2012 top ten trends in academic libraries
A review of the trends and issues affecting academic
libraries in higher education
ACRL Research Planning and Review
Committee
The ACRL Research Planning and Review Committee is
responsible for creating and updating a continuous and dynamic environmental
scan for the association that encompasses trends in academic librarianship,
higher education, and the broader environment.
These top trends include:
Communicating value
Academic
libraries must prove the value they provide to the academic enterprise. Librarians
must be able to convert the general feelings of goodwill towards the library to
effective communication to all stakeholders that clearly articulate its value
to the academic community
Data curation
Data
curation challenges are increasing as standards for all types of data continue
to evolve; more repositories, many of them cloud-based, will emerge; librarians
and other information workers will collaborate with their research communities
to facilitate this process.
Data curation presents opportunities for “finding new
ways to communicate the value of the skills librarians already possess and in
developing roles that were previously not associated with librarians.”11 Librarians and
information workers have a vital role to play in helping their research
communities design and implement a plan for data description, efficient
storage, management, and reuse. Several discipline data repositories already
exist, and include librarians as principal collaborators.
Digital preservation
As digital collections
mature, concerns grow about the general lack of long-term planning for their
preservation. No strategic leadership for establishing architecture, policy, or
standards for creating, accessing, and preserving digital content is likely to emerge
in the near term.
Higher education
Higher
education institutions are entering a period of flux, and potentially even
turmoil. Trends to watch for are the rise of online instruction and degree
programs, globalization, and an increased skepticism of the “return on
investment” in a college degree. Shifts in the higher education
surround will have an impact on libraries in terms of expectations for
development of collections, delivery of collections and services for both old
and new audiences, and in terms of how libraries continue to demonstrate value
to parent institutions.
Information technology
Technology
continues to drive much of the futuristic thinking within academic libraries. The key trends driving educational technology identified in the 2012
Horizon Report are equally applicable to academic libraries: people’s desire
for information and access to social media and networks anytime/anywhere;
acceptance and adoption of cloud-based technologies; more value placed on
collaboration; challenges to the role of higher education in a world where
information is ubiquitous and alternate forms of credentialing are available;
new education paradigms that include online and hybrid learning; and a new
emphasis on challenge-based and active learning.
Technology trends specific to libraries include
Web-scale discovery systems with enhancements such as discipline-scoped
searching and customized widgets, community-source library management systems,
and vending machines to handle loans of equipment.
Mobile environments
Mobile
devices are changing the way information is delivered and accessed. An increasing number of libraries provide services and content delivery
to mobile devices. The 2012 Horizon Report
reviews ways higher education institutions are using apps and tablets to
enhance learning inside and outside the classroom. Some schools have replaced
print textbooks with tablets preloaded with course materials while others use
them for lecture capture, tutorials, orientations, and interactive
publications.
Patron driven e-book acquisition
Patron-Driven
Acquisition (PDA) of e-books is poised to become the norm. For this to occur,
licensing options and models for library lending of e-books must become more
sustainable. A report on the future
of academic libraries identifies PDA as an inevitable trend for libraries under
pressure to prove that their expenditures are in line with their value.
Scholarly communication
New
scholarly communication and publishing models are developing at an ever-faster
pace, requiring libraries to be actively involved or be left behind. New publishing models are being explored for journals, scholarly
monographs, textbooks, and digital materials, as stakeholders try to establish
sustainable models. Developments relevant to journals include open access to
historical content, author-funded open access to new content, and uncertainty
of the future of “Big Deals” (agreements or subscriptions with the large, usually
expensive, publishers.
Academic
libraries must develop the staff needed to meet new challenges through creative
approaches to hiring new personnel and deploying/retraining existing staff. Staff development and
personnel are the top work place issues for academic librarians
User behaviors and expectations
Convenience
affects all aspects of information seeking—the selection, accessibility, and
use of sources. Libraries usually are not the
first source for finding information. When queried, respondents describe the
library as “hard to use,” “the last resort,” and “inconvenient.” Convenience is
a significant factor in both academic and everyday-life information-seeking
situations. Not only is immediate access to
electronic sources a critical component of meeting the information needs of
students and faculty, but access to human sources also is important.
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