports that mentioned the benefits for the library, the majority of our reports had more coverage on the benefits for the academic community (21 reports) and the benefits for the press (14 reports), which will be described below.

1. Benefits for academic community: The most-discussed benefit in the news articles is that library-press collaboration would promote the accessibility and dissemination of knowledge. It echoes with our finding in the “background” section, where many articles discussed the academic community’s demands of a new publishing model as a motivation for such collaborations. These articles framed library-press collaboration as an opportunity for both parties to explore open access publishing of scholarly works, particularly monographs in humanities areas; thus, it would help scholars as the creators of scholarly works to promote the visibility and dissemination of their works on the one hand and help them as the users of scholarly works obtain access to more materials on the other hand. Moreover, several articles pointed out the financial benefits for students, as such collaboration would also help develop open educational resources or open e-textbooks, which would greatly reduce the cost of college education. Additionally, some articles reported that scholars would receive better publishing services, like peer-review process, content editing, and marketing of their works. Several articles further claimed that the collaboration could promote the reputation of the affiliated university as a research-oriented institution through digital publishing services in areas in which the university has distinctive expertise.
2. Benefits for the press: Our findings in the benefits for the press covered in the news articles are similar to the ones discussed by other scholarly literature as shown in the literature review section, albeit with different emphasis. The most discussed benefit is to improve the financial viability of the press by reducing its deficit, lowering the operation cost, and increasing revenue in the collaboration with library. Note that we found the words “sustainability” or “sustainable” have been mentioned many times in the texts under the code of “benefit for press,” which implies the importance of sustainability to a university press. Moreover, some news articles reported that collaboration would provide new business and service opportunities for the press, such as participating in the university’s digitization efforts and experimenting with multiple scholarly publishing models. The third type of benefit revealed in our dataset is that the collaboration could help the press become more visible in the local community by providing improved publishing services to the local community.
3. Benefits for the library: Not surprisingly, we observed a very limited number of news articles reporting the benefits of such collaboration to the library. Most of these articles focused on its effect on library’s exploration of open access publishing, by claiming that the collaboration would empower or give legitimacy to library’s open access publishing efforts. Additionally, one article mentioned that merging with the university press would provide extra off-site storage facilities for the library so that it would have more on-site space for its users.

How the Collaboration Would Work/Worked

All articles covered some information about how the library-press collaboration would or did work. The most important information is about the specific type of collaboration, which has already been discussed in the first part of the Findings section. Another important and frequently mentioned bit of information is about the arrangement of leading positions in the collaboration. Most of our news articles reported about the new roles for library director/dean or press director in the position, while others, especially those reporting a Type 2 collaboration (launching a new press), described hiring a director of the press as an immediate need or first priority. Additionally, many articles provided operational details of the collaboration, like how the open access would work, the disciplinary coverage of publishing, and funding of the press or collaborative project.

What Are Offered by Each Party in the Collaboration

About half of the news articles mentioned what each party would offer in this collaboration, although most of them did not go into details. To summarize, the resources offered by the presses include: expertise and experience in scholarly publishing, close relationship with authors, and space. The resources offered by the libraries include: expertise and skills in copyright, information technologies and human resources, financial support, special collections, and space for presenting titles from the press.

Brief Description of the Parties in the Collaboration

In our dataset, 19 out of 23 collected news articles provide a brief description of the university press involved in the collaboration. These descriptions provide information about the history of the press, disciplinary coverage of the press, the number of published titles, and its reputations in the field. Interestingly, only four articles include a short description of the library, mainly about its collection and organizational structure. Further, we identified two articles that briefly described the home institution of the collaboration on the number of its student population and academic programs.

Discussions

Purpose of News Articles—How to Justify the Collaboration

We argue that the most straightforward purpose of news articles on library-press collaboration is to inform the local academic community about such collaboration. Similar to public marriage announcements, the main purpose of our collected news articles is to inform the relevant community about the “marriage” of library-press collaboration. Our content analysis of the news articles demonstrates that all articles reported the critical information about the collaboration: the two parties involved in the collaboration, the time schedule of the collaboration, and how the collaboration worked or would work. With this information, the local academic community should be able to develop a basic understanding of the collaboration.

We further argue that another important purpose of these news articles is to justify the library-press collaboration to the local community. Providing rationales to such collaboration to the local academic community could help the two parties obtain support from this community, which is important for the success of the collaboration in the future. We identified several strategies the news articles used to provide justification to the library-press collaboration:

1. Emphasis on the benefits to the local community: We found that the benefit brought by the collaboration is the topic with the highest coverage across all news articles, as shown in figure 1, while the benefits to the academic community, including scholars as both the creator and user of knowledge and students as consumer of educational resources, have more coverage in the news than other types of benefits. This finding suggests news articles’ effort in persuading the local academic community of the actual benefits they could receive from the collaboration.
2. Leading/following the trend in scholarly publishing: More than 65 percent of our news articles are published in or after 2015, which echoes the findings from other studies that library-press collaboration has become a trend in the scholarly publishing field. Interestingly, we observed two different depictions of the local collaboration in such a trend. On the one hand, we noticed that some news articles, particularly those published in recent years, described the collaboration as their local reaction to the trend in the field, which uses the following logic to justify their local collaboration: many other libraries and presses, particularly the leading ones, have established similar library-press collaboration, and we haven’t heard any report on the negative impact of such collaboration; therefore, it should be safe and cost-effective for us to just follow our peers to create such collaboration locally, and it is also hard not to do what everyone else seems to be doing.

   On the other hand, we observed several news articles that described the local collaboration as their effort to play the leading role in the scholarly publishing. These articles employed the following logic to justify their local collaboration: Our local organizations (library and/or press) have a history and/or characteristics as the leader or innovative player in the field, and this library-press collaboration would be another innovative attempt to solve the problems in scholarly publishing. By doing that, we can also take a leading role in the field by providing solid evidence of the effectiveness of the library-press collaboration to other libraries and presses.

3. Absence of challenges: Interestingly, none of our news articles discussed the potential problems or challenges of their local library-press collaboration. It is not an unexpected finding especially if we compare the news articles to the marriage announcements, where the challenges of marriage are often excluded from the announcement. Likewise, our news articles did not cover the challenges probably because first, they do not intend to lead the local academic community to question the rationales of such collaboration; and, second, the organizations involved (library/press/university) are unaware of the actual challenges of this collaboration, particularly in the debut of such collaboration.

Unbalanced Depictions between Press and Library

Our findings on the code coverage illustrate an unbalanced presentation between press and library in the news articles. As discussed earlier, the collected news articles covered much more on “benefit for the press” and the “brief history/description of the press” than that of the library. We argue that there are two assumptions for those news articles to provide more depictions on the press side than the library.

First, news articles assume the audience of the reports—the local academic community—are unfamiliar with the press. This assumption is supported by some other literature, where they pointed out that university presses are often marginalized in the host institutions, largely because presses usually serve the academic community outside of the host institutions.27 Consequently, the local academic community often lacks knowledge about the affiliated press. Unlike the university presses, libraries in a university focus providing services to the local community and thus are well recognized by the community. Based on the local community’s unbalanced familiarity between press and library, we argue that the news articles attempted to bring the press to the center of community by providing more background information in their reports, as the press is not a subordinate but rather an indispensable party to the collaboration.

Second, news articles assume the press has encountered a much higher level of financial pressure than the library, which has also been discussed by other literature.28 Particularly, the financial difficulty has even directly affected the long-term viability of the press, while libraries often do not have the same level of financial pressure. Therefore, these news articles spend more coverage on the benefits a press could receive from the collaboration, especially from financial perspectives; and that is also the reason we found the words “sustainability” and “sustainable” have occurred many times when the news articles reported the benefits for the press.

Limitations and Implications

One limitation of our study lies in the data collection method. As outlined in our method section, we relied on keyword searches through Google to identify news articles on library-press collaboration; however, we cannot guarantee this method would allow us to collect all relevant news articles, which means there might be several news articles that meet our inclusion/exclusion criteria but are still not included in our dataset. Another limitation is that we only analyzed the news articles released on the institution’s official news sites, and there might be other ways for the institution/library/press to inform its academic community about library-press collaboration, like email announcements or brochures posted campuswide. Consequently, we cannot safely conclude that our findings can be applied to other communication methods employed by the institution/library/press to inform their academic community about the library-press collaboration.

With the limitations discussed above, this study reveals how the message of library-press collaboration has been delivered to the local academic community through content analysis of relevant news articles released through official channels. The findings would work as a prerequisite to further investigation of the academic community’s perception and reaction to library-press collaboration, which would in turn impact the success of such collaboration, and we plan to further explore the actual effect of those news articles on the academic community’s response of library-press collaboration through interviews with stakeholders, including librarians, press staff, and researchers. Moreover, this study will inform the academic library and university press communities about their initial purpose and expectations of such partnerships, which would help them reflect on the current status of existing collaborations and prevent the dissolution of such partnerships. These reflections would play a critical role in improving the sustainability of the scholarly publishing field. Additionally, the findings from this study would encourage LIS educators to think about how they should depict and educate future librarians on the issues of library publishing in higher education, particularly the relationship between academic libraries and university presses.

Notes

1. Charles Watkinson, “Why Marriage Matters: A North American Perspective on Press/Library Partnerships,” Learned Publishing 29, no. S1 (2016): 342–47, https://doi.org/10.1002/leap.1044.

2. Patrick H. Alexander, “Publisher-Library Relations: What Assets Does a University Press Bring to the Partnership?” Against the Grain 20, no. 6 (December 1, 2008), https://doi.org/10.7771/2380-176X.2606; Richard Clement, “Library and University Press Integration: A New Vision for University Publishing” (Utah State University, DigitalCommons@USU, October 4, 2011), https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1103&context=lib_pubs.

3. Clement, “Library and University Press Integration,” 5.

4. Clifford Lynch, “Imagining a University Press System to Support Scholarship in the Digital Age,” Journal of Electronic Publishing 13, no. 2 (November 8, 2010): 4, https://doi.org/10.3998/3336451.0013.207.

5. Clement, “Library and University Press Integration.”

6. Margo Bargheer and Kizer Walker, “Library Publishing and the University Press in the United States and Germany: Lessons from Two Academic Contexts for Sustaining the Scholarly Book,” Bibliothek Forschung und Praxis 41, no. 3 (November 23, 2017): 291–307, https://doi.org/10.1515/bfp-2017-0037; Laura Brown, Rebecca Griffiths, and Matthew Rascoff, “Ithaka Report: University Publishing in a Digital Age,” July 26, 2007, https://sr.ithaka.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/4.13.1.pdf.

7. Bargheer and Walker, “Library Publishing and the University Press in the United States and Germany”; Maria Bonn, “Publishing, Libraries, Publishers and Librarians,” Against the Grain 26, no. 6 (December 1, 2014), https://doi.org/10.7771/2380-176X.6945; Charles Watkinson, “From Collaboration to Integration: University Presses and Libraries,” in Getting the Word Out: Academic Libraries as Scholarly Publishers, eds. Maria Bonn and Mike Furlough (Chicago, IL: Association of College and Research Libraries, 2015), 83–112; Charles Watkinson, “Three Challenges of Pubrarianship,” Against the Grain 26, no. 6 (December 1, 2014), https://doi.org/10.7771/2380-176X.6946; Carol Ann Davis, Wendy C. Robertson, and Charlene N. Simser, “Navigating the Political Waters of Open Access Publishing in Libraries,” Serials Librarian 74, no. 1/4 (January 2018): 194–200, https://doi.org/10.1080/0361526X.2018.1428477; Yuan Li et al., “The Library-Press Partnership: An Overview and Two Case Studies,” Library Trends: Baltimore 67, no. 2 (fall 2018): 319–34, https://doi.org/10.1353/lib.2018.0039; Melanie Schlosser, “Building Capacity for Academy-Owned Publishing through the Library Publishing Coalition,” Library Trends: Baltimore 67, no. 2 (fall 2018): 359–75, https://doi.org/10.1353/lib.2018.0041.

8. Alexander, “Publisher-Library Relations”; Meredith Babb and Judith Russell, “Why Libraries and University Presses Should Support One Another,” Against the Grain 27, no. 6 (December 1, 2015), https://doi.org/10.7771/2380-176X.7221; Bonn, “Publishing, Libraries, Publishers and Librarians”; Brown, Griffiths, and Rascoff, “Ithaka Report: University Publishing in a Digital Age”; Monica McCormick, “Toward New-Model Scholarly Publishing: Uniting the Skills of Publishers and Libraries,” in Getting the Words Out: Academic Libraries as Scholarly Publishers, eds. Maria Bonn and Mike Furlough (Chicago, IL: Association of College and Research Libraries, 2015), 57–82.

9. “Press and Library: Collaboration Survey” (New York, NY: Association of American University Presses, 2013), 3, https://wiki.lib.sun.ac.za/images/4/4e/LibraryPressCollaboration_report.pdf.

10. Bonn, “Publishing, Libraries, Publishers and Librarians”; James G. Neal, “Symbiosis or Alienation,” Journal of Library Administration 35, no. 1/2 (December 10, 2001): 5–18, https://doi.org/10.1300/J111v35n01_02; Karl Janssen, “Libraries and the University Press: Partners in Scholarly Communication,” in Kansas Library Association College and University Libraries Section Proceedings 8, no. 1 (2018), https://doi.org/10.4148/2160-942X.1069.

11. Li et al., “The Library-Press Partnership”; Katina Strauch and Tom Gilson, “ATG Interviews Peter Berkery, Executive Director, AAUP,” Against the Grain 25, no. 2 (April 1, 2013), https://doi.org/10.7771/2380-176X.6479.

12. Raym Crow, “Campus-Based Publishing Partnerships: A Guide to Critical Issues” (SPARC, January 2009), www.chainbridgegroup.com/images/campus_pub_partnerships_v1.pdf.

13. Clement, “Library and University Press Integration,” 12.

14. Clement, “Library and University Press Integration,” 13.

15. Watkinson, “From Collaboration to Integration,” 87.

16. Babb and Russell, “Why Libraries and University Presses Should Support One Another”; Li et al., “The Library-Press Partnership.”

17. Crow, “Campus-Based Publishing Partnerships”; Li et al., “The Library-Press Partnership”; Watkinson, “Why Marriage Matters”; Michael Spooner and Andrew Wesolek, “Content and Collaboration I: A Case Study of Bringing an Institutional Repository and a University Press Together,” Utah State University DigitalCommons@USU (2013), https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/lib_pubs/119.

18. Clement, “Library and University Press Integration”; Clifford Lynch, “Imagining a University Press System to Support Scholarship in the Digital Age,” Journal of Electronic Publishing 13, no. 2 (November 8, 2010), https://doi.org/10.3998/3336451.0013.207; Crow, “Campus-Based Publishing Partnerships”; Spooner and Wesolek, “Content and Collaboration I”; Watkinson, “Why Marriage Matters.”

19. Mary Alice Ball, “Libraries and University Presses Can Collaborate to Improve Scholarly Communication or Why Can’t We All Just Get Along?” text, First Monday, ISSN 1396-0466 (Valauskas, Edward J., December 6, 2004), 1996–2004, https://journals.uic.edu/ojs/index.php/fm/article/download/1196/1116?inline=1; Crow, “Campus-Based Publishing Partnerships”; Li et al., “The Library-Press Partnership”; Watkinson, “Why Marriage Matters.”

20. Alexander, “Publisher-Library Relations”; Ball, “Libraries and University Presses Can Collaborate to Improve Scholarly Communication or Why Can’t We All Just Get Along?”; Clement, “Library and University Press Integration”; Crow, “Campus-Based Publishing Partnerships”; Li et al., “The Library-Press Partnership”; McCormick, “Toward New-Model Scholarly Publishing”; Spooner and Wesolek, “Content and Collaboration I.”

21. Ball, “Libraries and University Presses Can Collaborate to Improve Scholarly Communication or Why Can’t We All Just Get Along?”

22. Patrick Alexander, “The Ant, the University Press, and the Librarian,” Against the Grain 26, no. 6 (December 1, 2014), https://doi.org/10.7771/2380-176X.6944.

23. McCormick, “Toward New-Model Scholarly Publishing.”

24. McCormick, “Toward New-Model Scholarly Publishing,” 80.

25. Alexander, “The Ant, the University Press, and the Librarian,” 16.

26. Watkinson, “Why Marriage Matters.”

27. Alexander, “Publisher-Library Relations”; Crow, “Campus-Based Publishing Partnerships”; Watkinson, “Why Marriage Matters.”

28. Alexander, “Publisher-Library Relations”; Clement, “Library and University Press Integration.”