Collaboration in Libraries and Learning Environments

Jurgita Rudžionienė (Vilnius University, Lithuania)

The Electronic Library

ISSN: 0264-0473

Article publication date: 3 November 2014

193

Keywords

Citation

Jurgita Rudžionienė (2014), "Collaboration in Libraries and Learning Environments", The Electronic Library, Vol. 32 No. 6, pp. 923-924. https://doi.org/10.1108/EL-11-2013-0206

Publisher

:

Emerald Group Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2014, Emerald Group Publishing Limited


Following the simple view expressed by one of the authors of this book […] that the purpose of higher education is to service, enable and deliver teaching, learning and research (p. 1), the book could help information professionals and universities to add an exceptional capacity to exploit uncertainties to thrive.

The rapidly changing environment in higher education requires different approaches in decision-making. The book consists of ten chapters. The authors come from different countries, mainly from the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the USA. They are university managers, university administration officers, policy and public affairs managers, managers responsible for students’ services as well as library, library information resources and library systems managers. This should be pointed out as a very valuable aspect of this book.

The main topics of the book describe the changing higher education context, including discussions of the situation from the student perspective. The authors find certain value in working with professional associations, and they analyse future needs and challenges for leadership skills for collaboration. Special attention is drawn to managing complex change collaboratively with some analysis of challenges for academic libraries and collaboration paradoxes. Projects that have been inspired by the use of technology and social media to enrich student experiences are examined in a separate chapter. One can enjoy the chapter that considers developments in collaborative approaches to the enhancement of academic library space, and others could find enhanced value in collaborative service provision possibilities through super-convergence. Joint-use libraries created between public libraries and university libraries, between community colleges and universities, between public schools and public libraries or between any library organisations wishing to collaborate on the delivery of library services are presented in the last chapter as a way of making appropriate decisions work across organisational boundaries for the benefit of users, and yet with the best use of limited resources.

This book provides library leaders and practitioners with a wide spectrum of theoretical and practical experience in the field of collaboration in libraries and learning environments. It should be noted that the book is based on practical experience coming from a limited amount of countries. On the other hand, using the models and experience described from certain universities enables managers to create successfully their own models of collaboration in their own country or university, and the great advantage of this book is an attempt to bring together different experts working outside the library. Each chapter is provided with a list of references, and an index is included at the end of the book.

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