This is a book about the future of business school libraries with contributions mainly by business school library directors from the USA and the UK. It is also about the future of research libraries in a self-serve, Internet-connected age.
Business school libraries live in a competitive world. Because their institutions compete for students, for internal and external funding and are constantly challenged to demonstrate their cost-effectiveness, these libraries are in the vanguard for many other library types. ‘Why do we need a [insert library type] library when information is instantly available through [insert one or more of] the Internet, Google, the Cloud, i-something or i-something else?’ And so it goes: if libraries are no longer about books, what is there for librarians to do?
According to the 14 contributors of the 12 chapters, there is plenty to be done, but survival requires selling skills, building relationships and renewing focus on proving value to the parent body. Chapter topics include change management, promotion, designing services and physical spaces, future scenarios and finding allies. For me the most thought-provoking chapter is by Chris Flegg, former librarian at the Melbourne Business School and now Bodleian Business Librarian at Oxford. She believes that ‘most librarians would accept that in the search-engine-dominated environment their libraries have lost their place as the dominant information providers in the public psyche’. Furthermore, she believes that libraries will probably substantially vanish ‘from the value chain as publishers sell their products directly to end-users', and also from the resource discovery picture as the major search engines greatly simplify their discovery and access technologies.
Survival, she says, lies in … – well, dear reader, you can read for yourself in this excellent and highly recommended collection of current, topical and well-indexed essays.