Changes in budget and technology will force the definition of an academic library to evolve, predicts the Association of College and Research Libraries.
Budget challenges, digitization, the growth of mobile Internet devices, and increased collaboration rank among the top 10 library trends of 2010, according to the June edition of the association’s review, College & Research Libraries News.
The report, released last week, projects that libraries will continue expanding their virtual resources. Libraries will move more collections online and get more deeply involved in social networks and course-management systems, it says.
In turn, the report says, physical library buildings will be redesigned as student workspaces. Some libraries have already begun the process, devoting space to academic support services such as writing and media centers.
In the face of budget cuts and increased accountability, academic libraries will be required to prove their value, the association says.
“It is increasingly important to demonstrate the library’s impact on student learning outcomes, student engagement, student recruitment and retention, successful grant applications, and faculty research productivity,” the report says.
2 Responses to Academic Libraries Must Keep Redefining Themselves
ambouche - June 23, 2010 at 4:22 am
Carry the logic of this out into the real world of the “teaching” institution, and what do you get? A library like ours–on a campus of the state university of Florida–which has a beautiful building, lots of computer stations, plenty of tables and carrels, a coffee shop–and almost no quality scholarly resources, at least in the humanities. Now that so much of the world’s serious, current scholarly output (journal articles, databases) is controlled by a few large companies and made available only at vast cost, most smaller institutions can’t afford them at all. Our electronic resources feature mainly those that are free or cheap. No wonder: the entire annual budget for books, serials and electronic resources allocated for my department(visual arts and art history) is about $2500 a year, and the other Humanities departments on campus are in the same boat. We can’t even afford JSTOR, beyond the introductory “starter” module. The fantasy that electronic access would democratize scholarship has fallen away; quality electronic resources are staggeringly expensive, and only those who are lucky enough to be affiliated with the richest institutions have access to them. These changes to the way libraries do business will only exacerbate the already severe and growing inequities between the rich and well-supplied “research” institutions and the poor, marginalized “teaching” ones. No wonder our students believe that “research” means surfing the Web; they have no experience of real research tools and materials, and no opportunity to acquire any. No wonder that they think a library is a building, a study hall, a comfy hangout… anything but a repository and source of stored knowledge.
jffoster - June 23, 2010 at 8:02 am
This line in the post original, “In turn, the report says, physical library buildings will be redesigned as student workspaces.” is interesting when taken together with this one from M. Ambouche in (1):”These changes to the way libraries do business will only exacerbate the already severe and growing inequities between the rich and well-supplied “research” institutions and the poor, marginalized “teaching” ones. …”Things are looking up. Good training for “students” who will mostly, if lucky, have cubicle jobs in which each particular worker need not know very much. The prudent ones will elect Hindi for their foreign language requirement, although grown up English is a foreign language to many of them.