Let Academic Documents Live!

I remember meeting a friend many years ago at the McMaster University library where she was a student. While waiting for her to finish up, I browsed the stacks and came upon graduate student theses. One tome stood out: "The Role of Dionysus in Greek Mythology". It was several hundred pages thick. I wondered at the time and energy that must have been spent researching and writing this document. That was my first real exposure to academic work, and it was intimidating to say the least. I'm sure that thesis is still in the stacks at the Mac library, but in light of this week's readings, it has got me thinking - where does academic knowledge live? In scholarly journals? In the stacks of a library? As nebulous data until someone connects to it through a link or a Google search? The most surprising read was Citations are not enough: Academic promotion panels must take into account a scholar’s presence in popular media (Biswas & Kirchher, n.d.). The statistics of how little peer reviewed academic papers are cited, let alone read is disheartening. In another reading, Blogging in the Academy (Nackerud & Scaletta, 2008), the authors describe how faculty and students at the University of Minnesota were using a then newly implemented blogging platform. I copied and pasted one of the links referenced in the article. The whole platform has been shut down. I'm guessing the university felt students and faculty could make use of other readily available commercial blogging platforms instead. And the blogs contained therein? Gone with the wind unless individual bloggers took the time to transfer their blogs somewhere else. In both of these cases, the formal academic documents and personal blog posts are not really living. In the digital age, if academic work is to live, it has to be part of a inter-connected web of similar information or what George Siemens referred to when he spoke of forming connections. The article (Wecker, n.d.) on Academia.edu left me more cautiously optimistic. Despite some push-back by some academic institutions, Academia.edu and the whole open access publishing inititatives seem to be a way for academic work to live in the digital age.