Research/Learning
Libraries are not ends in themselves but support the goals of their communities. Research and learning behaviors drive academic library change.
University Futures are shaping Library Futures
Libraries are not ends in themselves, but serve the interests of the organizations of which they are a part. As university emphasis varies around research, education and career poles, we can expect to see libraries evolve to support those emphases more strongly.
The university's curatorial role
I made a note in these pages a couple of years ago about the University of Edinburgh’s mission statement. The University’s mission is the creation, dissemination and curation of knowledge. The occasion was Chris Rusbridge’s justified pleasure at seeing the mission changed to include
Using Wikipedia
We still don’t appear to know what to make of Wikipedia. Consider these two cases. First, Edward Glaeser includes a reference to Wikipedia in the acknowledgements to his new book, Triumph of the city. Following common practices, Wikipedia is not listed in the bibliography or citations, because any
The library network and the scholarly record
The library community is a highly interconnected one. Networks are motivated both by library mission and effective management of resources. This trend will accelerate as the Internet favors shared services, and libraries will see more benefit in building such shared services. The Hathi Trust is an important example. The growth
Managing down collections ...
I was interested to read this from Karen Schneider a while ago: “Centralized mass storage for legacy print materials (paper-based books and journals) is by far the most under-observed trend in libraries today”. I agree, with the friendly qualification that the trend is about managing the relationship between
Evolving research life ...
I was interviewed for the British Library’s Growing Knowledge: the evolution of research exhibition, which opened last week. I have not seen the physical installation yet but there is an online presence. See the gallery of digital research initiatives they showcase, for example, or the network research tools.
The infrastructure is getting thicker ..
Andy Powell has a nice post on general trends in educational use of networking. The context is a reflection on the future of federated access management but the points he makes are more generally interesting. He talks about the economic situation, outsourcing to the cloud and shared services, the varieties
Library literature again ...
Two interventions First a mention of two recent articles …. Rick Anderson has a very nice piece in Educause Review about budgets, libraries and scholarly publishers. It is an interesting reflection on systemic change, always difficult to manage as it involves reconsidering why things are done as well as how
