Am just back from a very interesting workshop at CLIR where a group of about 20 people discussed the future of academic libraries, launching the discussion with a set of prepared essays from eight of us. Too much was discussed across the day to cover here, and there will be a summary of the event produced by CLIR, but here’s some of what I took away:
1) All academic libraries are facing tremendous change and there is concern with the role and mission of such entities in a world where the myths of everything being available on the web drive the understandings of university administrations and students.
2) While everything will likely be digitized in a decade or so, the provision and preservation of high quality curated collections remains a great unknown. The question of controlling the preserved collection (in house or outsourced?) was thought to be crucial to ensuring longevity of access and quality.
3) The staff needed for the transformations and challenges ahead are not likely to be supplied by typical ALA-accredited programs — indeed a show of hands among the library directors in attendance suggested that none thought the accreditated degree mattered when seeking intelligent and able employees for academic libraries.
4) The Library as Laboratory metaphor was used to convey how academic libraries might better fit with the mission of the 21st century university. This points to the library partnering with faculty and academic computing on experimental projects aimed at delivering cutting-edge services to the academic community. Yes, the term ‘libratory’ was coined (mea culpa, but I could not resist).
5) Better determining the boundaries and possibilities of relationships with the commercial sector (this was a contentious one)
6) The need for collective action (more than collaboration) was deemed vital, meaning that several leading academic libraries would need to find constructive ways of working serioulsy together on more than isolated projects to advance the concerns of academic libraries going forward.
7) Libraries are caught up too much in concerns with products when they should be concerned with processes. For example, there is the danger that emphases on repositories will result in a new emphasis on this as a ‘collection’ instead of on the act of curating digital resources into the future. Our own discussions of the process often seemed to end up with products, emphasizing the difficulties we all face in breaking out of this track.
There was much more and Chuck Henry and colleagues are to be congratulated on facilitating this event. I learned a lot but was also delighted to find so many like-minded people seeing the same problems and opportunities. More to follow, surely.
the full papers can be found at: http://www.clir.org/activities/registration/08R21.html