What's happening in your library?

[Janellyn P Kleiner <jkleiner@lsu.edu>]

Today's libraries are confronted by a multitude of issues and I would like
to suggest that we turn our attention to some of those. Open access is
currently in transition. It may succeed or it may fail. Time and
experience will be the deciding factors. We have important issues of
immediate concern that we need to discuss. Why not focus on one or all of
the following rather than this ongoing open access debate that has been
dominating liblicense in recent weeks.

For example, the current issue of

1.    The 21st-Century Chemistry Library

Article Location:
--------------------
http://pubs.acs.org/email/cen/html101605195420.html

>From Chemical & Engineering News
http://www.cen-online.org

This explores the issue of what libraries are doing with satellite/branch
libraries. Are these changes occurring at your institution? Are other
forms of consolidation taking place at your university? Are you planning
to move in this direction? What are the forces behind this movement? Will
consolidation improve or diminish library services and librarians?

2.  Developing and maintaining electronic libraries for the future. We
have been building and housing print libraries for centuries. Electronic
libraries bring new issues to the table. How can we best preserve those
contents? How are we managing this array of resources in our institutions?
Is it possible to build comprehensive collections of e-resources?

3.  How are increasing journal prices and the need for more electronic
resources impacting our collections? Are we becoming a generation of
librarians who spend too much of our time ‘balancing budgets’ or fund
raising rather than developing and housing the collections our faculties
need? Is the budget shaping our decisions more so than our needs?

4.  What about Google? Is Google just the leader among network developers
and publishers or just the first of many such partnerships? Is there a
threat here? Publishers too quickly jump to defend their piece of the pie
but what about libraries? I see Google’s new project as having more
potential to negatively affect libraries than publishers. Google promotes
books, and as time goes by and publishers see this as the bonanza it truly
is, publishers can sell more books directly to the people. What happens to
libraries when publishers’ markets are primarily consumers? Will
libraries evolve into repositories of regional historical information
only?

5.  What place do institutional repositories have in this changing
landscape?

6.  How do we educate future librarians for this transitional environment?

I'm sure you can add other questions and issues that need discussion and
that are of immediate importance to our profession and to libraries. This
listserv provides the forum to exchange ideas on issues of tremendous
import to the future of libraries and librarianship. Is your library
involved in any of these quests so important to our future? Please take
some time to tells us what you're doing in this changing world of 
scholarly communications.

Jane Kleiner
Associate Dean of Libraries for Collection Services
The LSU Libraries
Louisiana State University
Baton Rouge, LA 70803
Phone: 225-578-2217
Fax: 225-578-6825
E-Mail: jkleiner@lsu.edu