After blogging about Carol Tenopir’s fascinating library value seminar the other week I was interested to see a view about how librarians are struggling with library value metrics in this slideshow ‘Refining the Academic Library’ (courtesy of a Google+ post from Ben Showers). The slides are from the Education Advisory Board in the US. The Education Advisory Board ‘provides best practice research and practical advice to academic, business, and student affairs leaders at the nation’s leading universities.’
The slides themselves cover the challenges facing libraries and talk through the transformation steps involved in changing the model of delivery from a face-to-face, print-based, ‘just-in-case’ business model, to a digital, ‘just-in-time’ model. Ranging through the issues of the rising costs of journals and how libraries are increasingly being disintermediated (although interestingly that view contradicts a comment from Carol Tenopir that academics may not read journals in the library but still the majority were using library resources as their main source for journal articles), through to looking at the power of Google’s digitisation potential compared with a typical academic library, the slides are a really good summary of the issues facing academic libraries and how academic libraries might move forward.
A lot of the content covers the challenges facing institutions with large physical collections and a building that is the focus of many of their traditional services, so some of that isn’t relevant to my particular interest. But many of the challenges and solutions around eresources, ebooks and support services are very relevant. 
One of the slides advocates ‘Going Where the Students Are’ which is something that we try to do as much as possible. So we have Library Resources embedded and linked within the Virtual Learning Environment and links to various library websites. We also have information literacy activities and have the goal of embedding as much as possible into VLE courses.
But that isn’t without issue. By closely intergrating the library so students can follow a link to resources directly from their course materials you can easily make the library invisible to users. The value of the physical library is that it makes it clear to students that when they go through the door, the resources within are provided by the ‘Library’ Replicating that feeling when in a virtual environment is quite a challenge and something that library portals have tried to address. A ‘brought to you by the Library’ pop-up message is feasible to do but potentially intrusive and irritiating to users when it pops-up on every single library resource link.
The slides give a really good run through the challenges and issues for libraries with lots of useful material that are going to be quite helpful in telling the sort of stories that we will need to put across over the next few years. As a final thought it’s also interesting to see the NCSU mobile services being mentioned in the slides, as they have been something that we have looked at quite a lot when planning the new mobile library website that we now have made available here
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