Ithaka has released an interesting study it has been working with since 2000 on academic libraries and faculty perceptions. What I like most from this is a useful model of academic library services that they’ve broken into three aspects: purchaser, archive, and gateway. They describe these as:
The purchaser role was described in the survey by the statement “the library pays for resources I need, from academic journals to books to electronic databases,” the archive role by “the library serves as a repository of resources – in other words, it archives, preserves, and keeps track of resources,” and the gateway role by “the library is a starting point or ‘gateway’ for locating information for my research.”
It’s certainly not a surprise that the library as gateway is being disrupted by public search services in the minds of faculty. This is evident in the findings where faculty are decreasingly likely to rate gateway services as “very important”:
I’ll be honest, the first thing I think of regarding gateway services is federated searching. It’s not surprising that faculty are considering this service as decreasingly important. The fact that 60% still think it’s very important leads me to believe (hope) that there is still time to address the problem. Another facet is that the science grouping, followed by social science, is leading this trend:
It makes sense that everyone values the “buyer” aspects of libraries. But in terms of gateway services, the humanities may still be reliant on libraries because of a preference for monographs. If the Kindle, or something similar, starts to gain traction then the humanities may follow science’s lead in finding their own gateway services.
There is a lot more to the study and it is well worth a read. They recommend shoring up the visibility of library services, concentrating and customizing for different faculty user groups, and taking advantage of network solutions (especially for smaller libraries.)
Post a Comment