Lorcan Dempsey

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.

When I think of the Google Books initiative now, three things stick with me. The first is simply what an

In making choices about focus and investment, consortial options can vary along three important axes: scoping, sourcing and (right)scaling.

Scaling capacity (building shared infrastructure and services) and scaling influence (aggregating a library voice to lobby or persuade) are historically core consortial activities.

Library consortia play an important role in scaling learning and innovation – this will become both more purposeful and more important in coming years.

Libraries and related organizations group together in a variety of ways to get their work done. They consort where there are scale advantages: to lobby, for example, to negotiate and license, to reduce costs, or to build shared infrastructure.

Recently @mishdalton [https://twitter.com/mishdalton] pointed me at an article [https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/25/opinion/tips-for-aspiring-op-ed-writers.

It is important to know what you know, so that you can avoid the curse of knowledge and communicate effectively.

Collections are changing in a network environment. One important direction is the assembly of resources around user needs based on a facilitated access model rather than an acquisition model.

It has been interesting watching Research Information Management or RIM emerge as a new service category in the last couple of years.

The library does not have a singular network presence. There may be a main website, but the library also syndicates its presence to other venues (e.g. RSS), has unbundled to social sites (e.g. Facebook), and sources activity in the cloud (e.g. LibGuides).

St Valentine's Day. What are the most popular love stories? Taking library holdings as a proxy for popularity.