Shinji Maeda
(Specialist, Electronic Content, Information Management Group,
Technical Services Office, Osaka University Library)

Since I became involved with my university’s repository and began to think about open access, my attitude toward faculty members has changed. I wouldn’t say I’ve become their biggest fan, but I attended this seminar purely because I wanted to get to know the faculty better. I used to have an image of them as people who just went to conferences and were uninterested in anything that researchers in other fields or people not involved in research had to say. Although there is a kernel of truth in this, the important thing is not what researchers are like, but one’s own relationship with them.

Prof. Nagami set my image of researchers straight. In his slide titled “The Decline of the ‘Nation Built on Science and Technology’ Concept” (included in the seminar materials posted online), he shows that scientific progress leads to human happiness only when there is feedback from and communication with ordinary people, that is, nonscientists, which puts a brake on directionless scientific and technological advances. He questioned the assumption that scientific information is generated by laboratory research. This sounds straightforward and should be easy for anyone to come up with, but it is a very hard thing for researchers to admit. If researchers are eager for contact with society and ordinary people, university libraries should certainly get to know their faculty. This presentation made me wonder whether the services that university libraries provide aren’t in fact “directionless” and whether the libraries aren’t merely arranging things to suit themselves. To prevent this, surely, what we need to do is to communicate with researchers.

Prof. Todoroki addressed another important topic in discussing how self-archiving had enlarged his horizons. Institutional repositories (IRs) exist to make self-archiving possible, and many research institutions, especially universities, are making active use of them. On an individual level, their contents have the potential to do for contributors what Prof. Todoroki’s self-archiving has done for him, but to make this happen, dialogue with the faculty (contributors) is necessary. Perhaps the best approach is to deposit content in an IR and then take the access data as a starting point for dialogue with the faculty.

Library staff work at a variety of jobs. Everyone knows, of course, that it is not only the staff at service counters whose work benefits the library’s users (including the faculty) and the university as a whole, but also those who handle administrative jobs like cataloging, subscriptions to e-journals and databases, and network administration. Understandably, the staff working away in the background do not get to know the faculty as people, but they can hardly be accused, therefore, of lacking the breadth of vision to see the university as a whole. Staff cuts have left them carrying a huge workload, yet they cannot disobey orders (or, sometimes, even discuss the situation with their supervisors). And yet it is not natural to work in a university library and not know the faculty. A university should consist of the faculty, who do research, and the librarians who help them on a daily basis (by which I mean they talk with them frequently, face-to-face!). If there is anybody whom it is impossible to keep from communicating with researchers, it is librarians. If they are not communicating, something is wrong.

Admittedly, these days it is difficult enough just to keep up with the IT that is out there, and it is far from easy to do a comparative assessment of the services being offered under new concepts such as Learning Commons, to rank them according to one’s organization’s needs, and to apply and deploy them. But those who try to break out of established patterns will surely find the strength to do so, whether they are librarians or researchers; it is human nature. I believe that true change is made possible by this kind of strength. I am grateful to Prof. Nagami and Prof. Todoroki for showing us real-life examples. I hope their message encourages us librarians to abandon what Prof. Nagai called our “ascetic” approach and see that what is really needed is, on the contrary, a willingness to push the envelope and try things that could fail. I picture a librarian in the corner listening to the speakers, his eyes lighting up: “Aha!” He runs wild. Others try to hold him back but are swept along in an unstoppable march. A higher-up who bars the way is unceremoniously knocked aside, his angry cries unheeded. How wonderful if such an absurdly riotous scene, so unlike the tranquility expected of a university library, were to break out and nobody could stop the march.

(As of October 2009)

Date	Place	Topic	Speakers (titles omitted)
2009
Oct. 20	NII (Conference room, 12th floor)	Open Access Week 2009 5th SPARC Japan Seminar 2009 “An Open Access Business Model and Researchers’ Attitudes”	Charlotte Hubbard (BioMed Central, Singapore) Shin Tochinai (Graduate School of Science, Hokkaido University)
Nov. 11	Library Fair, Pacifico Yokohama	The 11th Library Fair & Forum 6th SPARC Japan Seminar 2009 “The NIH Public Access Policy” (Japanese interpretation provided)	Neil M. Thakur (National Institutes of Health Office of Extramural Research)
Dec. 3–4	Tokyo Institute of Technology Kuramae Hall	Digital Repository Federation International Conference 2009 (DRFIC 2009) (For details, see http://www.tulips.tsukuba.ac.jp/DRFIC2009/index_ja.php)
Dec. 11	NII (Conference room, 12th floor)	7th SPARC Japan Seminar 2009 “Status of Social Sciences Journals: Operation and Management Policy IR, Copyright, E-journals”	Kate Wildman Nakai (Monumenta Nipponica) Matori Yamamoto (Japanese Society of Cultural Anthropology/Japanese Society for Oceanic Studies)
2010
January	TBA	8th SPARC Japan Seminar 2009 Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP) journal publishing seminar and training course	ALPSP

For the latest news of events, see the SPARC Japan website: http://www.nii.ac.jp/sparc/en/event/