What can “marriage announcements” tell us? A content analysis of news articles on library-press collaboration

Abstract

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 collabora-tion. 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.