Friday, September 12, 2008

US report on research libraries

There was an interesting publication in August from the US' Council on Library and Information Resources.
Council on Library and Information Resources. (2008) No Brief Candle: Reconceiving Research Libraries for the 21st Century. Washington: CLIR. http://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub142/pub142.pdf
This is a collection of "Papers from a meeting convened by CLIR of librarians, publishers, faculty members, and information technology specialists on February 27, 2008 ." The focus is on academic libraries supporting research, rather than teaching, from my scan through it. The concerns and issues are slightly different from those in, for example, the UK, but there are obviously a lot of common themes (most notably, the change in research and scholarly publishing brought about by technology).
I did my usual quick-and-dirty search for the phrase "information literacy" and it only occurred in a section about 21st century scholarly publishing, rather narrowly focused "These discussions raise the larger issue of information literacy in the emerging digital environment. How will publishers help users separate high-quality, peer-reviewed content from other information that is easily available through search mechanisms? How do publishers “brand” their material in the digital environment?" (38). Although collaboration between librarians and academics is one of the themes, it seems to focus more on the need for the librarian to be scholarly and to have a grip on technical change.
There is discussion about this report on the ACRL blog, which is where I found the link to the report.
Photo by Sheila Webber: Torshavn harbour and church, 2007

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