Essay from ACRL - Changing Roles of Academic and Research Libraries

ACRL has released a report highlighting the changes academic libraries in particular are experiencing due to the changes in the information marketplace and is the result from a meeting held late last year.

“This essay derives from a Roundtable on Technology and Change in Academic Libraries, convened by the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) on November 2-3, 2006 in Chicago.”

This essay offers a lot of practical insight into the changes that are happening all around  us due to the exponential growth starting with the development of the web, just a little over fifteen, short years ago. It has come to the point that it is no longer feasible for libraries to continue their traditional role as gatekeeper.

“At the same time, however, traditional structures of authority and qualitative certification, which the library embedded both in its own collection and in the scholarly apparatus it supported, have been engulfed in a flood of information from multiple sources, disseminated primarily in digital form, and retrievable by means that the library, and hence the academy, no longer control.”

Have libraries been supplanted by the web? Many of the younger librarians I know regularly visit Wikipedia and are addicted to Google when it comes to locating and consuming content. I think the following paragraph needs to be thoughtfully considered throughout the academic library community as many users are considering their libraries irrelevant to their work.

“Among young people in particular, however, there is a tendency to consider the library as primarily the domain of the book; fewer now regard the library as either a primary source of information or as a means to discover and access knowledge that exists beyond its own physical collection. The recent OCLC report, College Students’ Perceptions of Libraries and Information Resources, indicates that most undergraduates either do not visit their campus library or do so only one or two times per year. Librarians and faculty members alike complain that young people too often conceive the research process as beginning and ending with an Internet search. Several have observed that it takes only one dissatisfying experience with a library to solidify a student’s conviction that the Internet provides more efficient, productive, and enjoyable paths to information.”

These  are just my initial thoughts and I’ll post more as I am continuing to digest the essay.  What are your thoughts?

http://www.ala.org/ala/acrl/acrlissues/future/changingroles.htm

March 21, 2007 | Filed Under Libraries 

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