Thursday, March 12, 2009

The changing nature of how students do research and the future of academic libraries

As developers of library software and information discovery tools, one of the things that frustrates us the most is the seemingly ever-widening gap between the traditional academic expectations of our librarians and the impatient, "good-enough", just get it done desires of our students. We spend a lot of time and expend a lot of effort trying to sort that out and what usually happens is compromise and a product that really isn't what we had in mind.

Much has been written about this issue - some right here on these pages. To add even more fuel to the fire, I stumbled across "Twenty-nine reports about the future of academic libraries" over at Confessions of a Science Librarian, and I offer them here. Number 22 was particularly enlightening. I hope to synthesize all this data soon and write a summary for our staff and you.

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