Envisioning Future Academic Library Services: Initiatives, Ideas and Challenges

The first line of the first essay in this book states: “Cavafy's famous poem describes the paralysis induced when waiting for an event that never happens … ” (p. 1). I was sitting in the Taylor Institution, Oxford University's modern European languages library, when I read this. I did not understand the reference. So I reached for my phone, and looked up Cavafy's Wikipedia entry, discovering him to be a Greek‐Egyptian poet. I searched for, and read, the poem on the same device. Then I found the original Greek version on a different web site and used Google Translate to give me direct translations of some of the more awkward‐sounding lines. Although I was surrounded by them, I did not look up a book. I did not even think to do so.

This is typical user behaviour in Western academic libraries today. What then will future academic library services provide? McKnight's book, at times invigorating and at times infuriating, gives many answers to this question. The most successful essays analyse the cutting edge of contemporary concerns from the expert standpoint of the contributors (most of them esteemed). Unfortunately, the least successful essays do the exact same thing, as certain concerns are uncritical, idiosyncratic, or mere hobby‐horses. Lynne Brindley's foreword recommends the book to “library managers, leaders and future leaders” (p. x). She is correct in identifying the target audience, for the book both sets out ways of thinking we must adopt, and ways of thinking it would be best to avoid. This well‐edited and well‐presented volume could also usefully be read by anyone interested in learning about the ways today's librarians are thinking about the future.

For me, most of the frustrations and warning lights came in the first half of the book, which feels too heavily populated by currently fashionable buzzwords, tools and web sites. Blogs are inevitably collocated with wikis, and the number 2.0 is all over the place. Certain statements come dangerously close to hyperbole. Derek Law's contention that “digital natives are, quite simply, different people” (p. 3) is quite simply untrue. Penny Carnaby's claim that “we are experiencing a once‐in‐a‐generation paradigm shift” (p. 17) would benefit from further clarification. The continued fixation among librarians with Second Life is demonstrated in a chapter that does little more than outline what Second Life is and what the author does there. He does not mention that this much‐trumpeted virtual world now has fewer than one million users (people who have logged in at least once in a given calendar month). Predictions about the use of computer‐simulated worlds have failed to come true for long enough that we have reason to be sceptical about using limited library resources to buy virtual islands and populate them with virtual librarians. The technologically deterministic thinking evident in some chapters belittles the libraries and librarians of the past, as though, before the invention of Facebook, libraries were static and conservative, with ways unchanged since the of time of Ptolemy's foundation in Cavafy's hometown of Alexandria.

However, some contributions are excellent. Three are outstanding: McKnight's own chapter – intelligent, clear, and well‐referenced, suggests a variety of ways academic libraries can add value to learning and teaching within the academy. Noting that the library is involved in every stage of student learning and participation in university life, her chapter is essentially a manifesto for increased professionalism and engagement with other support staff. Anticipating the Browne review, she suggests that the present economic crisis may “be the catalyst for forcing change in the way academic libraries and universities deliver their services” (p. 213). Economic factors force us to innovate. Technology, as Michael Gorman has warned us, can lull us with a “siren song” (Gorman, 2007).

Martin Lewis' chapter, on the library's involvement in managing research data, is also concerned with communication, in particular with research students and academic staff. Lewis is ambitious for the profession, suggesting that the management of research data is one area where librarians can use a combination of new and traditional skills to provide national‐scale solutions to a fast‐developing problem in academia. His analysis of the gaps in the education of librarians is acute, as are his suggestions for greater local, national, and international collaboration.

To return to my afternoon in the Taylor Institution, libraries will continue to be more than their management policies, relationships with the academy, and collections, both electronic and print. First, and most importantly, libraries are spaces. Andrew McDonald's thoughtful, deeply‐referenced, yet wholly readable thoughts on the library as twenty‐first century space ought to be required reading for all academic librarians, whether or not they are considering changes to the fabric of their library buildings. McDonald frames the modern academic library in terms of both continuity and change, tasks us to put evidence and research before dogma and premonition, and most essentially of all, reminds us that academic library services exist to serve library users.