The roles of libraries in access to networked information: Cautionary tales from the era of broadcasting

published or submitted for publicatio

Updating the Agenda for Academic Libraries and Scholarly Communications

This issue of C&RL is focused on scholarly communication, and it seems appropriate, in this invited guest editorial, to step back and examine the broader agenda that academic and research libraries need to consider today in engaging with scholarly communications as a way of framing the issue. My view is that this agenda is ripe for re-thinking. The overall environment has changed significantly in the last few years, underscoring the growing irrelevance of some long-held ideas, and at the same time, clearly identifying new and urgent priorities. What I hope to do here is to summarize very succinctly my thoughts on the most pressing issues and the areas most needing reconsideration. Articles in this issue touch upon aspects of many of these topics; I hope that future authors may also find topical inspirations here. You’ll note that many of these are issues that have been important to the CNI agenda in recent years, and I’ve included a few references to some of these materials

Updating the Agenda for Academic Libraries and Scholarly Communications

This issue of C&RL is focused on scholarly communication, and it seems appropriate, in this invited guest editorial, to step back and examine the broader agenda that academic and research libraries need to consider today in engaging with scholarly communications as a way of framing the issue. My view is that this agenda is ripe for re-thinking. The overall environment has changed significantly in the last few years, underscoring the growing irrelevance of some long-held ideas, and at the same time, clearly identifying new and urgent priorities. What I hope to do here is to summarize very succinctly my thoughts on the most pressing issues and the areas most needing reconsideration. Articles in this issue touch upon aspects of many of these topics; I hope that future authors may also find topical inspirations here. You’ll note that many of these are issues that have been important to the CNI agenda in recent years, and I’ve included a few references to some of these materials

Rethinking Institutional Repository Strategies

At the spring 2017 CNI meeting in Albuquerque, New Mexico, we held an Executive Roundtable on the topic of Rethinking Institutional Repository Strategies. We knew this was a timely topic for many of our member institutions, and we anticipated that many CNI member institutions would seek to attend this roundtable. To meet the demand, we offered two sessions of the roundtable (with different institutions participating in each) on sequential days, and even then had to turn away many who expressed interest. At the main CNI meeting, CNI’s executive director Clifford Lynch offered a summary of the roundtables during one of the breakout sessions. This report expands upon the themes Lynch described and adds more details about participants’ observations and current activities

Libraries, Networks and OSI: A Review, with a Report on North American Developments

Lorcan Dempsey made a study trip to North America in May 1990 as part of a British-Library-funded study of library networking (i.e., use of computer networks by libraries) in North America. Based on this trip, as well as on extensive literature research and follow-on electronic mail and phone discussions, he prepared the report reviewed here. The prospective reader should understand that this book is in fact a published report. Some sections assume considerable familiarity with the subject matter; extensive quotations from the literature are included. Some sections are quite detailed and discuss work in progress (and some of this material will date quickly). Sometimes, the coverage is a bit encyclopedic, which makes for slightly tedious reading, but such detail is necessary in a comprehensive report

Mapping the Current Landscape of Research Library Engagement with Emerging Technologies in Research and Learning: Final Report

The generation, dissemination, and analysis of digital information is a significant driver, and consequence, of technological change. As data and information stewards in physical and virtual space, research libraries are thoroughly entangled in the challenges presented by the Fourth Industrial Revolution:1 a societal shift powered not by steam or electricity, but by data, and characterized by a fusion of the physical and digital worlds.2 Organizing, structuring, preserving, and providing access to growing volumes of the digital data generated and required by research and industry will become a critically important function. As partners with the community of researchers and scholars, research libraries are also recognizing and adapting to the consequences of technological change in the practices of scholarship and scholarly communication. Technologies that have emerged or become ubiquitous within the last decade have accelerated information production and have catalyzed profound changes in the ways scholars, students, and the general public create and engage with information. The production of an unprecedented volume and diversity of digital artifacts, the proliferation of machine learning (ML) technologies,3 and the emergence of data as the “world’s most valuable resource,”4 among other trends, present compelling opportunities for research libraries to contribute in new and significant ways to the research and learning enterprise. Librarians are all too familiar with predictions of the research library’s demise in an era when researchers have so much information at their fingertips. A growing body of evidence provides a resounding counterpoint: that the skills, experience, and values of librarians, and the persistence of libraries as an institution, will become more important than ever as researchers contend with the data deluge and the ephemerality and fragility of much digital content. This report identifies strategic opportunities for research libraries to adopt and engage with emerging technologies,5 with a roughly fiveyear time horizon. It considers the ways in which research library values and professional expertise inform and shape this engagement, the ways library and library worker roles will be reconceptualized, and the implication of a range of technologies on how the library fulfills its mission. The report builds on a literature review covering the last five years of published scholarship, primarily North American information science literature, and interviews with a dozen library field experts, completed in fall 2019. It begins with a discussion of four cross-cutting opportunities that permeate many or all aspects of research library services. Next, specific opportunities are identified in each of five core research library service areas: facilitating information discovery, stewarding the scholarly and cultural record, advancing digital scholarship, furthering student learning and success, and creating learning and collaboration spaces. Each section identifies key technologies shaping user behaviors and library services, and highlights exemplary initiatives. Underlying much of the discussion in this report is the idea that “digital transformation is increasingly about change management”6 —that adoption of or engagement with emerging technologies must be part of a broader strategy for organizational change, for “moving emerging work from the periphery to the core,”7 and a broader shift in conceptualizing the research library and its services. Above all, libraries are benefitting from the ways in which emerging technologies offer opportunities to center users and move from a centralized and often siloed service model to embedded, collaborative engagement with the research and learning enterprise