Libraries are the Future
Libraries are the Future, or that is the implication of the the new JISC initiative - Libraries of the Future. The initiative was trumpeted at the JISC 2008 Conference in Birmingham last week, which I commented about previously. There was some good stuff that came out of the conference, not least this. Checking out the Libraries of the Future site you get this overview of where they are coming from.
In an information world in which Google apparently offers us everything, what place is there for the traditional, and even the digital, library? In a library environment which is increasingly moving to the delivery of online rather than print resources, what of the academic library’s traditional place at the heart of campus life?
What about the impact of repositories and open access on the delivery of library resources? And the need to digitise and make more widely accessible key scholarly resources? And what of the calls for libraries to play a central role in the promotion of ‘information literacy’?
Through ‘Libraries of the Future’, JISC is hoping to explore these and many other questions, to open up - with partner organisations and librarians themselves - a debate about the future of the academic and research library.
To coincide with the launch, yesterday’s Guardian contains an eight page supplement Libraries unleashed, produced in association with JISC. The print version has lots of nice pictures in addition to all the text in the online version.
Lots of good reading in here, not just about technology, the articles on buildings and spaces are interesting as well. One particular paragraph caught my eye, quoting Dr Ian Rowlands from the Centre for Information Behaviour and the Evaluation of Research (Ciber), in Wendy Wallace’s article Information Alert.
"There is a clear message that young people have not been taught to construct a proper search and evaluate the results. Libraries are spending a fortune on premium content, but fundamental skills are lacking."
Surely we should be investing in the development of the discovery and delivery tools for this premium content, so that you don’t need training to use it. If you need to train users to use your system, you have probably failed the usability test.
The Libraries are the future theme is something I picked up on whilst at the JISC 2008 conference. I get the feeling that the drift away from libraries providing and guiding access to information that serves the scholar and the researcher - Learning Management Systems/eLearning, archives, repositories etc., being set up and run away from the library - may well start to be reversed as folks realise the need for information management and librarian skills in these areas.
