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the library will have two roles
13 Jan 09
Smith, Abby. “The Research Library in the 21st Century: Collecting, Preserving, and Making Accessible Resources for Scholarship.” No Brief Candle: Reconceiving Research Libraries for the 21st Century (PDF), 13-20.
In its local role, the library will be optimized to meet the needs of its campus community. The library is likely to provide repository infrastructure for stewardship of university-based information assets. Most of those assets will support pedagogy, administration, student life, alumni affairs, and other things vital to the school. A much smaller portion of them will support research. Research will be a far more global phenomenon than local institutions can support on their own.
In its networked role, the library will be able to support research and dissemination to the extent that it is tightly networked into the increasing cluster of inter-institutional collaborations that enable the creation and use of scholarly content. These collaborations will be key elements of research cyberinfrastructure, an infrastructure that will be a research-and-dissemination platform. In the magic phrase of the digital era, it “will scale,” be ubiquitous, and support a variety of scholarly domains, from astronomy to nanobiology, archaeology to urban design. The next-generation research library must be firmly embedded in that infrastructure, because that will be the platform to which scholars will gain access on their laptop library. (18-19)
Posted by pzed on January 13, 2009 at 8.22am
Categories: collection policies, digital initiatives, libraries
