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This book covers the practical side of being an academic librarian – a role that has undergone a large degree of change in recent years. It outlines and describes the skills necessary to succeed in these large, and often complex, organisations. The book includes tools and techniques for an academic librarian for managing time, meetings, projects, publishing and research, communications (paper and electronic), the basics of supervision, and how to work in a large organisation. The impact of the growth of electronic formats on the role of the academic librarian are discussed in detail. - Explains how, in practical terms, to stay organised, communicate successfully, network and navigate through an often politicised environment - Applies business practices to the field of librarianship - Shows how to use organisational behaviour techniques to manage yourself and your work

First published in 1986, Information Technology & Libraries explores some of the issues, problems, and opportunities presented to librarians with the development of information technology.Charting the development of information technology in libraries in a historical context, the book examines the possible changes in the way society will operate and the effects on the higher education system as a background to library service. It discusses the external networks bringing in data from institution to use and the local networks which will distribute and add to the data. These will change the way libraries operate and the mechanisms employed by members of the institution to gather and analyse information. The volume, therefore, looks forward to the future of the library and the attendant effects on users, structures, management, and staff. It highlights the key issues for the library manager, and the requirements for library staff education, training, and skills.This book will be of interest to students and researchers of library & information science, library skills and education.

As libraries transition into the digital age, they encounter a pressing challenge: outdated information systems hinder their ability to meet the diverse needs of patrons. Traditional library management systems struggle to cope with the demands of modern users, resulting in inefficient resource allocation, limited accessibility, and disjointed user experiences. This disconnect between antiquated systems and evolving user expectations poses a significant barrier to libraries striving to remain relevant in an increasingly digital world. Improving Library Systems with AI: Applications, Approaches, and Bibliometric Insights presents a comprehensive solution to this pressing problem. By integrating modern digital tools and technologies, libraries can revolutionize their information systems, enhancing accessibility, efficiency, and user satisfaction. This book offers practical insights and strategies for modernizing library services and operations, from digitizing physical resources to implementing advanced search algorithms and data analytics. Librarians, administrators, and technology providers will find invaluable guidance on navigating the complexities of digital transformation and maximizing the impact of their efforts. Through case studies, best practices, and in-depth analysis, this book equips stakeholders with the knowledge and tools to navigate the digital landscape and future-proof their libraries. The principles outlined in this book empower libraries to overcome the challenges of outdated information systems and emerge as vibrant, dynamic hubs of knowledge and innovation.

Student parents are a socioeconomically, racially, and financially diverse group. What they have in common is the drive to work hard to overcome steep barriers in obtaining a college education. Supporting Student Parents in the Academic Library: Designing Spaces, Policies, and Services is part toolkit, part treatise, and part call to action. In four parts: • The Higher Education Landscape • The Role of Academic Libraries • Looking Outward to Community, For-Profit, and International Organizations • Evaluating Needs and Measuring Success It includes templates, sample policy language, budgets, survey instruments, and other immediately useful tools and examples. There are field notes from academic librarians from institutions of varying sizes and resources demonstrating different ways of supporting these students, and the voices of students themselves. Student parents can feel unwelcome and invisible in their institutions. And for every student parent who is struggling to complete an education despite these hurdles, there are many others who have not been able to find a way. Supporting Student Parents is a guide to engaging with and aiding the student parents in your libraries and leading the charge in making your institutions more family friendly.

When a crisis occurs, it is the employees who determine an organization's resiliency and effectiveness. It is their response, ability to plan for contingencies, and capacity for creating solutions that means the difference between organizational success and failure. In 29 chapters from authors in all institution types and sizes, Managing Crises in the Academic Library can help library workers learn from the crises of the past and prepare for the next unexpected event. Chapters cover lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic, perpetual budget uncertainty, dealing with downsizing, merging departments, mold mitigation, and mental health issues, but also offer strategies applicable during any crisis, including: • Responsive decision-making in academic library collections • Managing stakeholder expectations • Effective communication strategies • Continuity of operations planning • Utilizing library storage facilities • Documentation and cross-training • Mediating student technology needs • Setting boundaries Chapters include workflow charts, bibliographies, and concrete strategies that can be easily adopted into your crisis planning. Libraries and library workers are deeply sustaining lifelines for many students and faculty. Managing Crises in the Academic Library collects stories that demonstrate the tenacity, creativity, and ingenuity of academic library workers as they maintain this vital community lifeline and offers actionable ideas and approaches for planning for and sustaining the resources, services, and people in the library during difficult times.

Privacy is not dead: Students care deeply about their privacy and the rights it safeguards. They need a way to articulate their concerns and guidance on how to act within the complexity of our current information ecosystem and culture of surveillance capitalism. Practicing Privacy Literacy in Academic Libraries: Theories, Methods, and Cases can help you teach privacy literacy, evolve the privacy practices at your institution, and re-center the individuals behind the data and the ethics behind library work. Divided into four sections: • What is Privacy Literacy? • Protecting Privacy • Educating about Privacy • Advocating for Privacy Chapters cover topics including privacy literacy frameworks; digital wellness; embedding a privacy review into digital library workflows; using privacy literacy to challenge price discrimination; privacy pedagogy; and promoting privacy literacy and positive digital citizenship through credit-bearing courses, co-curricular partnerships, and faculty development and continuing education initiatives. Practicing Privacy Literacy in Academic Libraries provides theory-informed, practical ways to incorporate privacy literacy into library instruction and other areas of academic library practice.

Engineering students, designers, studio artists, and other student creators have unique research needs that libraries are well-positioned to meet. They use academic literature to inspire and ground creation, but also seek information from trade literature, patents, technical standards, and how-to manuals. They apply tacit knowledge and need to learn not only how to write within academic discourse but also create objects, designs, and experiences. In four parts, Creators in the Academic Library: Instruction and Outreach explores how to teach specifically for creator research, motivate learning, and deepen students'understanding of their own practice. • Technology, Tools, and Techniques for Creation • Inspiring Creativity through Research • Creator's Unique Information Needs • Grounding Creation in Research Chapters are grouped by learning objectives rather than discipline to highlight the throughlines that unite creators regardless of their field. They include methods for researching creative technology, tools, and techniques in different settings and disciplines; how to research for inspiration; adapting our tools and teaching to the unique information-seeking behaviors of creator disciplines; and how these skills can be transferred to students'future careers. Creators in the Academic Library offers learning strategies and objectives that can help you teach all manner of creators.

This book, written by a political scientist born in the global North but now based in one of the departments of his discipline in the Republic of South Africa, is an attempt to focus on the global geography of political science and its global reach. All too often, the world view of scholars is shaped by the'lens'of the global North, and there is little awareness of how the products of our scholarship are distributed in the world's libraries and classrooms, and of the structures of centre and periphery that characterise the field. At the heart of our bibliometric considerations, beyond the usual citation indicators based on Scopus, arguably the most complete database of its kind in the world, is the idea of measuring the presence of scientific authors and/or book publishers in the world's library systems as well as in the world's lecture halls. These indicators - called Libcitation and Classroom Citation - are discussed and developed in the various sections of our book. As we show, the claim of'global political science'must now be challenged by the harsh reality of the regional concentration of our discipline in the Western countries of the world, as evidenced by the fact that the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the United States alone account for two-fifths of all political science titles recorded worldwide in Scopus-indexed journals from 1996 to 2021, and, also for more than 50% of the world's academic libraries recorded in OCLC WorldCat. Worse still, no less than two-thirds of the'global'political science journals indexed in Scopus are published in these three countries! With all the weaknesses of our new evaluation systems, which were first presented in German in a series of articles in the Gruyter journal Bibliotheksdienst, and which are now being presented step by step in an expanded English version, substantially supplemented by new contributions and perspectives, claim to be an innovation in a global academic world in which the'ranking'of scholarly communities and academic book publishers is unfortunately becoming more and more important. Our ranking systems focus on the real presence of scholarship around the globe.

Academic librarianship is due for a major paradigm shift in response to the existential threats facing the library profession and higher education, and library workers are leading this shift with new ideas about community, feminism, education, and social change. The Critical Librarianship and Pedagogy Symposium: Reflections, Revisions, and New Works collects expanded and updated presentations given at the Critical Librarianship and Pedagogy Symposium (CLAPS) held biennially at the University of Arizona Libraries. This anthology provides a toolkit for critical library pedagogy that recognizes how knowledge is created within historical and deeply politicized contexts. Authors working in library or disciplinary teaching fields explore intersections between information literacy and critical pedagogy and provide current thinking, assessment, and reflection on their practices of teaching students how to recognize and critique the oppressive power structures inherent in educational systems. The work done by librarians is analyzed to reveal the socioeconomic frameworks that drive the costs of our labor. Divided into five parts—Critical Pedagogies in the Classroom, Feminist Library Practices, The Labor of Librarianship, Practices of Care, and Community Archives—chapters include explorations of the advent of neoliberalism in higher education, social justice, white fragility, supporting neurodivergence in education, and disability-rights activism. They use lenses such as queer, intersectional, feminist, and critical race theory to examine subjects, and include practices for sustainable teaching, facilitating dialogue in the classroom, and using tools such as user experience or empathic design. The Critical Librarianship and Pedagogy Symposium offers ways to incorporate critical pedagogy theory into your own practices as educators, both within the library and in higher education in general.

Organizational Transformation in Academic Libraries: Discourse, Process, Product helps inform discussions in academic libraries on organizational patterns and divisions of labor. The book gives librarians leverage to think outside traditional bureaucratic structures and re-think how libraries serve their patrons. It examines existing structures and proposes new organizational models and lays out a process for planning organizational transformation and implementing a new organization. Seven chapters offer a radical vision of library transformation, proposing a collaborative process for changing academic libraries into organizations fit for the second quarter of the twenty-first century and beyond. Academic libraries are changing in the face of information technologies, economic pressures and globally disruptive events such as the current pandemic. As a result, practical solutions for transforming organizational and workflow structures for the future are desperately needed. The title analyzes existing organizational structures and proposes new ones that can be adapted to individual libraries. It discusses the challenges posed by virtual learning environments, digital initiatives and resources, changes to cataloging standards and succession planning, as well as changes brought about by the current pandemic. - Presents a clear analysis of organizational patterns and divisions of labor in the future of the academic library - Gives specific organizational models and presents a process for planning and implementing organizational transformation - Advocates for, and supports the radical transformation of, library organization and workflow structures - Proposes a collaborative process for transforming academic libraries into future-ready organizations - Considers current challenges and aims to support the design of new organizations ready for the second quarter of the 21st century and beyond

Der Band befasst sich auf der Grundlage bibliothekssoziologischer und lernpsychologischer Erkenntnisse mit dem Lernen und Arbeiten in Wissenschaftlichen Bibliotheken. Er ist sowohl für Bibliothekswissenschaft und Hochschuldidaktik als auch für Bibliotheksbau und Hochschulplanung nützlich, da er eine Lücke in der theoretischen Auseinandersetzung mit dem Lernen im Raum der Bibliothek füllt und Grundlagen für die Planung und Gestaltung liefert.

In dem Lehrbuch wird der enge Zusammenhang zwischen dem wissenschaftlichen Schreiben in der Hochschulbibliothek sowie der Schlüsselqualifikation Informationskompetenz systematisch sowie konkret anhand von verschiedenen Schreibszenarien aufgezeigt. Für die erfolgreiche Anfertigung einer studentischen Hausarbeit, einer Abschlussarbeit (Bachelor, Master) oder einer Dissertation bedarf es eines fundierten Wissens beim Umgang mit wissenschaftsrelevanter Information und des Beherrschens dazu notwendiger Fähigkeiten und Fertigkeiten bei der Recherche, der Auswahl, der Bewertung und der Verarbeitung von Information. Das Konzept des forschenden Lernens, wie es an den Hochschulen verfolgt wird, spielt dabei ebenso eine Rolle wie die Schwellenkonzepte der Informationskompetenz, die den dynamischen Zusammenhang der Informationspraxis mit dem Forschungsprozess in den Disziplinen betonen. Die Ressourcen und Dienstleistungen, die die Hochschulbibliothek zur Förderung und Unterstützung des wissenschaftlichen Schreibens zu Verfügung stellen, werden einbezogen.

Supporting ethnic studies is an opportunity to uplift diverse stories and perspectives and to build and affirm such communities and their voices, experiences, and histories. Ethnic studies librarianship requires engagement, a desire to listen and engage with one's constituents, and a focused approach to re-humanizing and emphasizing the voices of those who are being studied. Race and ethnicity, despite their abstractness, have real, concrete meaning and consequences in American society. Being able to see who speaks and who is silenced matters, and ethnic studies librarianship supports the intellectual journey of students in becoming aware of the various ways we see the world and the numerous stories we tell and come across in our lifetime. Ethnic Studies in Academic and Research Libraries serves as a snapshot of critical work that library workers are doing to support ethnic studies, including areas focusing on ethnic and racial experiences across the disciplines. Other curriculums or programs may emphasize race, migration, and diasporic studies, and these intersecting areas are highlighted to ensure work supporting ethnic studies is not solely defined by a discipline, but by commitment to programs that uplift underserved and underrepresented ethnic communities and communities of color. Twenty chapters are broken into three thorough sections: •Instruction, Liaison Engagement, and Outreach •Collections Projects and Programs •Collaborations, Special Projects, and Community Partnerships Ethnic studies programs, faculty, and students can lack visibility in librarianship, though there are many opportunities to engage with and support these interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary programs. Ethnic Studies in Academic and Research Libraries captures case studies, programs, and engagements within the field(s) of ethnic studies and how library workers are creating and documenting important support services and resources for these communities of learners, scholars, activists, and educators. We need to think critically about how we support ethnic studies and our faculty colleagues in these departments, especially during challenging times in fiscal crises and the systemic violence and oppression that occurs in higher education, in our institutions, in our communities, in our profession, and in our histories. What we collect, preserve, share, and uplift reflects who we are and our priorities.

Faced with increased budget cuts, libraries must continue to advance their services through new technologies and practices in order to keep pace with the rapid changes society is currently facing. The once traditional in-person services offered can no longer be the only option, and to keep themselves afloat, libraries must offer more in terms of digital services. The convenience of offering mobile and digital services brings a new wave of accessibility to libraries and a new question on just how much libraries will need to change to meet the newfound needs of its patrons. Beyond offering these digital services, libraries are incorporating other types of technology in multifaceted ways such as utilizing artificial intelligence practices, social media, and big data management. Moreover, libraries are increasingly looking for ways to partner and collaborate with the community, faculty, students, and other libraries in order to keep abreast of the best practices and needs of their users. The Research Anthology on Collaboration, Digital Services, and Resource Management for the Sustainability of Libraries explores emerging strategies and technologies that are redefining the role of the library within communities and academia. This reference book covers extensive ground on all the ways libraries have shifted to manage their resources, digitalize their services, and market themselves within the new technological revolution. These continued shifts for libraries come with benefits, challenges, and future projections that are critical for discussion as libraries continue to strive to remain updated and relevant in times of change. This book is ideal for librarians, archivists, collection managers, IT specialists, electronic resource librarians, practitioners, stakeholders, researchers, academicians, and students who are interested in the current state of libraries and how they are transforming to fit modern needs.

In the last decade, the United States has seen a marked increase in nontraditional students, a diverse population of adult students who attend college while working, supporting families, or negotiating any number of circumstances that might delay the completion of their higher education goals. Studies have consistently shown that nontraditional students are more likely than traditional students to not complete their degree work or take longer to graduate for a variety of reasons, including outside responsibilities, difficulties adjusting to academic and campus environments, and new or different learning methodologies. As a result of the rise in nontraditional students and university-wide efforts to increase student retention and graduation rates, academic libraries are shifting and expanding their capabilities in order to better provide resources, services, and spaces to meet users'unique needs. Supporting Today's Students in the Library collects current strategies from all types of academic libraries for retaining and graduating nontraditional students, with many of them based on learning theories and teaching methodologies. The book explores methods for overcoming language barriers, discusses best practices, and presents case studies that support the changing student population. Additionally, Supporting Today's Students in the Library provides a variety of ideas for new services, spaces, and outreach opportunities that support nontraditional students on campus and beyond. With targeted ideas and strategies for increasing agency and engagement, as well as addressing the diverse needs and challenges of nontraditional student populations, Supporting Today's Students in the Library: Strategies for Retaining and Graduating International, Transfer, First-Generation, and Re-Entry Students demonstrates how academic libraries are successfully serving these students.

This survey studies how colleges and universities use open access resources as a supplement to or replacement for academic journals and other materials. Although the primary focus of the report is on scholarly publishing, especially academic journals, some questions relate to other information vehicles such as textbooks, audio-visual resources and print books.As a response to the COVID crisis many colleges and universities are turning to open access resources and this report gives highly detailed data on the extent of use of a broad range of specific open access resources including but not limited to Google Scholar, Google Books, LOCKSS, the Directory of Open Access Journals, PubMed Central, arXiv, bioRxiv, MedRxiv, ResearchGate the Directory of Open Access Books, OAPEN, the Online Guide to Open Access Journals, PDQY, Open Access Theses and Dissertations, the Registry of Research Data Repositories, MedEdPortal, the Open Access Directory, OpenDOAR, the Free Music Archive, EBSCO Open Dissertations, Science.Gov, OpenStax, MERLOT, Lumen Learning, the Open Course Library, Boundless and Saylor Academy.

How can a library engage students and pro-actively create information literacy? What impact might that have? These vital questions are addressed, at an international level, in this timely new book. Delving into various real-life case studies of interventions in colleges and universities from Canada to India, the chapters in this edited collection showcase relevant examples of efforts to improve engagement with library resources. The authors highlight instances of specifically designed student-centered workshops, a university partnership with a writing center, the role of a library in Africa as a source of socio-economic transformation, and many more examples of innovations and collaboration between libraries and students. The experiences shared by authors in this book are a valuable resource for librarians and researchers across the world interested in how their collaborative efforts can promote the value of information literacy and help create opportunities for students to build their library practice skills.

Compounded with the emergence of information technology, information services have become more complex. In order to break the bottleneck in providing information services, the information behavior of the user community must be studied and library staff must be effectively trained to identify, adapt, and satisfy the information needs of every type of information seeker. Innovations in the Designing and Marketing of Information Services provides emerging research exploring the theoretical and practical aspects of improving and expanding information resources and services in a cost-effective way and enables librarians to plan and present information services for the betterment of civil society. Featuring coverage on a broad range of topics such as e-resources, knowledge ethics, and user-friendly technology, this book is ideally designed for librarians, information scientists, behavioral scientists, information technologists, marketers, marketing executives, academicians, researchers, and students.

Providing practical and theoretical chapters on academic library services for graduate students, this volume helps information professionals support this often-overlooked campus population to address their multiple roles and identities as students and as future faculty members or professionals.As more and more students attend graduate programs, many higher education institutions have established professional development programs to help graduate students learn the wide range of skills needed to be successful as both students and as future professionals or academics. To presuppose that graduate students are proficient library users is a mistake. Graduate students need and want help, and many libraries are now offering specialized services for this diverse population. Contributors to this edited volume provide case studies and practical advice on academic library services for graduate students that support their multiple roles on campus and address the complex social and emotional issues related to their other roles as parents, working adults, caretakers, and more. As academic libraries shift from functioning primarily as collections repositories to collaborating as key players in discovery and knowledge creation, value-added services for graduate students are even more central to libraries'changing missions. This book makes an important contribution to the ongoing professional conversation and is a useful tool for librarians who want to better support graduate students at their institutions.

The Engaged Library provides case studies, examples, and discussion of how academic libraries can create successful partnerships to contribute to the integration of high-impact practices on their campuses, and ways to execute these practices well. Each chapter addresses one of the ten original high-impact practices through the lens of library partnerships, contributions, and opportunities, and provides ideas for and examples of outcomes assessment. A variety of types of institutions are included, and some chapters discuss initiatives that involve a combination of multiple practices. Across all of the chapters and case studies, you will find examples of well-orchestrated and engaging models that rely on instructional teams of faculty, advisers, librarians, and technology professionals to enhance and deepen the practices'impact on student learning. The framework for The Engaged Library challenges academic libraries to plan, develop, and execute efforts to incorporate these practices intentionally, systematically, and for greater engagement and impact. It can help foster a shared language around high-impact practices within academic librarianship that will highlight and articulate how libraries have been and can increasingly become integral to the success of these engaged learning practices across academia. As high-impact practices become a leading measure of engaged pedagogy on college campuses, this volume can provide an entry point for academic librarians looking to lead, partner, and contribute to these practices on their campus.

Postsecondary institutions are high stress environments for many students: Undergraduates may be living on their own for the first time, coping with demanding academic requirements, and experimenting with drugs, alcohol, and new social relationships and identities. Advanced degree students tend to have a high level of job insecurity and are also more likely than other students to be juggling family obligations on top of their studies, research, and teaching. Mental health disorders have their peak onset during the university and college years, and severe anxiety is on the rise. Many university libraries across North America are expanding their service offerings to include student wellness initiatives or are making their space available to other campus entities to provide wellness support as mental health issues and awareness of mental health challenges on campus have increased. Student Wellness and Academic Libraries gathers multiple perspectives on wellness programming and discussions of current activities, with case studies, commentary, and research on student wellness initiatives in academic libraries. Some chapters explore one initiative in detail, and others look at a variety of activities and how they fit within a strategy; some focus on a particular aspect of wellness, and others on a particular at-risk group. Academic libraries have always promoted student success through teaching and research support and through instruction in information literacy, a skill that is understood to be useful not just for academic success but also for life success. For college and university students, learning to live well and attend to their mental health are life skills they can and should develop during this time, and academic libraries are increasingly playing a role in this part of the student experience. Student Wellness and Academic Libraries can help those charged with leading these efforts gain valuable insight into ideas and directions the library can take in pursuit of that goal.

A Golden Age classic. In this “sparkling academic mystery,” murders plague a university library—and only an intrepid book cataloger can solve them (Publishers Weekly). For the staff of the library at the center of The Widening Stain, it's easy enough to dismiss the death of a woman who fell from a rolling ladder as nothing more than an unfortunate accident. It's more difficult, however, to explain away the strangled corpse of a man found inside a locked room, surrounded by rare and obscure erotica. And that's not all—a valuable manuscript has vanished from the stacks, which means that both a killer and a thief are loose in the facility's hallowed halls. It's up to chief cataloger Gilda Gorham to solve the crimes but, unless she's careful, the next death in the library might just be her own... A humorous and literary Golden Age mystery, The Widening Stain is adorned with as many playful limericks as it is with bibliographic details. The book, which offers a satirical glimpse of academic life at an institution strongly resembling Cornell University, is one of the most beloved bibliomysteries (mysteries involving books) of all time. “[A] smart and humorous classic.” —Mystery Scene “Baffling... a good story with an academic atmosphere.” —The New York Times

At the heart of digital scholarship are universal questions, lessons, and principles relating both to the mission of higher education and the shared values that make an academic library culture. But while global in aspirations, digital scholarship starts with local culture drawn from the community. Editors Chin Roemer and Kern invite you into their institutional workspace, the University of Washington, gathering voices from a range of positions that speak to the facets of digital scholarship. This mosaic of perspectives reveals the challenges, questions, and personalities that sit at the nexus of academic libraries and digital scholarship culture. Reflecting on UW's approach, you'll gain insights for your own institution on topics such as ways to create awareness of digital services through training; supporting students as creators of content; blending existing analog collections with ongoing digital initiatives using a media lab; creating a campus-wide, discipline agnostic, data repository service; how a popular digital storytelling workshop spawned digital scholarship across campus; digital scholarship consultations, viewed from an instructional technologist's approach; the place of digital scholarship in the fabric of a revitalized urban community; four strategies for teaching research skills within an online-only bachelor's degree program; and assessment findings from focus groups, surveys, digital pedagogy projects, and Omeka case studies. By thoroughly exploring a single institution, this unique volume elucidates the many ways in which digital scholarship can express the values, priorities, opportunities, and challenges of the community's intellectual and technical environment.

Open and Equitable Scholarly Communications is an action-oriented research agenda designed to provide practical, actionable information for academic librarians; include the perspectives of historically underrepresented communities in order to expand the profession's understanding of research environments and scholarly communication systems; and point librarians and other scholars toward important research questions to investigate.

In Academic and Digital Libraries: Emerging Directions and Trends, the authors open by identifying the technological revolution in the academic libraries from 1930s until now, finding that the growth of technology in the academic libraries is largely similar to the phases of human growth through four stages; Stage of Birth (1930 - 1959), Stage of Childhood (1960 - 1979), Stage of Youth (1980 - 1989) and Stage of Maturity (1990 - 2017). Therefore, the authors present essential information about 3DHT in order to understand the importance of this technology in our life, particularly in academic libraries. Next, the authors aim to determine how and to what extent humanities students in Poland make use of digital libraries. Emphasis was placed on three factors: time spent working at the library, duration of use of the library, and the proportion of materials used that come from the digital library. Next, the book includes research which conducts an environmental scan of current best practices in academic library technology to reflect on future landscapes. The work takes the premise that by projecting out from current leading-edge technology realities, it is possible to better plan for the future. The final chapter examines the concepts of digitization and preservation of information resources in academic libraries. The need for and process of digitization of Libraries resources, as well as the areas of collaboration in digitization and preservation projects are discussed.