959

What Can “Marriage Announcements” Tell Us? 
A Content Analysis of News Articles on Library-
Press Collaboration

Mei Zhang and Xiaofei Wei*

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 commu-
nity 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 ar-
ticles 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.

Introduction
 The Wayne State University Press reinstated its terminated leadership and switched its reporting 
from the Dean’s Office of University Libraries to the Office of the President in February 2020—it 
had only been a few months since it joined the university library in fall 2019. This unsuccessful 
partnership between university press and the library immediately sparked discussions within 
and outside the scholarly publishing community. As people also noticed the existence of many 
successful library-press collaborations, they asked questions about the reasons to form such 
collaborations, as well as the problems and future of similar partnerships between university 
presses and academic libraries. 

Although studies show an upward trend of the collaboration between university presses 
and academic libraries, we notice an uneven representation in the scholarly literature on the 
library-press collaboration, emphasizing the perspective of insiders—librarians and profession-

* Mei Zhang is a Postdoctoral Scholar in the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University; email: mzhang@
syr.edu. Xiaofei Wei is a doctoral student in the Information School at University of Wisconsin–Madison; email: 
xwei52@wisc.edu. ©2021 Mei Zhang and Xiaofei Wei, Attribution-NonCommercial (https://creativecommons.
org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) CC BY-NC.

mailto:mzhang@syr.edu
mailto:mzhang@syr.edu
mailto:xwei52@wisc.edu
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/


960  College & Research Libraries November 2021

als in the scholarly publishing industry over the perspective of the wider academic commu-
nity—including but not limited to faculty, researchers, students, and staff. Not surprisingly, 
librarians and scholarly publishing professionals have published a large body of scholarly 
library literature examining the library-press collaboration in terms of its background, benefits, 
collaboration details, and challenges, either theoretically or through case studies. However, 
much less attention has been paid to the academic community’s perception or reaction of such 
collaboration, and none of the literature explores how this library-press collaboration has 
been communicated with the academic community, even though the academic community 
plays a critical role in scholarly publishing as the creators and consumers of scholarly works. 

The lack of research on the academic community’s perception and reaction of library-
press collaboration encourages us to explore how the differing stakeholders—the library, the 
university press, and others in the university—inform the academic community about such 
collaborations. As the message communicated to the academic community would impact 
how they understand and respond to the new collaboration initiative, it is important to first 
explore what message has been delivered to the academic community about library-press 
collaboration before we can really understand and interpret, or even predict reactions to 
such collaborations. In this study, we borrow the term “marriage” to describe library-press 
collaboration from Charles Watkinson when he used it to depict the “long term, and deeply 
embedded partnership” in such collaborations.1 We examine how this “marriage” has been 
communicated to the academic community through official “marriage announcements”—news 
articles published on the official websites of affiliated institutions, and we focus on answering 
the following two research questions: 
1. What information is covered in the news articles about library-press collaboration? 
2. What are the purposes of these news articles on library-press collaboration? 

Literature Review
Background of Library-Press Collaboration
Current literature from both library and publishing communities discusses several background 
factors that encourage the collaboration between university presses and academic libraries. 
Some studies view this collaboration as a way for presses to solve the financial pressures 
when publishing scholarly monographs.2 This type of pressure was largely brought by the 
increasing price of monographs and diminishing sales of titles; consequently, presses cannot 
meet researchers’ demands to publish many scholarly monographs, which was described as 
the “crisis of the scholarly monograph.”3 As scholarly monograph publishing is considered 
to be university presses’ “truly unique contributions that are essential to academic,”4 univer-
sity presses take multiple strategies to reduce their financial pressures in this crisis, such as 
moving from publishing hard copies to paperbacks and expanding the list of titles to include 
some trade books or textbooks.5 Meanwhile, some presses decide to collaborate with academic 
libraries to solve the sustainability issues in their scholarly monograph publishing based on 
the “natural” partnership between press and library.6

Another factor mentioned by several studies as a background for the press-library collabora-
tion is the academic libraries’ intention to enter into the scholarly publishing field, particularly 
through open access publishing. As more academic libraries started their publishing programs 
or projects, one issue discussed by both librarians and presses is the relationship between library 
and press.7 Some practitioners recognize that library publishing cannot replace university presses 



What Can “Marriage Announcements” Tell Us?     961

in scholarly publishing, since the reputation of library publishing cannot really compete with the 
long-term established prestige of university presses in the field. They point out that libraries and 
presses should be collaborators rather than competitors due to their complementary skills.8 This 
attitude also echoes with the findings from a 2012 AUP survey of libraries and university presses 
about the library-press collaboration, where 69 percent of participants believed that library 
publishing should “complement” rather than “reinventing or duplicating” press publishing.9

Additionally, a few articles have depicted the library-press collaboration as both parties’ 
reactions to the rapidly changing scholarly publishing environment brought by the devel-
opments or even revolutions in information technology and digital scholarship.10 Based on 
the shared mission/values between libraries and press in disseminating and preserving the 
scholarly works, their collaboration seems to be natural along with the various benefits it can 
bring to both parties. 

Types of Library-Press Collaboration
Many researchers and practitioners agree that the library-press collaboration should have 
various formats as the collaborating institutions have different needs and contexts, and no 
“one size fits all” model could work for all cases.11 Raym Crow, in his widely discussed work 
on issues in campus-based publishing partnership, identified five types of library-press initia-
tives within a same institution, including the following: backfile digitization projects, library 
online provision of press print titles and supplements, press distribution of library content, 
creating digital research or reference services, and providing digital publishing platform.12 
However, as Richard Clement pointed out that Crow’s classification primarily focuses on the 
collaborations that are “programmatic”, which suggests the press and library collaborate in a 
program/project with shared expertise and resources while still “remaining an independent 
unit.”13 Clement then identified another type of library-press collaboration, where the press 
reports to the university library under the same organizational structure. Clement called this 
reporting structure “library and press integration,” and he noticed that there are different 
degrees of such integration.14 Watkinson further created a taxonomy to systematically describe 
the different types of library-press relationships, including five types from the least integrated 
type as “little evidence of currently active relationships between press and library” to the most 
integrated type as “shared vision approaches.”15 Detailed information about Watkinson’s five 
types of library-press relationships will be provided in the methodology section, as it inspires 
us to develop our classification of different types of library-press collaborations.

Benefits of Library-Press Collaboration
Many articles examine how libraries and presses can benefit from the library-press collaboration. 
One common way to frame the benefits is to discuss mutual advantages for both parties. Several 
scholars claim that the collaboration would enhance library and press’s mutual understanding 
of scholarly publishing;16 others mentioned some general benefits of collaboration, including 
shared expertise, reduced cost, and broadened perspectives, which would better prepare both 
parties responding to the rapidly changing scholarly publishing environment.17 Additionally, 
literature also outlines the benefits for press and for library separately, as described below.

The most-discussed benefit for the press is that the collaboration could improve the 
press’s organizational visibility in its home institution. Scholars claimed that the press, before 
the collaboration, used to be treated as an auxiliary unit in university; the collaboration with 



962  College & Research Libraries November 2021

library allows the press to better demonstrate its value in disseminating scholarly works to 
the affiliated university, which then help the press move from the marginalized position to the 
center of the university.18 Another benefit for the press is the collaboration would provide the 
press with financial and technical support to experiment with different publishing models.19

The benefits libraries could gain from the collaboration with the press focus on helping 
the library enter into the publishing field. Press’s expertise and skills in the acquisition, de-
sign, and production of books could help libraries better interact with scholars as the content 
creators rather than library patrons; and eventually the partnership with press will allow 
libraries to improve the legitimacy and reputation of library publishing, especially outside 
the affiliated university.20

Challenges of Library-Press Collaboration
Some articles describe the challenges for library-press collaboration. Cultural differences be-
tween library and press is an often-mentioned challenge for the collaboration. Particularly, 
Mary Alice Ball claimed that library usually treats scholars as researchers; thus, its focus is 
service and access. Conversely, university press treats scholars as content providers, thus 
focusing on content production and protection of the intellectual rights.21 Patrick Alexander 
further argued that library focuses on serving patrons inside a university, while press often 
serves scholars outside its home institution.22 Monica McCormic noted that library tends to 
say “yes,” as its main function is to provide services to patrons, while university press tends 
to say “no,” as it cannot publish everything submitted to the press.23 All these cultural differ-
ences between two organizations make it challenging for library and press to build a mutual 
respect and understanding environment and thus find a common ground to “be nimble and 
experimental together.”24 Another main challenge of library-press collaboration lies in their 
different financial operations: university press is a revenue-generating organization, whereas 
library operates on “subsidized, expenditure-based budget”;25 therefore, library sometimes 
does not fully understand press’s revenue-driven operations to maintain its financial viability.26

Limitations of Current Literature
The literature review demonstrates that the majority of these articles were written by stake-
holders either from libraries or university presses and have covered a relatively comprehensive 
range of the topics on the library-press collaborations. However, what we do not know from 
these articles is how the library-press collaboration has been communicated with a wider 
audience beyond the library and press communities. Since the collaboration not only affects 
the two parties—libraries and university presses—but also impacts the academic community, 
which are the actual creators and users of the content in scholarly publishing, it is important 
to investigate how this larger academic community perceives library-press collaboration. 
Surprisingly, little scholarship exists on both parties’ or universities’ efforts to actively com-
municate this collaboration with a wider audience; therefore, our study aims to investigate 
such efforts of library/press/university by analyzing articles from university news sites that 
officially announced the formation of the collaboration.

Methodologies
Data Collection
We focus on investigating how an institution informed its academic community about the 



What Can “Marriage Announcements” Tell Us?     963

library-press collaboration through formal news channels; therefore, the first step is to identify 
these news articles. We conducted three rounds of web search to collect news articles in April, 
June, and July of 2020 to ensure we captured the latest news on targeted topics. Specifically, we 
used keywords (“university press AND librar*) combined with one of the following verbs—
(merge/join/collaborat*/partner*/ integrat* /report /unite / move/ work together / transfer / 
embed)—to initiate multiple Google searches, and then we went through the inclusion and 
exclusion criteria, as listed below, for the first 100 web pages returned by each Google search.

Inclusion criteria: 1) We collected only news articles from the university/institution’s 
formal news website. Particularly, we used two ways to identify formal news sites: first, a 
report is found on the news site with a URL of the institution’s official website, like .edu or 
.org; second, the report is found on the campus newspaper, even though its URL ends with 
.com, like The Michigan Daily (https://www.michigandaily.com/). Among our collected 23 
news articles, all but two were identified in the first category, and table 1 provides detailed 
information about the news sites that held those news; 2) The news articles should primarily 
focus on the library-press collaboration; 3) The academic library and the press in the collabo-
ration should be located in the United States.

Exclusion criteria: 1) We did not collect any news article published on a national news 
platform, like Inside Higher Ed, or The Chronicle of Higher Education; 2) We did not collect news 
articles where the reported collaboration was NOT between library and press. For instance, if 
a news article reported on the collaboration between a press and a scientific society on open 
access publishing with the funding from a library, then we will not collect this report in our 
dataset; 3) We did not treat a library’s purchase of resources published by a university press 
as library-press collaboration; 4) We did not collect multiple reports of the same collabora-
tion. Therefore, if there are multiple news articles found on the same collaboration at different 
stages, we only collected the first report on the launch of this collaboration.

After applying the inclusion and exclusion criteria to the webpage returned by Google 
search, we identified 23 news articles from 2007–2020 as our dataset for further analysis. Table 
1 demonstrates the basic information about these 23 news articles. The discussion of how we 
developed the types of collaboration can be found later in this methodology section.

TABLE 1
Basic Information about News Articles Collected in This Study

Report 
#

Library Same 
Institution 
Press?

Year of 
Report

Report News 
Site 

Type of 
Collaboration

Report Title

1 Oregon State 
University 
Libraries

Y 2007 The Messenger* Type 4 OSU Press Joins OSU 
Libraries

2 Cornell Library Duke 
University 
Press

2008 Cornell 
Chronicle

Type 3 Duke University Press 
Joins Cornell Library 
to Expand ‘Project 
Euclid’ by Putting 
Independent Journals 
Online

*The Messenger is a magazine published twice a year by OSU Libraries and Press and distributed to donors to 
Oregon State University.

https://www.michigandaily.com/


964  College & Research Libraries November 2021

TABLE 1
Basic Information about News Articles Collected in This Study

Report 
#

Library Same 
Institution 
Press?

Year of 
Report

Report News 
Site 

Type of 
Collaboration

Report Title

3 University 
of Michigan 
Library

Y 2009 The Michigan 
Daily

Type 4 University to Merge 
Publishing Operations 
with Library

4 Utah State 
University 
Libraries

Y 2009 Utah State 
Today

Type 4 Utah State University 
Press Merges with 
Merrill-Cazier Library

5 Digital Library 
of Georgia

University 
of Georgia 
Press

2011 UGA Today Type 3 The University of 
Georgia Press and 
the Digital Library of 
Georgia Collaborate 
on Open Access 
E-book

6 Indiana 
University 
Libraries

Y 2012 IU News Room Type 1 IU to Establish New 
Office of Scholarly 
Publishing

7 Robert Frost 
Library at 
Amherst 
College

Y 2012 Amherst 
College News

Type 2 Amherst College to 
Launch First Open-
access, Digital Academic 
Press Devoted to the 
Liberal Arts

8 Library Affairs 
at Southern 
Illinois 
University 
Carbondale

Y 2014 SIU News Type 4 Dewey Center, SIU 
Press Join Library 
Affairs

9 California 
Digital Library

Y 2015 CDLINFO News Type 3 UC Press and the CDL 
Receive $750K Grant 
from the Andrew W. 
Mellon Foundation

10 Texas Tech 
University 
Libraries

Y 2015 The Daily 
Toreador

Type 4 Tech University Press 
Merges with Tech 
Libraries

11 Humboldt 
State University 
Library

Y 2015 myHumboldt 
Message Center

Type 2 HSU Library Launches 
Humboldt State 
University Press

12 University of 
Cincinnati 
Libraries

Y 2016 UC News Type 2 UC to Launch New 
Academic Press

13 Kent State 
University 
Libraries

Y 2017 e-Inside Type 4 Kent State University 
Press Reports to 
University Libraries



What Can “Marriage Announcements” Tell Us?     965

TABLE 1
Basic Information about News Articles Collected in This Study

Report 
#

Library Same 
Institution 
Press?

Year of 
Report

Report News 
Site 

Type of 
Collaboration

Report Title

14 Fordham 
University 
Libraries

Y 2017 Inside Fordham Type 3 Fordham University 
Press and Fordham 
Libraries Awarded 
NEH/Mellon Grant

15 Cornell Library Y 2017 Cornell 
Chronicle

Type 4 Cornell Press Finds 
New Home at Cornell 
Library

16 College of 
University 
Libraries and 
Learning 
Sciences at the 
University of 
New Mexico

Y 2018 UNM 
Newsroom

Type 4 UNM Press Joins 
College of University 
Libraries and Learning 
Sciences

17 University of 
Washington 
Libraries

Y 2018 UW Libraries 
News & 
Announcements

Type 4 UW Press Joins UW 
Libraries

18 Texas A&M 
University 
Libraries

Y 2018 Texas A&M 
TODAY

Type 4 Texas A&M University 
Press to Merge with 
University Libraries
Press Room

19 MIT Libraries Y 2018 MIT Libraries 
News (also 
available on MIT 
Press News)

Type 3 The MIT Press to 
Launch Print and 
Open Access Book 
Series with Support 
from the MIT Libraries

20 University of 
Virginia Library

Y 2019 UVA Today Type 3 UVA Library, UVA 
Press Partner to Make 
Original Scholarship 
Freely Available

21 University 
of Wyoming 
Libraries

University 
Press of 
Colorado

2019 UW News Type 5 UW Libraries Joins 
University Press of 
Colorado

22 Wayne State 
University 
Libraries

Y 2019 Today@Wayne Type 4 WSU Press Joins 
Library System

23 University of 
Tennessee 
Libraries

Y 2020 The University 
of Tennessee, 
Knoxville News

Type 4 UT Press Joins the 
University Libraries



966  College & Research Libraries November 2021

Data Analysis
Coding Process
We conducted a content analysis on the collected news articles to systematically capture the 
meaning of materials. Specifically, we divided the 23 articles into five groups, with four to five 
articles in each group. Then one author inductively developed the initial codebook from the 
first group of four articles, and then discussed the codebook with another author to ensure 
we developed the same interpretation of the codebook. We further revised our codebook 
together based on the coding of another four articles in the second group. Later, two of us 
used the revised codebook to code the articles in groups 3–5 separately. After coding articles 
in one group independently, we compared and discussed our codes one by one before we 
moved to the next group; this comparison and discussion process helped us agree and remain 
consistent with our assignments of codes. Finally, we turned to the four articles in the first 
group and updated our coding based on the revised codebook.

In our codebook, we identified two categories of codes: the codes about the content cov-
erage of the news articles and the codes about the identified interviewees. Table 2 provides 
the list of our primary codes along with their descriptions, and we also identified subcodes 
for some of our primary codes.

TABLE 2
Primary Codes Identified in This Study

Code Description of the Code # of News 
Articles 

Assigned 
with the 

Code

Category 1: Content Covered in the Report

Background of 
collaboration

Description of the background of the library-press collaboration, 
like the environment depiction

20

Benefits for library Benefits of collaboration for the library 8
Benefits for press Benefits of collaboration for the press 14
Benefits for both library 
and press

Benefits of collaboration for both library and press described 
together

9

Benefits for others Benefits of collaboration for parties other than press or library 21
Brief description of the 
press

Description of the press about its previous and/or current 
services, or the general history of the press

19

Brief description of the 
library

Description of the library about its previous and/or current 
services, or the general history of the library

4

Brief description of the 
institution

Brief history or description about the university where the press 
and/or library are affiliated with

2

How collaboration 
worked or would work

Description of how the collaboration would work or worked—it 
might be a plan, or a description of the working mechanism of 
current collaboration

23

What is offered by library Any resource library can bring into the collaboration 10
What is offered by press Any resource press can bring into the collaboration 13



What Can “Marriage Announcements” Tell Us?     967

Identifying the Type of Collaboration
As we intended to identify different types of library-press collaboration in the news articles, 
we first planned to use the classification developed by Watkinson, which includes five types 
of library-press collaboration: 

• Type 1: little evidence of currently active relationships between press and library
• Type 2: good relationships between the press and one or more libraries, but no reporting
• Type 3: reporting and joint projects, but relative autonomy and no physical collocation
• Type 4: physical collocation, reporting, but relative autonomy
• Type 5: more integrated, shared vision approaches

 However, we encountered two challenges when applying this classification to our data: 
first, indicators of Types 1 and 2 cannot be found in the news articles, probably because these two 
types of collaboration were either very common across different institutions or were less worthy 
to report on; second, key information needed to distinguish Types 3, 4, and 5 were missing in 
the news articles, as the information might be too granular for most readers of the news articles.

Because of these challenges of applying an existing classification to our data, we decided 
to develop our own classification of library-press collaboration inductively from the collected 
news articles, which also includes five different types:

• Type 1: established a new office that includes components from both library and press
• Type 2: launch of a new press under library or supported/funded by library
• Type 3: joint projects
• Type 4: structure reorganization, including merge or integrations between library and 

press, reporting structure between two parties 
• Type 5: library becomes a member of a consortial press

Table 1 under 3.1 demonstrates the different types of library-press collaboration we iden-
tified based on our own classification. 

Methods Used for Code Coverage and Bigram Analysis
To better understand the focus of our news articles, we calculated the coverage percentage 
of primary codes and the most frequently used bigrams throughout these news articles. The 

TABLE 2
Primary Codes Identified in This Study

Code Description of the Code # of News 
Articles 

Assigned 
with the 

Code

Category 2: Interviewees in the Report

Librarian Name and title of librarian interviewed in the news 22
Staff from press Name and title of press staff interviewed in the news 14
Person in both library 
and press

If a person holds titles from both library and press, then code 
his/her name and titles here

2

Others Name and title of person outside library and press interviewed 
in the news

10



968  College & Research Libraries November 2021

results of both analyses can be found in the Findings section. Specifically, we took a few steps 
to calculate the coverage percentage of primary codes. First, the coverage percentage of each 
code was calculated by dividing the sum of the coverage percentage in each source by the 
total number of sources (23). Then, the percentage of each code was converted proportionally 
such that the sum of all the percentages is 100 percent. 

In this study, we used bigrams to display the most mentioned topics in the news ar-
ticles. Bigram is a sequence of two words extracted from a text, and the most frequently 
occurred meaningful bigrams in a text can largely reflect the important topics of the 
text. Particularly, we used the following process to identify the most frequently occurred 
bigrams in the news articles. We first exported the references of each primary code in 
NVivo as separate word documents and then combined them into one document. Only 
the texts from the news articles were kept. Then we removed some property phrases, like 
the names of university/library/press, and the names of interviewees. We also removed 
“university press,” “university library,” and “university libraries,” as these bigrams do 
not provide substantive information to our analysis. Then we conducted general text 
cleaning process, including converting text into lower case, removing common stop words, 
removing punctuations and extra white spaces. After the preparation, the document was 
processed using R and a few packages, including “tm,” “RWeka,” “wordcloud,” and 
“ggplot2,” to calculate the most frequently occurred bigrams and generated an initial 
bigram cloud. We further identified and removed irrelevant bigrams from the bigram list, 
like “he said” and “press will,” and then generated the final frequency list and bigram 
cloud, as shown in figure 3.

Findings
Basic Information about the Reports
Type of Collaboration
Table 1 shows basic information of our news articles, which range from 2007 to 2020, and 
more than 65 percent of them were released in 2015 and after. As for the types of collabo-
ration covered in these reports, 12 articles (52.2%) reported a Type 4 collaboration, which 
brings organizational structure changes to library and press; six articles (26.1%) repre-
sented Type 3 collaboration about joint projects between library and press; two articles 
(8.7%) covered Type 2 collaboration on the launch of a new press supported by library; 
we only found one article (4.4%) reported on Type 1 collaboration, where a new scholarly 
publishing office was launched to include the press and component of library; and one 
article (4.4%) on Type 5 collaboration, where a library became a member of a consortial 
press. Figure 1 further depicts the distribution of news articles by their publishing year 
and type of collaboration. 

News Titles and Primary Codes Coverage
We found some interesting patterns in the titles of the news articles. Among the 23 news 
articles, eight of them used the pattern “press joins library,” while none of them used “li-
brary joins press”; four used pattern “university press merges with University library”; 
two used pattern “University launches press.” Additionally, four articles included the 
purpose of library-press collaboration, like “open access” or “make publications freely 
available online.”



What Can “Marriage Announcements” Tell Us?     969

Figure 2 illustrates the coverage of our primary codes. Here we further create a parent 
code for the primary codes with related/similar meanings. For instance, we created a parent 
code “benefits” to include all four primary codes on benefits. The codes in the outer circle 
in figure 2 are our primary codes identified in the coding process, as shown in table 2, while 
the codes in the inner circle are the parent codes we created for the coverage analysis. Both 
the percentage of the original primary codes and their parent code can be found in figure 2.

FIGURE 2
Coverage Percentage of Primary Codes

FIGURE 1
Distribution of News Articles by Published Year and Type of Collaboration



970  College & Research Libraries November 2021

Figure 2 shows that the codes with widest coverage are “benefits” (33.5%) and “how the 
collaboration worked/would work” (20.5%), followed by background of the collaboration 
(16.6%), brief history of the press/library/host institution (14.9%), and other codes. Among the 
primary codes under “benefit,” the coverage of “benefit for others” (17.7%) makes up more 
than half of the coverage of “benefits” (33.5%). Besides, it is worth noting that the coverage 
of “benefit for press” (8.8%) is almost twice as much as that of the “benefit for library” (4.6%). 
Further, when it came to the history/description, the news articles mainly provided history 
of the presses (12.7%), while very few coverages were on the history of the library (1.9%) or 
of the host institution (0.3%). 

Most Frequently Used Bigrams
We identified the most frequently used bigrams in our dataset. Figure 3 shows the bigram 
cloud of references from all codes on the left and lists the frequency of most-used bigrams on 
the right. As shown in figure 3, “open access” is the most frequent bigram, followed by bigrams 
related to scholarly publishing, such as “scholarly publishing,” “access publishing,” “digital 
publishing,” “access journals,” “peer review,” “access models,” and “business model.” We 
found some frequent bigrams indicating the disciplines/domains of the publishing involved 
in the collaboration, including “social sciences,” “humanities social,” and “educational re-
sources.” Another bigram worth noting is “business model.”

Interviewees and Their Sentiment in the News
We also identified the interviewees covered in the news articles, which depicted the stake-
holder’s information in the collaboration. Among our 23 articles, 22 interviewed librarians, 

FIGURE 3
Bigrams of All the Coded Text in the News Articles



What Can “Marriage Announcements” Tell Us?     971

mainly library director/dean or similar position; 14 included staff from press—mainly press 
director; two included persons holding dual positions at both library and press; 10 individu-
als were interviewed outside of library and press, including (vice) president of a college/
university, provost, and professors in humanities.

The stakeholders interviewed in the news articles expressed an overall positive senti-
ment toward the collaboration. For example, some press directors said they were “excited,” 
“thrilled,” or “enthusiastic” about the collaboration, and some mentioned “exciting things” 
they can do together. Some library staff praised the role of the press; for example, the MIT 
libraries director said the MIT press “has long been an innovator in digital publishing and 
open access” (#19). Another librarian was enthusiastic that the collaboration was a good op-
portunity for the library to become the producer of knowledge: “this is a historical turning 
point for libraries” (#20).

Themes Covered in the News
Background of the Library-Press Collaboration
We identified three major themes in the news as the background of the library-press collabo-
ration.

1. Demand for new publishing model
Most news articles depicted the library-press collaboration as a response to the academic 

community’s demand for a new publishing model, especially a demand for open access pub-
lishing in humanities. Those articles outlined the drawbacks of traditional publishing models 
by focusing on the increasing price of books and the reduced number of published titles, which 
created barriers for academic communities to disseminate and get access to knowledge. For 
instance, one article (#7) claimed that “current models of scholarly publishing do far more to 
lock down information than to disseminate it to those who need it.” Additionally, we iden-
tified two other factors that generated the demand for a new publishing model, including 
university presses’ technical and financial challenges in digital publishing and the lack of 
online publishing venues in humanities and social sciences. Then these articles introduced 
library-press collaboration as an opportunity for the two parties, especially for university 
press, to engage in a new publishing model—primarily the open access model—to solve the 
problems brought by traditional publishing models, since open access would provide free 
access to the scholarly works for all readers around the world.

2. Following vs. leading
Interestingly, we notice that about half of collected news articles framed the library-press 

collaboration as the local press/library’s move to follow the trend in scholarly publishing. 
These articles emphasized that many peer presses and libraries, including some leading ones, 
had established collaboration especially in open access publishing, and thus the local press/
library collaboration was an effort to join the “emerging trend” or “national trend” (#4).

Different from the “follower” perspective, we also observed the “leader” perspective in 
several articles. Although these articles covered a wide range of time periods in our data, all of 
them either emphasized the leading roles of the local press/library in library-press collaboration 
or open access, or, addressed their all-time “innovative” characteristics in digital publishing.

3. Positive relationship between press and library
About 30 percent of the news articles discussed the positive library-press relationship in 

the background of the collaborations. These positive relationships came from two sources: 



972  College & Research Libraries November 2021

prior partnership and shared missions. Specifically, some of these articles reported that the 
library and press had already partnered in different projects, while other articles addressed 
the shared missions or visions between the two parties in creating, disseminating, and pre-
serving knowledge, all of which would allow them to better understand the other party’s 
needs in the collaboration.

Benefits Brought by the Library-Press Collaboration
All articles outlined some benefits of the library-press collaboration. Compared to the eight 
reports that mentioned the benefits for the library, the majority of our reports had more cov-
erage on the benefits for the academic community (21 reports) and the benefits for the press 
(14 reports), which will be described below.

1. Benefits for academic community: The most-discussed benefit in the news articles 
is that library-press collaboration would promote the accessibility and dissemina-
tion of knowledge. It echoes with our finding in the “background” section, where 
many articles discussed the academic community’s demands of a new publishing 
model as a motivation for such collaborations. These articles framed library-press 
collaboration as an opportunity for both parties to explore open access publishing 
of scholarly works, particularly monographs in humanities areas; thus, it would 
help scholars as the creators of scholarly works to promote the visibility and dis-
semination of their works on the one hand and help them as the users of scholarly 
works obtain access to more materials on the other hand. Moreover, several ar-
ticles pointed out the financial benefits for students, as such collaboration would 
also help develop open educational resources or open e-textbooks, which would 
greatly reduce the cost of college education. Additionally, some articles reported 
that scholars would receive better publishing services, like peer-review process, 
content editing, and marketing of their works. Several articles further claimed 
that the collaboration could promote the reputation of the affiliated university as a 
research-oriented institution through digital publishing services in areas in which 
the university has distinctive expertise. 

2. Benefits for the press: Our findings in the benefits for the press covered in the news 
articles are similar to the ones discussed by other scholarly literature as shown in the 
literature review section, albeit with different emphasis. The most discussed benefit 
is to improve the financial viability of the press by reducing its deficit, lowering the 
operation cost, and increasing revenue in the collaboration with library. Note that 
we found the words “sustainability” or “sustainable” have been mentioned many 
times in the texts under the code of “benefit for press,” which implies the importance 
of sustainability to a university press. Moreover, some news articles reported that 
collaboration would provide new business and service opportunities for the press, 
such as participating in the university’s digitization efforts and experimenting with 
multiple scholarly publishing models. The third type of benefit revealed in our da-
taset is that the collaboration could help the press become more visible in the local 
community by providing improved publishing services to the local community.

3. Benefits for the library: Not surprisingly, we observed a very limited number of 
news articles reporting the benefits of such collaboration to the library. Most of these 
articles focused on its effect on library’s exploration of open access publishing, by 



What Can “Marriage Announcements” Tell Us?     973

claiming that the collaboration would empower or give legitimacy to library’s open 
access publishing efforts. Additionally, one article mentioned that merging with the 
university press would provide extra off-site storage facilities for the library so that 
it would have more on-site space for its users. 

How the Collaboration Would Work/Worked
All articles covered some information about how the library-press collaboration would or 
did work. The most important information is about the specific type of collaboration, which 
has already been discussed in the first part of the Findings section. Another important and 
frequently mentioned bit of information is about the arrangement of leading positions in the 
collaboration. Most of our news articles reported about the new roles for library director/dean 
or press director in the position, while others, especially those reporting a Type 2 collabora-
tion (launching a new press), described hiring a director of the press as an immediate need 
or first priority. Additionally, many articles provided operational details of the collaboration, 
like how the open access would work, the disciplinary coverage of publishing, and funding 
of the press or collaborative project.

What Are Offered by Each Party in the Collaboration
About half of the news articles mentioned what each party would offer in this collaboration, 
although most of them did not go into details. To summarize, the resources offered by the 
presses include: expertise and experience in scholarly publishing, close relationship with 
authors, and space. The resources offered by the libraries include: expertise and skills in copy-
right, information technologies and human resources, financial support, special collections, 
and space for presenting titles from the press. 

Brief Description of the Parties in the Collaboration
In our dataset, 19 out of 23 collected news articles provide a brief description of the university 
press involved in the collaboration. These descriptions provide information about the history 
of the press, disciplinary coverage of the press, the number of published titles, and its repu-
tations in the field. Interestingly, only four articles include a short description of the library, 
mainly about its collection and organizational structure. Further, we identified two articles 
that briefly described the home institution of the collaboration on the number of its student 
population and academic programs.

Discussions
Purpose of News Articles—How to Justify the Collaboration
We argue that the most straightforward purpose of news articles on library-press collabora-
tion is to inform the local academic community about such collaboration. Similar to public 
marriage announcements, the main purpose of our collected news articles is to inform the 
relevant community about the “marriage” of library-press collaboration. Our content analysis 
of the news articles demonstrates that all articles reported the critical information about the 
collaboration: the two parties involved in the collaboration, the time schedule of the collabo-
ration, and how the collaboration worked or would work. With this information, the local 
academic community should be able to develop a basic understanding of the collaboration. 



974  College & Research Libraries November 2021

We further argue that another important purpose of these news articles is to justify the 
library-press collaboration to the local community. Providing rationales to such collaboration 
to the local academic community could help the two parties obtain support from this commu-
nity, which is important for the success of the collaboration in the future. We identified several 
strategies the news articles used to provide justification to the library-press collaboration:

1. Emphasis on the benefits to the local community: We found that the benefit brought 
by the collaboration is the topic with the highest coverage across all news articles, as 
shown in figure 1, while the benefits to the academic community, including scholars 
as both the creator and user of knowledge and students as consumer of educational 
resources, have more coverage in the news than other types of benefits. This finding 
suggests news articles’ effort in persuading the local academic community of the 
actual benefits they could receive from the collaboration.  

2. Leading/following the trend in scholarly publishing: More than 65 percent of our 
news articles are published in or after 2015, which echoes the findings from other 
studies that library-press collaboration has become a trend in the scholarly publishing 
field. Interestingly, we observed two different depictions of the local collaboration 
in such a trend. On the one hand, we noticed that some news articles, particularly 
those published in recent years, described the collaboration as their local reaction to 
the trend in the field, which uses the following logic to justify their local collabora-
tion: many other libraries and presses, particularly the leading ones, have established 
similar library-press collaboration, and we haven’t heard any report on the negative 
impact of such collaboration; therefore, it should be safe and cost-effective for us to 
just follow our peers to create such collaboration locally, and it is also hard not to do 
what everyone else seems to be doing.

On the other hand, we observed several news articles that described the local collabora-
tion as their effort to play the leading role in the scholarly publishing. These articles employed 
the following logic to justify their local collaboration: Our local organizations (library and/or 
press) have a history and/or characteristics as the leader or innovative player in the field, and 
this library-press collaboration would be another innovative attempt to solve the problems 
in scholarly publishing. By doing that, we can also take a leading role in the field by provid-
ing solid evidence of the effectiveness of the library-press collaboration to other libraries and 
presses.

3. Absence of challenges: Interestingly, none of our news articles discussed the potential 
problems or challenges of their local library-press collaboration. It is not an unexpected 
finding especially if we compare the news articles to the marriage announcements, 
where the challenges of marriage are often excluded from the announcement. Like-
wise, our news articles did not cover the challenges probably because first, they do 
not intend to lead the local academic community to question the rationales of such 
collaboration; and, second, the organizations involved (library/press/university) are 
unaware of the actual challenges of this collaboration, particularly in the debut of 
such collaboration.

Unbalanced Depictions between Press and Library
Our findings on the code coverage illustrate an unbalanced presentation between press and 
library in the news articles. As discussed earlier, the collected news articles covered much 



What Can “Marriage Announcements” Tell Us?     975

more on “benefit for the press” and the “brief history/description of the press” than that of 
the library. We argue that there are two assumptions for those news articles to provide more 
depictions on the press side than the library.

First, news articles assume the audience of the reports—the local academic community—
are unfamiliar with the press. This assumption is supported by some other literature, where 
they pointed out that university presses are often marginalized in the host institutions, largely 
because presses usually serve the academic community outside of the host institutions.27 Con-
sequently, the local academic community often lacks knowledge about the affiliated press. 
Unlike the university presses, libraries in a university focus providing services to the local 
community and thus are well recognized by the community. Based on the local community’s 
unbalanced familiarity between press and library, we argue that the news articles attempted 
to bring the press to the center of community by providing more background information in 
their reports, as the press is not a subordinate but rather an indispensable party to the col-
laboration. 

Second, news articles assume the press has encountered a much higher level of financial 
pressure than the library, which has also been discussed by other literature.28 Particularly, 
the financial difficulty has even directly affected the long-term viability of the press, while 
libraries often do not have the same level of financial pressure. Therefore, these news articles 
spend more coverage on the benefits a press could receive from the collaboration, especially 
from financial perspectives; and that is also the reason we found the words “sustainability” 
and “sustainable” have occurred many times when the news articles reported the benefits 
for the press.

Limitations and Implications
One limitation of our study lies in the data collection method. As outlined in our method 
section, we relied on keyword searches through Google to identify news articles on library-
press collaboration; however, we cannot guarantee this method would allow us to collect 
all relevant news articles, which means there might be several news articles that meet our 
inclusion/exclusion criteria but are still not included in our dataset. Another limitation is that 
we only analyzed the news articles released on the institution’s official news sites, and there 
might be other ways for the institution/library/press to inform its academic community about 
library-press collaboration, like email announcements or brochures posted campuswide. Con-
sequently, we cannot safely conclude that our findings can be applied to other communication 
methods employed by the institution/library/press to inform their academic community about 
the library-press collaboration. 

With the limitations discussed above, this study reveals how the message of library-press 
collaboration has been delivered to the local academic community through content analysis 
of relevant news articles released through official channels. The findings would work as a 
prerequisite to further investigation of the academic community’s perception and reaction 
to library-press collaboration, which would in turn impact the success of such collaboration, 
and we plan to further explore the actual effect of those news articles on the academic com-
munity’s response of library-press collaboration through interviews with stakeholders, in-
cluding librarians, press staff, and researchers. Moreover, this study will inform the academic 
library and university press communities about their initial purpose and expectations of such 
partnerships, which would help them reflect on the current status of existing collaborations 



976  College & Research Libraries November 2021

and prevent the dissolution of such partnerships. These reflections would play a critical role 
in improving the sustainability of the scholarly publishing field. Additionally, the findings 
from this study would encourage LIS educators to think about how they should depict and 
educate future librarians on the issues of library publishing in higher education, particularly 
the relationship between academic libraries and university presses.

 Notes
 1. Charles Watkinson, “Why Marriage Matters: A North American Perspective on Press/Library Partner-

ships,” Learned Publishing 29, no. S1 (2016): 342–47, https://doi.org/10.1002/leap.1044.
 2. Patrick H. Alexander, “Publisher-Library Relations: What Assets Does a University Press Bring to the 

Partnership?” Against the Grain 20, no. 6 (December 1, 2008), https://doi.org/10.7771/2380-176X.2606; Richard Clem-
ent, “Library and University Press Integration: A New Vision for University Publishing” (Utah State University, 
DigitalCommons@USU, October 4, 2011), https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1103&am
p;context=lib_pubs.

 3. Clement, “Library and University Press Integration,” 5. 
 4. Clifford Lynch, “Imagining a University Press System to Support Scholarship in the Digital Age,” Journal 

of Electronic Publishing 13, no. 2 (November 8, 2010): 4, https://doi.org/10.3998/3336451.0013.207.
 5. Clement, “Library and University Press Integration.”
6. Margo Bargheer and Kizer Walker, “Library Publishing and the University Press in the United States and 

Germany: Lessons from Two Academic Contexts for Sustaining the Scholarly Book,” Bibliothek Forschung und 
Praxis 41, no. 3 (November 23, 2017): 291–307, https://doi.org/10.1515/bfp-2017-0037; Laura Brown, Rebecca Griffiths, 
and Matthew Rascoff, “Ithaka Report: University Publishing in a Digital Age,” July 26, 2007, https://sr.ithaka.
org/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/4.13.1.pdf.

7. Bargheer and Walker, “Library Publishing and the University Press in the United States and Germany”; 
Maria Bonn, “Publishing, Libraries, Publishers and Librarians,” Against the Grain 26, no. 6 (December 1, 2014), 
https://doi.org/10.7771/2380-176X.6945; Charles Watkinson, “From Collaboration to Integration: University 
Presses and Libraries,” in Getting the Word Out: Academic Libraries as Scholarly Publishers, eds. Maria Bonn and 
Mike Furlough (Chicago, IL: Association of College and Research Libraries, 2015), 83–112; Charles Watkinson, 
“Three Challenges of Pubrarianship,” Against the Grain 26, no. 6 (December 1, 2014), https://doi.org/10.7771/2380-
176X.6946; Carol Ann Davis, Wendy C. Robertson, and Charlene N. Simser, “Navigating the Political Waters 
of Open Access Publishing in Libraries,” Serials Librarian 74, no. 1/4 (January 2018): 194–200, https://doi.org/10.
1080/0361526X.2018.1428477; Yuan Li et al., “The Library-Press Partnership: An Overview and Two Case Stud-
ies,” Library Trends: Baltimore 67, no. 2 (fall 2018): 319–34, https://doi.org/10.1353/lib.2018.0039; Melanie Schlosser, 
“Building Capacity for Academy-Owned Publishing through the Library Publishing Coalition,” Library Trends: 
Baltimore 67, no. 2 (fall 2018): 359–75, https://doi.org/10.1353/lib.2018.0041.

8. Alexander, “Publisher-Library Relations”; Meredith Babb and Judith Russell, “Why Libraries and University 
Presses Should Support One Another,” Against the Grain 27, no. 6 (December 1, 2015), https://doi.org/10.7771/2380-
176X.7221; Bonn, “Publishing, Libraries, Publishers and Librarians”; Brown, Griffiths, and Rascoff, “Ithaka Re-
port: University Publishing in a Digital Age”; Monica McCormick, “Toward New-Model Scholarly Publishing: 
Uniting the Skills of Publishers and Libraries,” in Getting the Words Out: Academic Libraries as Scholarly Publishers, 
eds. Maria Bonn and Mike Furlough (Chicago, IL: Association of College and Research Libraries, 2015), 57–82.

9. “Press and Library: Collaboration Survey” (New York, NY: Association of American University Presses, 
2013), 3, https://wiki.lib.sun.ac.za/images/4/4e/LibraryPressCollaboration_report.pdf. 

10. Bonn, “Publishing, Libraries, Publishers and Librarians”; James G. Neal, “Symbiosis or Alienation,” Journal 
of Library Administration 35, no. 1/2 (December 10, 2001): 5–18, https://doi.org/10.1300/J111v35n01_02; Karl Janssen, 
“Libraries and the University Press: Partners in Scholarly Communication,” in Kansas Library Association College 
and University Libraries Section Proceedings 8, no. 1 (2018), https://doi.org/10.4148/2160-942X.1069.

11. Li et al., “The Library-Press Partnership”; Katina Strauch and Tom Gilson, “ATG Interviews Peter Berkery, 
Executive Director, AAUP,” Against the Grain 25, no. 2 (April 1, 2013), https://doi.org/10.7771/2380-176X.6479.

12. Raym Crow, “Campus-Based Publishing Partnerships: A Guide to Critical Issues” (SPARC, January 2009), 
www.chainbridgegroup.com/images/campus_pub_partnerships_v1.pdf.

13. Clement, “Library and University Press Integration,” 12. 
14. Clement, “Library and University Press Integration,” 13. 

https://doi.org/10.1002/leap.1044
https://doi.org/10.7771/2380-176X.2606
https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1103&context=lib_pubs
https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1103&context=lib_pubs
https://doi.org/10.3998/3336451.0013.207
https://doi.org/10.1515/bfp-2017-0037
https://sr.ithaka.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/4.13.1.pdf
https://sr.ithaka.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/4.13.1.pdf
https://doi.org/10.7771/2380-176X.6945
https://doi.org/10.7771/2380-176X.6946
https://doi.org/10.7771/2380-176X.6946
https://doi.org/10.1080/0361526X.2018.1428477
https://doi.org/10.1080/0361526X.2018.1428477
https://doi.org/10.1353/lib.2018.0039
https://doi.org/10.1353/lib.2018.0041
https://doi.org/10.7771/2380-176X.7221
https://doi.org/10.7771/2380-176X.7221
https://wiki.lib.sun.ac.za/images/4/4e/LibraryPressCollaboration_report.pdf
https://doi.org/10.1300/J111v35n01_02
https://doi.org/10.4148/2160-942X.1069
https://doi.org/10.7771/2380-176X.6479
http://www.chainbridgegroup.com/images/campus_pub_partnerships_v1.pdf


What Can “Marriage Announcements” Tell Us?     977

15. Watkinson, “From Collaboration to Integration,” 87.
16. Babb and Russell, “Why Libraries and University Presses Should Support One Another”; Li et al., “The 

Library-Press Partnership.”
17. Crow, “Campus-Based Publishing Partnerships”; Li et al., “The Library-Press Partnership”; Watkinson, 

“Why Marriage Matters”; Michael Spooner and Andrew Wesolek, “Content and Collaboration I: A Case Study 
of Bringing an Institutional Repository and a University Press Together,” Utah State University DigitalCommons@
USU (2013), https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/lib_pubs/119.

18. Clement, “Library and University Press Integration”; Clifford Lynch, “Imagining a University Press 
System to Support Scholarship in the Digital Age,” Journal of Electronic Publishing 13, no. 2 (November 8, 2010), 
https://doi.org/10.3998/3336451.0013.207; Crow, “Campus-Based Publishing Partnerships”; Spooner and Wesolek, 
“Content and Collaboration I”; Watkinson, “Why Marriage Matters.”

19. Mary Alice Ball, “Libraries and University Presses Can Collaborate to Improve Scholarly Communication 
or Why Can’t We All Just Get Along?” text, First Monday, ISSN 1396-0466 (Valauskas, Edward J., December 6, 
2004), 1996–2004, https://journals.uic.edu/ojs/index.php/fm/article/download/1196/1116?inline=1; Crow, “Campus-
Based Publishing Partnerships”; Li et al., “The Library-Press Partnership”; Watkinson, “Why Marriage Matters.”

20. Alexander, “Publisher-Library Relations”; Ball, “Libraries and University Presses Can Collaborate to 
Improve Scholarly Communication or Why Can’t We All Just Get Along?”; Clement, “Library and University 
Press Integration”; Crow, “Campus-Based Publishing Partnerships”; Li et al., “The Library-Press Partnership”; 
McCormick, “Toward New-Model Scholarly Publishing”; Spooner and Wesolek, “Content and Collaboration I.”

21. Ball, “Libraries and University Presses Can Collaborate to Improve Scholarly Communication or Why 
Can’t We All Just Get Along?”

22. Patrick Alexander, “The Ant, the University Press, and the Librarian,” Against the Grain 26, no. 6 (December 
1, 2014), https://doi.org/10.7771/2380-176X.6944.

23. McCormick, “Toward New-Model Scholarly Publishing.”
24. McCormick, “Toward New-Model Scholarly Publishing,” 80.
25. Alexander, “The Ant, the University Press, and the Librarian,” 16.
26. Watkinson, “Why Marriage Matters.”
27. Alexander, “Publisher-Library Relations”; Crow, “Campus-Based Publishing Partnerships”; Watkinson, 

“Why Marriage Matters.”
28. Alexander, “Publisher-Library Relations”; Clement, “Library and University Press Integration.”

https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/lib_pubs/119
https://doi.org/10.3998/3336451.0013.207
https://journals.uic.edu/ojs/index.php/fm/article/download/1196/1116?inline=1
https://doi.org/10.7771/2380-176X.6944

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