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Social media promote the boundary-less organization and enable networking, but challenge organisations in that they are expected to do so on a much larger scale. These expectations affect the entire society and thus demand a reflection of one’s own position to successfully manage the change. The library as the traditional keeper of the knowledge hoard is confronted with new, globally operating actors and changed user habits of the library’s stakeholders. This paper reflects the roles of the library in the context of the university from the perspectives of knowledge work, knowledge development and social media. The paper discusses the status quo with the knowledge maturing model and presents approaches for adapting library offerings according to the three design dimensions content, process and service.

Due to a new university law all Austrian universities became autonomous entities concerning financial and administrative affairs in 2002. As a result, university libraries found themselves in the new position of having to compete with all other university departments for budgetary resources. After overviewing various earlier strategies pursued to deal with this situation the paper focuses on a detailed delineation of the project of shared archiving in Austria: Print volumes which are electronically available will be archived only once. This does not necessarily mean cumulation at one institution, but to identify institutions owning the best holdings and selecting them as archiving libraries. A system of shared archiving should lead to equal distribution of burden. This paper describes principles of legal agreements, workflows and the expected positive impacts on collection development of shared archiving. Keywords

The first dissertations at the University of Innsbruck written by women are unique due to the lack of legal deposit at the beginning of the 20th century. Furthermore, these works are sometimes very fragile documents consisting of, for example, loose leaves or very thin paper; they are also increasingly demanded by library users. This situation provided good reason to dedicate a project to the online preservation of this stock at the University and Regional Library of Tyrol, and through this project, to remember the first female doctoral candidates. The main objective of the project work was to digitize dissertations written by female students before 1938 at the University of Innsbruck as widely as possible and to prepare the digital facsimiles for the online presentation in the institution’s digital library. This book chapter provides an introductory overview of the early beginnings women studying at the University of Innsbruck and then reports on key data and findings of the project.

This paper discusses the dynamic relationship between libraries and researchers. At first, we look at the scientific, technological and financial developments which have led to a transformation of the relationship over the last decades. In the following, we ask whether Open Access is a solution to the existing problems and what are the pros and cons of this model for scholarly publishing. Finally, we will show possible new tasks of libraries in the research process.

This paper gives an overview of the history of bibliometrics in Austria and reports on its level of awareness and its acceptance. For this purpose an online survey addressed to Austrian scientists was conducted and its results analyzed. In spite of emergent and increasing activities in this field, the uptake of bibliometric knowledge is slow and has much room for improvement in the Austrian scientific community. The majority of responders agree on the need for a more sophisticated bibliometric education and also indicate a willingness to use existent bibliometric services.

„Library automation in Austrian University libraries“ gives an overview concerning the development of computerized systems from the beginning of the 1970s till today. Library management systems are the focus of the paper describing TUB, GRIBS, BIBOS and Aleph 500, the latter as the first integrated library system. Computerized systems were implemented to meet the growing demands and to achieve better service results, like radiofrequency technology for lending services or patron driven acquisition. The rapid change in technology and the huge amount of available documents in full text have enlarged the functions of a library tremendously. Only the optimal use of technology enables libraries to cope with the new tasks. The library user of today expects a 24/7 service independent of place and time.

Austrian university libraries offer an increasing part of their information resources and full text documents in electronic form. The present paper does not only describe the range of resources offered and their intensive use. It also deals with the change in the tasks and the work flows of libraries and addresses the issue, whether a far-reaching switch to digital information can optimize costs as well as personnel and space requirements of scientific information resources.

This paper offers an introduction to: Bruno Bauer, Christian Gumpenberger, Robert Schiller(Ed.): "Universitätsbibliotheken im Fokus: Aufgaben und Perspektiven der Universitätsbibliotheken an öffentlichen Universitäten in Östereich". Graz - Feldkirch: Neugebauer, 2013 (Schriften der Vereinigung Österreichischer Bibliothekarinnen und Bibliothekare (VÖB), Vol. 13).

This paper focuses on the question how library executives can be supported in planning and implementing change policies and procedures. It describes specific change projects at several German libraries such as the University Library of the Technische Universität München or the University Library Passau and analyzes the different ways in which reforms were effectuated, such as the peer advice strategy ("Modell Kollegiale Beratung") adopted in some university libraries. For data collection and interpretation, qualitative research methods are used.