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Tight budgets and competition spur increased creativity
Transitions in the way information is produced, disseminated, and accessed provide valuable opportunities for academic libraries to emerge as even more central and vibrant resources for the academy. Libraries have long helped their colleges and universities adopt digital technologies, but the information explosion has changed expectations about the creation and use of knowledge. As libraries increasingly provide seamless access to content through licensing agreements for databases, journal articles, and other e-resources, they have become increasingly transparent to users. Academic librarians seek to redefine and reaffirm their roles by asserting themselves more actively and seeking out new partnerships.
According to the “Power of Personal Persuasion Toolkit,” written in 2006 by Julie Todaro, president of the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL), a division of the ALA, academic libraries play a major role in the new higher education environment. They are extending their reach through strategic partnerships, collaborative relationships, and creative alliances. These activities update the image of libraries, share their expertise, and promote their services. Twenty-first century changes in higher education environments are prompting librarians to rethink their vision, mission, and institutional role, restructure their image, reposition themselves within the higher education environment, and redistribute some expertise and energy.
Library size: A matter of degree
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Public and academic libraries have been getting larger, multiplying in square footage in both new buildings and renovations, but size ranking is based mainly on number of volumes held. Here, in those terms, are the 10 largest U.S. libraries — eight of which are academic libraries:
1. Library of Congress______________ 32,124,001
2. Harvard University _____________ 15,826,570
3. Boston Public Library____________ 15,686,902
4. Yale University ________________ 12,368,757
5. U. of Illinois/Urbana-Champaign 10,524,935
6. Univ. of California/Berkeley ____ 10,094,417
7. Columbia University ____________ 9,455,312
8. Univ. of Texas/Austin____________ 9,022,363
9. Univ. of Michigan ______________ 8,273,050
10. Stanford University _____________ 8,200,000
The toolkit, available on line, reports that academic and research libraries are:
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Expanding their roles of support for students, faculty, and staff and assuming a role of assistance and support in partnerships and collaborations and in internal and external institutional enterprise activities.
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Expanding their role, and the marketing of their role, in providing critical general education, specialized instruction, and workforce education, their service and expertise in research support, and their role as discipline/department liaisons.
Another essay, published in February 2007 from a roundtable convened by the ACRL in Chicago in November 2006 (also available on line), explains the need for libraries and librarians to reposition themselves to meet the rapidly evolving needs of the academy “in visionary ways. . . . A defining element of this moment is the capacity for academic and research libraries to accelerate their own transformation through collaborative action.” To meet the challenges identified in the essay, academic and research libraries will have to adopt a “reconfigured portfolio” that will aim to:
Creating student-centered learning environments
The face of the academic library is evolving to accommodate the new ways in which students learn and conduct research. Many academic libraries are dramatically renovating space to include leisure study space, restaurant and refreshment spaces, active learning, low- and high-tech centers, and learning commons, such as the one created by McMaster University, in Hamilton, Ontario, a 2008 winner of the ACRL Excellence in Academic Libraries Award.
Creating bilingual online learning environments
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The Hostos Community College, City University of New York, library staff partnered with faculty to develop new curricular design and revitalization through the development of new courses designed to teach information literacy, critical thinking, and computer literacy and also by creating bilingual student-focused environments, both face-to-face and on line.
McMaster took a drab and outdated reading room with none of the hi-tech functionality required by library users today and transformed it into the Mills Learning Commons, an active, student-centered learning space. About 7,000 square feet of library space was renovated, resulting in open ergonomic computing spaces, lounge spaces with soft seating (chosen by students via a “vote with your seat” contest), collaborative study rooms, bookable consultation rooms, and new spaces for academic skills counseling, services to students with disabilities, and expert IT help. Also added were 170 state-of-the-art computers, full wireless access, new printers and scanners, productivity software, and special software for students with disabilities.
Resources for building academic and research libraries and renovating spaces can be found on line at: http://wikis.ala.org/acrl/index.php/ACRL/LAMA_Guide_for_Architects
The ACRL, through its dynamic strategic plan, is committed to assessment opportunities that include the need to recruit people into the profession and retain them. Resources to help with this are available at http://wikis.ala.org/acrl/index.php/RandR. The ACRL also conducted an “environmental scan” in the spring of 2006 to identify the major assumptions shaping the practice of academic librarianship and to identify emergent issues of concern to the profession. Based on the results of that survey, the ACRL Research Committee identified the “Top Ten Assumptions for the Future of Academic Libraries and Librarians” and a number of emergent issues of concern to the profession; these included digitization, the evolving skill sets needed by librarians, increased access to library resources and services, questions concerning intellectual property, and issues related to the evolution of information technology. The full report is available on the ACRL Web site.
Emerging issues for academic libraries
• The profession must foster broader collaboration among academic, public, special, and school librarians on topics such as public engagement and media literacy.
• Pressure to make library facilities environmentally friendly will increase.
• Library facilities and services will become increasingly integrated with research, teaching, and learning programs across campus.
• Print materials will be moved off-site; library space will be redesigned to support collaborative learning, new modes of research support, and interactive learning areas.
• Budget tensions grow regarding when to buy standardized digital collections and when to preserve and provide access to unique collections held by the library.
• Library patrons will use semantic Web search techniques to find information resources.
• Need to support e-science and e-scholarship in the social sciences and the humanities will increase and require new approaches to the design and delivery of core library services.
• Collaboration between academic libraries and university publication programs will increase as their roles become increasingly complementary.
• Interdisciplinary studies, new models of undergraduate and graduate education, and newly developed areas of inquiry will stretch library resources and service models.
• The tools and techniques of social computing will provide new opportunities for the design and delivery of library resources and services, but will also make increasing demands on library staff and systems.
Academic libraries support institutional outcomes and positively impact learning
Elizabeth M. Mezick, an accounting professor at Long Island University, finds in “Return on Investment: Libraries and Student Retention” (The Journal of Academic Librarianship, September 2007) that library expenditures and professional staff have a significant positive effect on student retention. Mezick also finds that the relationship between expenditures on resources and retention is greatest at baccalaureate colleges, while the relationship between expenditures on staff and retention is greatest at doctoral-granting institutions.
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