UCLA's newspaper, The Daily Bruin, ran a great article this week about open access journal publishing. "GSA's print academic journal Carte Italiane moves online" is a clearly written article about open access publishing and the ways that libraries and universities are working on developing sustainable business models for open access. The article draws on a lot of our local favorites, including the inimitable Sharon Farb, UCLA's Associate University Librarian for Collections and Scholarly Communication, and the work of her staff in the Library Digital Collection Services.

Sharon's portfolio also includes the preservation department. If you're a grizzled veteran of the stacks, you might wonder how it is that the preservation department, cataloging and metadata center, digital library program and digital collections services all hang together. We might wonder that, too, if we weren't so busy.

The common thread, and the busyness, is that we're all working on making the collections discoverable, usable and widely available. Open access publishing makes sure that the scholarly community retains the rights to its own output and makes our scholarship available to the widest audience. The article will explain all of this better than I can, but at the core, people preserve the things they need and care about. The more people who can read an article, the more stakeholders we have for preserving that article.

Although most of the posts on this weblog are (and will be) about what goes on behind the scenes to preserve library collections, this article is a nice reminder that everything the preservation department does in order to keep the collections in good health is part of the larger goal of library service. We want these collections to be used. And used to pieces if need be.

And I promise that the next post will have something to do with paste.