What does an academic library do?
A 2018 joint publication identified nine functional areas common to all academic libraries:
- Convene Campus Community: Provide spaces and facilitate programs for the community broadly or specific sub-populations to generate engagement, outreach, and inclusion.
- Enable Academic Success: Support instruction, facilitate learning, improve information literacy, and/or maximize retention, progression, graduation, and later life success.
- Facilitate Information Access: Enable discovery and usage of information resources of any format or ownership; provide for preservation of general collections.
- Foster Scholarship and Creation: Deliver expertise, assistance, tools, and services that support research and creative work.
- Include and Support Off-Campus Users: Provide equitable access for part-time students, distance and online learners, and other principally off-campus/non-campus/remote users.
- Preserve and Promote Unique Collections: Ensure the long-term stewardship of rare materials and special collections, and maximize their usage.
- Provide Study Space: Provide physical spaces for academic collaboration, quiet study, and technology-enhanced instruction and/or learning.
- Showcase Scholarly Expertise: Promote research excellence and subject matter expertise of scholars and other affiliates; includes repository activities for open access preprint materials.
- Transform Scholarly Publishing: Drive toward modernized formats, revamped business models, and reduced market concentration.
- Support student/faculty/staff recruitment, retention, and development
- Promote student success and contribute to improving graduation rates
- ​Collaborate with faculty for successful teaching, scholarship and research
What are library challenges?
- Reconnecting our community as direct impacts of the COVID pandemic subside
- Declining budgets, rising prices
- Unstable institutional revenue base, difficulty planning
- Aging facilities and infrastructure, deferred maintenance
- Meeting expectations for digital access in a vendor environment predominated by direct sales to end users
- Lack of awareness/visibility among stakeholders
What are library opportunities?
i. Talented, creative, energetic people
ii. Prime “real estate”
iii. Strong historical collections, ability to curate and tailor new acquisitions
iv. Technological expertise and capacity
- Values that promote trust
i. Privacy
ii. Intellectual freedom
iii. Universal access
- Make the online experience as satisfying as on-site
