Building the library of the future
The array of forces that impact upon the
library’s operating environment makes any modelling of transformation during
the coming years an almost impossible task. The political and economic forces
that drive the functions and finances of parent institutions, the imperative
for commercial publishers to meet investor’s demands for earnings per share
growth, technological advances from Silicon Valley and beyond, are all part of
the world in which the library will have to flourish.
What we can do, however, is look at trends
and consider how best to take advantage of these to develop a library that is
positioned for success tomorrow. A glance at the world of the academic library
in 2017 reveals a few key themes that are conditioning professional practice,
resource allocation, and investment priorities. These include the creation of
advanced learning environments for students, an increasing move towards a
global, distributed collection of information resources, the deployment of
tools and technologies required to curate the evolving scholarly record, and a
growing expectation of both domain and methodological expertise among recruits
to the library profession.
Against this backdrop, in its strategic plan
to 2025, Carnegie Mellon University announced its intention to create a 21st
century library that serves as a cornerstone of world-class research and
scholarship. While a large part of our vision is built upon a large-scale shift
to digital forms of content, and web-based services, we are certain that the
library will remain a vital presence on campus.
We see a need to celebrate an enduring sense
of ‘libraryness’ – an environment and culture that supports scholarship and
provides access to professional librarians in interactive research and study
environments.
It is our view that the abundance of
scholarly content in digital form brings a degree of complexity that will only
increase demand for expertise in information discovery and organisation.
We set out four key themes:
- Develop information specialists as partners in research, teaching, and learning;
- Collaborate with peer institutions to provide co-ordinated access to a global collection of information resources;
- Steward the evolving scholarly record, and champion new forms of scholarly communication; and
- Be recognised globally as a leader in the development of the scholarly information ecosystem.
To understand the world in which these themes
will unfold, we need to reflect upon some of the trends evident in today’s
library. These are neither exhaustive, nor are they mutually exclusive: I make
this point to highlight the complex world of the contemporary research
environment.
21st-century library spaces for 21st-century
learners
Today, many universities are building new, or
remodelling old, libraries to meet demands for serious space – learning
environments that support interactions with information in a variety of forms.
The design of the contemporary library draws heavily upon the space
reallocation made possible by advanced storage retrieval systems (bookBots) and
the transfer to offsite storage of lesser-used collections, freeing up space to
meet student demand. While today’s libraries are busier than ever, few students
make extensive use of traditional offerings such as lending collections and
reference services.
Libraries will continue to be recognised as a
place of research and learning for the entire university community, at the
heart of the campus-based experience. They will provide an array of spaces to
meet a variety of learning needs: individual and group study, collaboration and
fabrication spaces, active learning studios, and an array of specialist
learning technologies. As access to the contemporary scholarly record in
digital form becomes universal, libraries will create specialised facilities
for the special collections and archives which distin guish most clearly one
library from another. On many campuses, libraries will also serve as an
academic commons, providing an opportunity for faculty and students to interact
across disciplinary boundaries, and in a space that reflects the diversity of
the university community.
Access to a global collection of information
resources
Today’s library collections remain distinctly
hybrid: a blend of print collections acquired over many years, coupled with
digital collections purchased or licensed from commercial publishers and
learned societies. Institutional and disciplinary repositories have been in
operation for more than a decade and are, increasingly, being joined by data
repositories as important parts of the scholarly information system. Open
access publishers such as PLoS have led the way in building complex and
interactive articles, which are presented alongside data, executable content,
and other artefacts of the research process.
We are almost at the point where all
scholarly information exists in digital form, and open access to books and
journal articles will transform scholarly publishing models. The need to build
and own library collections ‘just in case’ will be overtaken by a network login
model. Such a model will operate across a vast array of content, including the
huge resource of digitised archives and special collections developed by the
academy over the past 20 years, and large-scale collections presented by Google
and others. Scholarly content will be discoverable through robust search
facilities, and delivered through shared, licensed collections.
The evolving scholarly record
Until the late 1990s, researchers built their
information workflows around the library, where both the research record and
current content were provided in printed form. In today’s digital world,
researchers’ access to information takes place outside the library, and to
remain a vital part of scholarship, libraries must develop their services
around the researchers’ workflow.
We increasingly recognise the importance of
going beyond our role as information providers and into an environment where we
provide services and expertise in all information aspects of the research
process. This includes the creation and operation of campus research
information systems, using proprietary services such as Symplectic Elements,
which allow easy curation and re-use of a scholar’s publications record, and
indicators of the impact of their work from citation and altmetric databases.
We are also offering support in the curation
and showcasing of outputs from the research process. Institutional repositories
are being augmented by data and software curation services such as Figshare, helping
researchers meet the growing open access requirements of their funders and
their institutions.
In the near future, the print-centric
scholarly record will have shifted to a complex series of digital and networked
objects. Data, computer models, lab notebooks, blogs, community review and
discussion, interactive and executable content will all form the record of
scholarship alongside articles and monographs. Library services will be
developed to capture, preserve, and share this record, promoting re-use and
curation. Research funder needs will be assessed and managed, for example
through the creation of data management plans.
I’m often surprised when people tell me they
think the internet put librarians out of business. In reality, our
expertise is in even greater demand than it was in the print world, although
the skills and domain knowledge have become more complex.
Our colleagues will be recognised as
information specialists closely integrated with the academic communities they
serve. They will bring expertise in information activities to all aspects of
the research process including grant applications, data management planning,
measuring and improving research impact, publishing and information discovery,
storage, and re-use. They will also be key partners in learning and teaching,
building digital learning objects, developing digital literacy skills, and
preparing students for careers in the knowledge professions.
At Carnegie Mellon University we appreciate
our good fortune in creating our library of the future in a university that is
home to one of the world’s leading schools of computer science, with a machine
learning department specialising in fields such as advanced data manipulation
and the development of algorithms to improve search, discovery and retrieval.
We see their research interests aligning closely with some of the major
challenges of information use in a digital world. For example, how do we best
replicate serendipity in a massive-scale digital library? How do we help a
researcher sift and understand the key content, when in some fields it is
impossible for experts to keep up to date with the volume of core literature
being published each year? How do we help a student identify the most relevant
material scattered across commercial publishers’ sites, university
repositories, in print collections and in the open web?
We anticipate an ambitious research agenda to
investigate these and other facets of the library of the 21st century. A
century ago, Andrew Carnegie created and defined the library of the 20th
century. Our ambition is that the university which bears his name will define
the library for the next 100 years.
Source | https://www.researchinformation.info
Regards
Pralhad
Jadhav
Senior
Manager @ Knowledge Repository
Khaitan & Co
Upcoming Event | MANLIBNET 17th Annual
International Conference on 15-16 September 2017 at Jaipuria, Noida, India
