Envisioning Future Academic Library Services; Initiatives, Ideas and Challenges

Citation

Moore Sievers‐Hill, A. (2011), "Envisioning Future Academic Library Services; Initiatives, Ideas and Challenges", New Library World, Vol. 112 No. 3/4, pp. 188-189. https://doi.org/10.1108/03074801111117096

This is an extremely good and highly relevant book for academic librarians. All chapters relate to pressures and challenges facing academic libraries and librarians today. It is an edited collection of chapters written for the book and, although the authors and specific examples are British, it is just as useful for North American librarians. Just about everything from chapters on libraries as places to Web 2.0 as it relates to libraries are timely and pertinent to all of us who toil in the fields of academic libraries.

The first chapter after the introduction, is one of the most thoughtful things I have read lately on many of the ideas important to librarians. One of the key points is that many of our concerns are not important to anyone else. It is entitled “Waiting for the Barbarians”: written by Derek Law. It basically says that we must change our working lives and our whole outlook, or be left in the dust. This is something that is becoming more so every day. The generational change that has occurred is different and more complete than in the past.

These may be common terms or concepts to everyone, but to me the whole idea of the younger generation being digital natives, and those older people who date from pre digital time as digital immigrants is new. The idea of aliteracy, referred to as such, is also new to me. It is the replacement of the written text with pictures. He writes about the change in content and its use itself, stating that digital natives generally want instant results extremely quickly; instant gratification. They like choices, but convenience trumps quality. This chapter covers the big picture of academic libraries today very well.

A related chapter is “The Delete Generation: How Citizen‐created Content is Transforming Libraries” by Penny Caranby. It builds on the first chapter. She alludes to a once‐in‐a‐generation paradigm shift, specifically the impact of citizen created content. Other chapters on knowledge management and Web 2.0 are well written, and thought provoking and relate to the central theme very well, having to do with initiatives, ideas and challenges to libraries now and in the future.

A chapter that many can probably relate to and find helpful is entitled “Libraries as Places: Challenges for the Future” by Andrew McDonald. It lays out some basic principles which people think they know, but which are often not followed in planning and creating a new library or library space. Like much of this book, the main points are easy to pull out of the text. In this case the new library space needs to be adaptable, accessible, functional and varied, meaning having different ways in it for students to research and interact. The hybrid library, that is one that provides access to both traditional and electronic resources, will have more space devoted to information skills training and technical support than traditional resources. This is already true.

One chapter in the book traces the history of various digital library services. “Loosely Joined: the Discovery and Consumption of Scholarly Content in the Digital Era” by Paul Coyne is a chapter which compares some of the hypothetical assumptions about libraries and how they have played out. A chapter on “The Leadership of the Future”, by Liz Wright, while applicable to libraries, is relevant to organizations of all kinds.

A chapter “Web 2.0: Redefining and Extending the Service Commitment of the Academic Library” is written by James G. Neal and Damon E. Jaggers. James G. Neal is Vice President for Information Services and University Librarian at Columbia University and Damon F. Jaggers is Associate University Librarian for Collections and Services at the Columbia University Libraries. James Neal is well known in academic librarianship and highly respected in the USA. The chapter focuses on the impact of Web 2.0 as a change agent, forcing libraries to rethink core responsibilities and the use non‐library tools in the academic library.

The book content is excellent, but as a whole suffers from the fact that books of compiled chapters written by different people doing different things in the content and writing style of their chapters, often is not cohesive. There is a disjointed quality to the work, even though most of the chapters are quite good. At the end of the day though, the book is a fine addition to the ever‐increasing literature on the subject of where academic libraries are or should be going.