- Taking full advantage of the popularity of scholarly information.
- Reversing the process of dis-intermediation in a full-blown do-it-yourself consumer marketplace.
- Becoming much more e-consumer-friendly and less stodgy and intellectual.
- Avoiding the decoupling scenario – libraries being decoupled from the user and the publisher.
- Introducing robust, fit-for-purpose mechanisms for monitoring and evaluating their users.
- Really getting information skills on the agenda because clearly people are having great difficulties navigating and profiting from the virtual scholarly environment.
- The library profession desperately needs leadership to develop a new vision for the 21st century and reverse its declining profile and influence.
Friday, January 20, 2012
University College London
So what are the main challenges to libraries and their information services in meeting the needs of users?
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information behaviour of the researcher of the future
ReplyDeletewhat is the `digital transition’ and how does it affect libraries?
British Library and JISC
University College London (UCL)
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/infostudies/research/ciber/downloads/ggexecutive.pdf
So what are the main challenges to libraries and their information services in meeting the needs of tomorrow’s scholars and researchers?
ReplyDelete1. Taking full advantage of the popularity of scholarly information and at the same time dealing with the fact that UK users are the minority group for many UK-funded, cash-strapped information services.
2. Reversing the process of dis-intermediation in a full-blown do-it-yourself consumer marketplace. As they say ‘we are all librarians now’. For, instance, how to sell the key library role of a safe and authoritative information haven and the need for digital information literacy training. Libraries are handicapped here by a lack of brand, although there is evidence that the BL has a good international presence. Publishers are better able to offer something here with their strong commercial and academic brands and their rapidly expanding ‘walled garden’ information products, and strategic partnerships should be considered.
3. Becoming much more e-consumer-friendly and less stodgy and intellectual. Few digital library offerings make any real attempt to connect with the larger digital consumer world: they simply do not chime with people’s experience of Facebook, YouTube, Amazon or even for that matter, ScienceDirect. Why, for example, don’t academic libraries try to emulate personal/social searching guidance offered so successfully by Amazon for many years?
4. Avoiding the decoupling scenario – libraries being decoupled from the user and the publisher. With the arrival of the e-book libraries will become even more remote from their users and publishers will become even closer as a result of consumer footfalls occurring in their domain. The fall out with publishers over open access and institutional repositories has caused a schism between librarians and publishers and the increasing willingness of the user to pay for information (a trend noticed by all publishers) will increase the isolation of libraries.
5. Introducing robust, fit-for-purpose mechanisms for monitoring and evaluating their users (and information services). Faced with the prospect that the future scholar will only ever want to use them remotely it is absolutely crucial that libraries have a means of monitoring and evaluating what they do. Furthermore, it is not sufficient to just listen and monitor it is also necessary to change in response to this data. Otherwise libraries will be increasingly marginalized and anonomized in the virtual information world. No private sector corporation would survive on the basis of failing to invest in consumer profiling, market research and loyalty programmes. No library we are aware of has a department devoted to the evaluation of the user, how can that be?
6. Really getting information skills on the agenda because clearly people are having great difficulties navigating and profiting from the virtual scholarly environment. To succeed it will be necessary to lead on outcomes/benefits (better researchers, degrees etc) and work closely with publishers.
7. The library profession desperately needs leadership to develop a new vision for the 21st century and reverse its declining profile and influence. This should start with effecting that shift from a content-orientation to a user-facing perspective and then on to an outcome focus.
While we have highlighted differences amongst scholarly communities in this paper it would be a mistake to believe that it is only students’ information seeking that has been fundamentally shaped by massive digital choice, unbelievable (24/7) access to scholarly material, disintermediation, and hugely powerful and influential search engines. The same has happened to professors, lecturers and practitioners. Everyone exhibits a bouncing / flicking behaviour, which sees them searching horizontally rather than vertically. Power browsing and viewing is the norm for all.
ReplyDeleteThe trends in the content space are not just technological. Research libraries also have to learn how best to manage a shifting world of formally published, self-published and unpublished materials, new licensing and business models, both paper and digital. It is an enormous challenge.