Leap Year for Libraries

I started thinking about what academic libraries could look like next February 29th (or maybe what I hope they will look like) and here is what I came up with:

Acquisitions

Books will still be a part of the budget but we will see more agreements like the journal-subscription model for serials: print, online only, or print and online. Libraries will be able to decide if they want the book in print or full-text online or both and will pay vendors a fee for each type of access.

Information Commons

Harvard Lamont Library Cafe    Originally uploaded by cindiann

There will be increasing pressure to have a cafe with Wifi for informal collaboration and research. Libraries will need to come to grips with how they really feel about food. The Commons will be a place to share and mashup the streaming content available from on and off campus (e.g., course videos, presentations, YouTube, etc).

Cataloging

I would like to say (once RDA finally is adopted) that in four years MARC will at least be enhanced by FRBR principles or, even better, MARC will be replaced altogether (*sigh* if only). As it is, this seems optimistic in the extreme.

Interlibrary Loan

Although the total number of interlibrary loan requests may not go down, there will be less requests for individual articles as more content is available online. I actually tried to find a citation in Ebsco, Gale and Proquest recently that didn’t have either an HTML or PDF available; it was a lot harder than I thought it would be. Requests will increase for items which are not online (old–out-of-print, but still in copyright–books) or, in the case of special collections, may need institutional authentication. ILL will be sending out a sort of temporary login for digitized special collections.

ILS

Open source initiatives like LibLime will be a more popular option for libraries because of their timely adoption of user-centric tools for searching and collaborating. The expensive ILS vendors of the past will be marginalized as more libraries turn to ILS overlay systems (Primo, Endeca, etc) or open source options like LibLime for simple, intuitive searching.

Reference

While face-to-face interaction will still drop over the next four years, virtual reference will increase. iPhone functionality in most phones by 2012 will make texting a library easier and more comfortable.

Publication

Open access journals will still be an issue for some academics but the number of citations to free online articles will continue to increase, despite the ‘experts’ who only see top-tier journals as viable publication outlets. As citations from free articles skyrocket, most scholars will admit (either privately or openly) that open access journals are really making a substantial impact on scholarship.

Of course there are many other aspects of libraries that will evolve over the next four years but these are what I would like to see happen. Maybe some of my thoughts are a bit drastic for just four years. If you think about it though, last February 29th, most people were just starting to glimpse the power of Google; Facebook had just barely been launched; and user-generated content and blogging had just started gaining real traction.

Horizon Report 2008

The 2008 Horizon Report by NMC and EDUCAUSE is now out. Haven’t had a chance to look at it yet but here’s the Table of Contents:

Time-to-Adoption: One Year or Less
Grassroots Video
Collaboration Webs

Time-to-Adoption: Two to Three Years
Mobile Broadband
Data Mashups

Time-to-Adoption: Four to Five Years
Collective Intelligence
Social Operating Systems

I’ll be reading this soon to find out some of the applications for education.

Library Brand Doodling

Google is a master a self-promotion. They are opening a contest to see who can come up with the best “doodle” on their brand. Wouldn’t it be cool to do something like this for a library? Anyone in the community could come up with a fun rendition of the library’s brand for a special event or day. One more method to increase library user involvement and especially a sense of ownership and loyalty.

Harvard’s Scholarship For Free?

So the big vote is today to decide whether publications by Harvard professors would be automatically included in Harvard’s institutional repository, thereby making Harvard scholarship free online. The New York Times writes:

Although the outcome of Tuesday’s vote would apply only to Harvard’s arts and sciences faculty, the impact, given the university’s prestige, could be significant for the open-access movement, which seeks to make scientific and scholarly research available to as many people as possible at no cost.

I completely agree. This is for real. If the Harvard academic juggernaut starts moving, other institutions will follow. Can’t wait to see how this develops.

|| Update Feb. 13, 2008 ||

Looks like the faculty voted for the amendment. Good news for all institutional repositories out there.

Soaring to Excellence?

I usually really enjoy the College of DuPage’s Soaring to Excellence teleconferences but today’s was not what it seemed. I thought that from the subtitle: “Meeting Needs Before They Need It” implied that the topic discussion would be along the lines of how to keep up with emerging trends in the library science market, coupled with recommendations on implementation. What we got was a whole broadcast on Community Informatics. While CI is somewhat related to libraries in that they facilitate community collaboration, the moderator (can’t remember her name) asked the question, “How does this relate to libraries,” or something similar at least three different times in the first hour and got different answers every time. It was really a disappointment. The best either of the guests could come up with was from Nancy Kranich, former President of ALA, who responded that libraries essentially were poised to be the center of communities.

Ok… I get it… what else?

We didn’t get much else. I gave it the first hour and left hoping the title for the next conferences in the series will be a little more connected to the actual topic.