Envisioning Future Academic Library Services: Initiatives, Ideas and Challenges

Citation

Joint, N. (2011), "Envisioning Future Academic Library Services: Initiatives, Ideas and Challenges", Library Review, Vol. 60 No. 5, pp. 435-436. https://doi.org/10.1108/00242531111135344

Here's a cheeky start to a chapter in an edited academic monograph: “Academic publishers don't like edited volumes […]. They groan when academics come along with proposals for edited volumes […]” The author of chapter six of this edited volume goes on to say (of course,) that this particular collection of edited contributions is quite different, because “the contents of this book […] would have been impossible for one individual to cover [etc.]”. Unfortunately the author's initial caveat from her chapter on humanities and social sciences publishing does ring true. The disadvantages of edited volumes which she points out can indeed be detected at times in this work.

So, although the book does, as its blurb says:

[…] bring together renowned authors from across the globe who are breaking traditional moulds and boundaries in a way that will have a profound impact on the way libraries and library services are conceptualized in the years to come […],

there is a down side to this. Some of the renowned authors are writing quite general chapters in isolation from each other, with the result that the final product is sometimes quite heterogeneous and even repetitive in its overall impact. When the reader works through the book in a single continuous read, and comes across, for example, the same quotation from the same source work, saying the same thing three times in three “different” chapters, that reader's patience is liable to be tested (see pp. 8‐9, p. 59 and pp. 106‐7) (De Rosa, 2005; De Rosa et al., 2006). The book costs nearly 50 pounds in paperback, a price which means that hearing the same thing three times grates. Each author is writing perfectly intelligently, and editing out the repetitions would damage each individual contribution, making the end result incoherent. But you can see why publishers “groan when academics come along with proposals for edited volumes”.

On the other hand, having started with the negative, I should also say that I enjoyed a lot of the material in this book, and have come back to some of the more memorable bits in the course of my own work. Some sections were quite original and unfamiliar to me, and I enjoyed the contributions on the future of academic libraries in China and Second Life in particular.

So, the strongest chapters in this work show that it is vital when writing for a visionary work like this to have two qualities: you must be energetic and forward‐thinking, but you should also be specific, with something genuinely original to say. Otherwise you may descend into a bland soup of generic enthusiasm. I felt, for example, that the fifth chapter on Second Life succeeded in saying something highly detailed (there was some real work done here) while championing a web 2.0 development that it is easy to enthuse over, while at the same time saying nothing in particular. There are also nice humorous touches in the chapter designed to make a serious point: I certainly will make sure that, when I venture into Second Life I will remember P. Charles Livermore's advice to a student who added something unsuitable to the front of his avatar. Beware of how your avatar looks from the front, because you see your avatar mostly from 6 feet behind and have little idea of the impression you are making (p. 72). No matter how high tech the application, it is always the “people dimension” that proves the decisive factor in success or failure – an important and serious point to make in writing about something so cutting edge.

In sum, I would say that, despite suffering from the patchiness inherent in edited volumes (which the book itself admits is a problem for publishers), this is a book with plenty to recommend it. It is best sampled rather than read at a single continuous sitting however. And I suspect that, in spite of these reservations, I will be keeping it close to my work station and sampling it profitably at various points in the year to come.