Academic and Research Libraries 20/20 Vision

Joint ARCoM/InfoSci event
26th September 2007

I was a part of the organising committee for 'Academic and Research Libraries 20/20 Vision', the joint ARCoM/InfoSci event, held for an afternoon at the Noel Stockdale room at Flinders.

The event ran very well, with about 50 of us in attendance. We got into a zone of thinking about future trends and emerging technologies that will shape our library and information industry, with guestimates for the year 2020.

Our presenters each covered a great deal of interesting topics and facts in a short time, brilliantly chaired by Helen Livingston of the UniSA Library, so I am going to share with you some highlights:

Evolution of library needs – From legacy to relevancy: addressing library challenges and opportunities. Caroline Beatty, Ex-Libris

Caroline puts forward the point that user expectations have been redefined. They now create or contribute to the content out there, yet they are also time poor. Stay relevant to user communities, and as librarians, be “fast, kind, reassuring and rewarding”.

Tend towards the kinds of systems that users like, she explains, those which are easy to use but also very smart. Here we’re talking about faceted browsing, ‘on the fly’ suggestions (people who like this also like…), and enriching records with tables of contents, reviews, tagging options and so on. Working smart can mean having data from the catalogue, different repositories and online databases normalised into one interface, with the Google/Amazon Web 2.0 style.

Publication, procurement, process, predictions and people: can we fill our future with more value? Richard Siegersma, DA Services.

Richard gave us the publisher’s perspective on future directions. He stated predictions of electronic format being preferred for the research and academic sectors, with as little as 5% in print. There will be a higher quality presentation of materials in multiple formats. Open access will flourish, and new copyright practices will challenge us.

Sources such as Wikipedia and all the UGC (user-generated content) will place tension on the publishing industry. Then there is the Google factor, where users see that convenience is king over content. However, content is a ‘knowledge asset’, which one can perceive as an intangible economy driver, and this can come in the shape of collaborative assets put out there by and for users.

Richard referred to a book called 'Glut' http://www.alexwright.org/glut/ , which hit home for him about the importance of spoken word, or word-of-mouth, throughout the ages, and it keeps us going now and into the future. He draws the parallel with these collaborative knowledge assets and says that people are the key to the future, which makes perfect sense.

The future of us: librarians in 2020. The roles and skills required by professionals of the future. Kate Sinclair, Flinders University Library.

Kate presented comparisons between the academic library of 1992 and 2007. CD abstracts and indexes were the new technologies then, and today we use online databases and various e-resources.

Regarding user education, back then we called it bibliographic instruction, whereas today there is emphasis on information literacy with online teaching, hands-on learning and an ‘information commons’ portal style of computer access, which links the student to their online resources. She asks: are we where our users are? It’s important to push our library’s presence out to the online environments of academic departments.

Kate raised the Web 2.0 technologies, illustrated aptly with the YouTube video, "Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gmP4nk0EOE. One thing this shows is that XML (rather than HTML) has helped everyday Internet users contribute to the Web, through the simplicity of text and formatting being one action, like word processing.

New staff skills will be in demand for the future. For example, there may be more teaching or information literacy responsibilities. This is coupled with perhaps a reduction in the range of manual and clerical tasks, to free up staff to provide better service. The Shifted Librarian sets out an impression of technology skills, to gear us up for now and into the future. http://www.theshiftedlibrarian.com/archives/2005/07/21/20_technology_skills_every_librarian_should_have.html

Finally, Kate talked about new spaces and places. Libraries are seeing an increase with their door stats, and not necessarily as much with loan stats, showing that people are using the library as a ‘third’ place. They are bringing their laptops, and tea and coffee is welcome. There is even a trend towards 'tidal space' in response to user needs. This is where furniture and workstations are modular, and the layout can be more suited to collaborative work or more for individual study at different times of the semester.

The Future of the Research Library (Is There One?) Ray Choate, Barr Smith Library, University of Adelaide.

Ray had some timely 'Gs' to share. For example, there is globalisation – the international stage of viewing and pushing out content, and dealing with multinational commercial providers of content. Governance – for the institutions and their gradual shift in operations and culture, namely to be more like businesses (think of how 'customers' is being said more than 'patrons' over time). There are also the actions of state and federal government: directions with copyright and intellectual property, and the RQF (Research Quality Framework). He commented that RQF will crystallise the areas of research and how we can support researchers with our collections and services.

Gregariousness is another one. This signifies collaborative learning and research, online commons and open source use, plus collaborative publishing. He mentioned consortia too as a way of gregariousness, and the opportunities out there to go ahead with them, including here in the South Australian library community.

Another future issue Ray touched upon was for library staff to draw from the expertise of academic staff for collection building and quality. Also, there will be print and digital preservation strategies required. It’s probable that some books for preservation will be kept as artefacts representative of the human record, and not book collections in their entirety. A part of financial decision making will be to have institution-specific specialisation, with collections distinct from those at other institutions.

I found our event to be fascinating and was very much into my note-taking again. We could all take away pointers from the afternoon, to hold up against our day-to-day library roles and consider how things will evolve in the time ahead. There are exciting opportunities to take on, to make our services even better. Thank you to the speakers and chair, to fellow committee members and to all those who turned up at Flinders to make the afternoon such a great success!

Kylie Jarrett
ARCoM Committee member

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