Harvard gets it right

I'm sure many people saw the article "At Harvard, a Proposal to Publish Free on The Web" from the New York Times. What I found particularly interesting was the idea that the division responsible for managing and granting access to all these faculty (and maybe student) publications was the library.

I've been thinking this for years now, thanks to Library 2.0 and Stephen Abram. Libraries across the board should be proactive and solicit information such as reports and papers from their communities. By assembling websites where such information is assembled, scholars and interested people would know where to go - they would look to the library to be the source of the latest publications. In that way, libraries would be the equivalent of a scholarly Craigslist.

I wonder if any of the librarians at Harvard thought of this. :)