Academic Library futures (redux)

I am working on a paper for CLIR that speculates (briefly) on the future of academic libraries. It will form one part of a six-paper presentation for them that aims to stimulate discussion. This has me examining many of the assumptions we make about these libraries and it is obvious many people are thinking similarly. I was pointed towards the Taiga Forum who issued in 2006 a set of ‘provocative statements’ about the future of academic libraries (no longer accessible from their site), and provocative they are e.g., that within five years (i.e., by 2011) we shall witness the following:

– a 50% reduction in the physical size of collections in libraries
– the merger of academic computing and libraries
– no more librarians as we know them (and the new average age to be 28!)
– no more library web sites as we know them (can you resist saying “thank goodness”? Clearly I can’t)

Given that most academic libraries are in universities, I would not get too concerned at the pace of change but the ideas are certainly intriguing. I tend to view libraries more through the lens of socio-technical theory, which makes me view the ongoing shifts as an essential tension between technological advances and social forces that pull, mould, shape and modify these advances in multiple directions at the same time. Given the law of unintended consequences that applies to all new technologies, prediction is a bit of a mug’s game but we can be sure that the basic human drives and interests won’t shift radically in the short term. The purpose of that information space we term ‘academic library’ is not questioned as much as revealed by this tension; the view of libraries as central storehouses of approved documents is already overshadowed by the library as research space and technology hub, though one might not recognize this so easily in the curriculum. But repositorial concerns are born anew in the digital era of resource aggregation and distributed research work. No, it’s not old wine in new bottles, as the cynics would have us believe; there are genuinely new problems for which we have some limited guides from historical practices, but the challenges ahead are great. It seems the people who bemoan these changes and who seek to maintain the academic library as it was, are the people who usually don’t use one for research.

One last provocative statement from Tiaga: “all information discovery (by 2011) will begin at Google, including discovery of library resources”. Must have sounded radical last year, it’s probably true enough by now.

Thoughts?

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