Consider the following quote …..
The role of the library in the university is being transformed. Information technology is shaping both the practice of scholarly inquiry and the daily routine of students and faculty, while library services are becoming more client-focused and more integrated into teaching, learning, and research activities. Demands for technology-related services, the digitisation of collections, and technology rich user environments are growing. Library professionals are increasingly directly involved in teaching students and developing their information literacy. These increasing demands occur at the same time as calls for accountability and for quantitative measures of the library contribution to research, teaching, and learning increasingly influence the allocation of institutional resources. The library must deal creatively with the tensions between, on the one hand, demands for free public access to data and outputs from publicly funded research, and, on the other, the protection of privacy and intellectual property rights.
Perhaps it is the opening paragraph of an article in Educause Review or Ariadne about the academic library today? Maybe it is the blurb attached to an academic library conference? Is it the explanatory text on ACRLog?
Nope …. it is from the job advert for the University Librarian at University College Dublin. The successful candidate will be one who “envisions UCD Library as the cornerstone of a leading international research University”.
Often, in a document like this, there are vaguer references to vision and change management, to creating a library for the twenty-first century, and so on. It is interesting seeing here some suggestion of ways in which the library is seen to be changing, albeit in quite general terms.
