Academic Libraries in the Information Society

The way that higher education library services are viewed, planned and managed must change radically if they are to survive and thrive in the future. Advances in technology, economic and political pressures, and socio‐demographic factors have combined to create an environment posing unprecedented challenges and opportunities. The Joint Funding Councils′ Libraries Review has highlighted the need for stronger management and more confident involvement in institutional planning and organizational change. Electronic communication will transform service provision, with significant shifts towards distributed networked services, empowering the end‐user and offering new roles and responsibilities to information intermediaries. Effective communication between library, computing and academic staff will be essential to ensure relevant and responsive services. New resource models will be required to take account of diverse customer needs and different modes of delivery. Organizational structures and management styles must change to meet future needs and human resource development must be given higher priority. Bold leadership will enable libraries to enhance their strategic role and respond positively to environmental change. The Virtual Librarian The role of the University librarian had changed. Once it had been a stock character part, the very image of scholarly exactitude, ever open to trade influence for tradition, a relic of the institution′s past and uninvolved with its future. Now, the reformists′ cry of “access not holdings” had worked right through the information chain. Publishers had abandoned their warehouses – they too could adopt just‐in‐time management: their role was now in packaging, marketing and brokering. The actual storage of knowledge – the articles, texts, interactive experiences – had been passed back to its creators in universities and elsewhere, to be retrieved, reformatted into the house style, and delivered to whoever ordered it. So the Library had gradually picked up both ends of the chain: managing the University′s backlist and negotiating its sale and delivery worldwide. At the same time it worked with academic staff in a more traditional function to identify and garner good material from the ends of the earth – and within budget...The University Librarian was now an equal seeker after R&D money, and his staff′s job security depended not on a never‐ reducing cataloguing backlog but on good project control with results on time [1]. The above scenario, taken from sketches produced by the Information Technology subgroup of the Joint Funding Councils′ Libraries Review Group [1] anticipates the changes and challenges facing academic libraries today. The Report of the Review Group, chaired by Professor Sir Brian Follett, predicts fundamental change, but argues that it “will take place gradually, and will need to be managed in conjunction with handling traditional library resources”. However, the Follett report leaves us in no doubt that the way higher education library services are viewed, planned and managed must change radically if they are to survive and thrive into the next century, and that urgent action is needed to counter the environmental forces currently threatening their future. The challenge for library managers surely lies in judging the pace of change, striking the right balance and managing the inherent tension between tradition and transformation. Follett Accepted version New Library World, 96 (3), 35-42. 2 also points out that such progress will be critically dependent on effective staff development and deployment, and the related report by the John Fielden Consultancy confirms the need for significant improvement in human resource management in academic libraries [2]. Environmental Trends and Developments The current pressures and issues affecting library and information services in all sectors are well known and have been documented in numerous articles and reports over the past decade. Of particular relevance in the context of academic and research libraries are the analyses offered by the Follett and Fielden reports, together with the working papers of the IT sub‐group [3] and two other seminal reports which also advanced the view that electronic publishing will transform scholarly communication, not only in science, technology and medicine, but also in the humanities [4, 5]. Technology and economics tend to be seen as the dominant forces driving us towards a world of relentless pressure to do more with less, but political and socio‐ demographic issues are also having a significant impact on service provision. These factors have been evident for a long time, but the cumulative effect of their combined impact has recently prompted closer scrutiny by government and other funding bodies, as reflected by the Follett review, the comparable review of public libraries initiated by the Department for National Heritage, and ongoing requirements for special libraries to justify their existence to their paymasters. The key trends are common to all types of libraries, but there have been particular developments in higher education over the last decade which have presented additional problems. Technology advances Advances in information and communication technologies have introduced new options for service delivery – notably for self‐service and remote access – and raised the expectations of funding bodies and library customers. Significant areas include: • local and wide area networking; • electronic publishing, including multimedia; • office automation and personal productivity tools; • new “third generation” library housekeeping systems; • mass markets for electronic information products and services. Local and metropolitan area networks linked to national and international networks offer end‐ users fast online access to information resources from their offices (or homes) including current awareness and document supply via new commercial services, with a choice of delivery modes and payment methods as an alternative to traditional library sources; the progressive expansion and enhancement of SuperJANET (the UK academic network) will also facilitate interlibrary co‐ operation. The proliferation of electronic information products and services in a multiplicity of formats has made the evaluation and selection of material a more complex business, and also poses questions about the identification and long‐term storage of definitive versions of publications. Word‐processing, spreadsheets, graphics and desk‐top publishing packages have become standard office tools allowing improvements in the efficiency and effectiveness of day‐ to‐day administrative and managerial tasks. The new generation of Unix‐based library housekeeping systems running on industry‐standard hardware are cheaper to maintain, requiring less staff effort, and offer lots of useful features – such as customized screens, down‐ Accepted version New Library World, 96 (3), 35-42. 3 loading of scanned data, more sophisticated searching, tailored management information reports, and easier links to other internal and external systems and databases. Finally, the growth in CD‐ROMs and other electronic products aimed at the consumer market together with mass media interest in the Internet is raising awareness among the general public of the capabilities of information systems which can be expected to stimulate demand among both existing and new customers.