When I was at the SSP meeting in San Francisco this week, I ran into an old friend who is the director of a noted university press. We talked about several things in the business, but I got around to asking, "What's your rights picture? Do you have a pretty good handle on what you have?" His response was, "Yes, we really do. We have a great picture. From 1998, anyway."

I should note that when I shared this vignette with a friend at a very large trade publisher, the recognition was almost palpable through email, but yet with a fortitude-conveying, "We'll get there," response. (Indeed, various scenarios could drive the recapture of this historical rights data faster than others. But I digress.) I shall note this is not an uncommon scenario, and it leads into a bigger riff.

There's a lot of talk right now within universities about remaking scholarly communication, and with that, remaking the relationship between libraries and university presses (I've contributed to some of this, myself). But what's becoming obvious to me is that there is often a pretty serious disconnect between these two worlds; in fact, a potentially crippling one.

Certainly, if university presses could gain recognition within university administrations that they are handicapped in an open market and need economic subsidization as a core academic enterprise, they would be significantly healthier, and could afford more assertiveness in product development and differentiation. But this is the least of the misunderstandings.

As another press friend said, "Librarians think they can prepare content in xml, push a button, place it on a website, and declare themselves publishers." And while that is a simplication of what libraries are thinking, in that rests so much of our common problem.

Because, first, truly, that can be a lot of what there is to publishing. But it is a very different kind of publishing than publishers have been involved with. Not necessarily better or worse, but very, very different. As we enter a world of mixed and interactive media, push-button publishing may be more like what some publishing will be. Not all, and I think not ever, all. And even in the most panglossian visions of e-publishing, you are still on the hook for the most important things that publishing has always been about: nurturing a work, building community, creating buzz, starting conversations. And the more I think about these central aspects of publishing - the social aspects of publishing - I am not at all convinced that librarians, despite their technical whiz with text/xml, have got even a basic clue about what these things mean. Building great, nifty mixed media products doesn't build viral marketing; doesn't find readers; doesn't build an audience; and doesn't find revenue.

In short, I am coming to the conclusion that librarians are likely to be lousy publishers.

But the most important thing to me about this recent spate of conversations is that libraries so utterly and completely miss what it means to publish what publishers have been publishing for the past several hundred years - longer form articles and manuscripts. The publishing work flow is intense: it requires significant hand- and thought-work. Editors don't sit around at their desks waiting for pretty, tightly-formed, well-argued drafts to come floating by. There is a lot of work in finding, attracting, grooming talent; encouraging the actual writing; producing coherent drafts; editing; presentation; administration; rights; marketing; and distribution. Some of these things are made easier by Web 2.0 and social computing, but in most cases, the workload has only increased, at least in the short term. For example, as a publisher, I have to now build buzz on-line as well as through my sales reps. Not only am I required to send the author traveling around 50 cities and 220 bookstores, but I will likely need to provide him or her a blog as well. Convince them to write more than "Hello, I have a blog," and to engage their fans in MySpace. And a core piece of publishing -- making sure what goes out to the world is literate and persuasive -- is always going to be hard work.

We're just not that smart, humans; it is really difficult to communicate with each other. Not everything is going to be improved by being processed through a collaborative, social mill. The best things are always going to take somebody's care, and love.

What librarians are missing is that all the talk of reinventing scholarly communication does almost nothing to actually help publishers publish. It doesn't alleviate the suffering; it creates an added distraction. It doesn't suddenly reinvent the economics of publishing or equip publishers with brand new staffs perfectly attuned to networked information after years of practice with their facebook profiles. Libraries are somewhat akin to Medieval physicians administering tonics to eliminate fever while instructing their patients to avoid approaching bodies of water at the time of full moons and teaching them how to make curative herbal teas.

I think anyone who has heard me talk, or reads anything I have written, knows how excited I am about some of the possibilities for building new forms of communication - for building new community - that our maturing understanding of network technologies is bringing us. But we have to appreciate the work that we are doing now, as publishers, as a society, and to bring these values together in a way that respects the best of what has been, and what could be. If either of these sets of institutions are to participate in a solution - libraries and presses - it will require serious, long-term, fundamental re-invention of their essence. There's pain there; it won't be avoided. And we're not there yet.

But we'll get there.