Document Type

Article

Publication Title

College & Research Libraries

Publication Date

2025

Keywords

academic libraries, faculty, information access, serials, scholarly communication, acquisitions, assessment, collection development, publishing

Abstract

This study explores how faculty across disciplines access and share scholarly serial content and what expectations they have for immediacy. The authors conducted twenty-five in-depth, semi-structured interviews with faculty of various ranks representing all Illinois State University (ISU) colleges. The findings, presented in the words of participants and triangulated with data from local sources, suggest that faculty use a variety of context-specific mechanisms to access and share serial literature. Participants discuss how they use library services such as databases, subscriptions, interlibrary loan, and document delivery, coupled with academic social networks, disciplinary repositories, author websites, and other publicly available sources to obtain the full text of articles along with their manifold considerations for sharing and requesting content. The urgency with which faculty need to gain access to scholarly literature is dependent on intersecting elements of discipline, current projects, how the resource will be used, the perceived competitiveness of the field, career stage, and personal practices. The findings reiterate that scholarly literature remains integral to the research and teaching of faculty even as needs and practices for accessing and sharing it grow more individualized and distributed.

Funding Source

This research benefitted from a University Research Grant funded by the Office of Research and Graduate Studies at Illinois State University.

Comments

This is the accepted (post-peer review) version of a manuscript which has been accepted for publication in College & Research Libraries (accepted: September 21, 2023; expected publication January 2025).

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