Jenica Rogers, on her blog Attempting Elegance, has a compelling essay today entitled “Killing Fear, Part 1: The Problem.” After discussing the changing expectations of students, the changing attitudes of librarians, and the undeniable policy and service shifts in academic libraries, she discusses revealing findings about what faculty still think it is a library should be doing. It boils down to teaching and facilitating information seeking behavior vs buying and archiving materials.
Her conclusion:
Put simply, there’s a contradiction between these faculty expectations and emergent and clearly evident trends in information, libraries, and our future. This particular stakeholder group seems to want the very traditional services and roles that others are pointing out are now part of a legacy model.
An interesting read, and I look forward to the presumed Part 2.
(Updated to fix link to original article. – aw)
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