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Choy Fatt Cheong: 'We need to shift our focus to developing services that incorporate the broader information universe.'
It's difficult to predict the future as libraries exist in a fast changing environment, but one thing seems clear – the availability and convenient access to a huge volume and variety of digital scholarly content will continue, most of which may lie increasingly outside library walls.
Shift in focus
In the past, the main role of academic libraries was to provide access to content. Now, however, users are able to access quality content from a variety of other sources. While continuing our role as provider of scholarly content, we need to shift our focus to developing services that incorporate this broader information universe.
Limits of open access
Like others, our library is likely to continue with costly subscriptions to ejournals and databases to enable our students and faculty to do their work successfully. The current journal subscription model is too entrenched in the scholarly communication process to disappear overnight, even with the rapid growth of open access. Furthermore, not all content can be open access. Digital media such as ebooks have price tags. Libraries continue to play an important role in pooling together a common fund to enable users to access a wide and deep range of publications that no single individual can afford on their own.
Open access materials will most likely increase in quantity and play an important role in making publicly-funded research freely available to all. However, it will be a very long time before they can completely satisfy the needs of all disciplines due to incompleteness and cost problems inherent in the both the 'green' and 'gold' open access routes.
What's more, libraries are still essential for the availability of most open access materials. Green open access depends on libraries continuing their subscriptions so that self-archived publications can be deposited in institutional repositories and made open access. In anticipation of many changes ahead, we formed our scholarly communication group two years ago to keep track of developments and to support academic staff in their engagement in scholarly communication. The group also manages our repository called DR-NTU and a university-wide open access mandate exists.
Movements in social media
Outside traditional publishing, there is increased use of social media to create useful scholarly content and discourse. Academics who are impatient with the slow peer review process to share and get acknowledgement of their work can take to academic blogging to increase their reach and build their reputations as they wait for citations to their published work to accumulate and their h-indexes to rise. Social media content and the rising interest in altmetrics for measuring impact of scholarship in new media is an area we need to keep close watch on.
In preparation for these developments, we set up a group to explore trends in social media and to develop new services. As a start, we initiated the campus-wide blogs@ntu service which helps staff in creating course blogs, research blogs, and marketing blogs. We expect our library staff to be competent in the use of social media to assist our users in this popular information space.
There are many new types of scholarly content accumulating in the common digital space including data-sets, videos, audio, maps, and text embedded in tools and applications. Finding information is less of a problem today than selecting appropriate information to use. More choice means that the burden is now on users to be able to discern and select useful information.
Librarians guide and teach students in making sense of this complex information environment. They are agents that act on behalf of, and in collaboration with, their users in getting optimal value from the information world, both within and beyond the library.
The role of university libraries is not just about providing access to content, but enabling users to learn, make discoveries and develop insights of their own. For this, our concern is with the entire information universe, not just library managed and subscribed content. In the future, this broad approach by libraries will provide more value to our users.
Choy Fatt Cheong is the university librarian at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore
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