Fall2006Q2

Question #2
As library collections move from hard-copy-owned content to digital-leased content, librarians are faced with a variety of management issues, including dealing with licensing issues, developing infrastructure, and providing different kinds of customer services. One consequence has been a decline in the number of users who use content within the library itself. Is this a bad thing? Will the increase in out-of-building users change the nature of the library itself?

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Dealing with the intellectual property and licensing restriction issues, moving around by using the fair-use. Teach the patrons the respect of copyright issue Increase the e-reference services, e-mail, and chat; ask reference questions via IM or through **[|**Meebo.com**].** Phone, plus keeping face to face reference desk Train and educate the librarians about new tech. Tools Find a fund to support the digital environment, digitization, decision making for the preservation to guarantee the long time information access. Provide information literacy to the users. Increase out-of-building users will never change the nature of the library, it will be modification in the library infrastructure, changing the environment will not change the basic principal of the library services such as organize, store, accesses , preserve the information. However, the increase of out-of-building users will increase the number, the technological and intellectual knowledge of library users and the society as a whole. Laila

Jody: Whether this is a "bad" thing or not depends on your point of view. Is change bad? Sometimes yes, sometimes no; sometimes it seems so at the time, but later it appears to have been a good thing. So it is with the shift of users out of the library. Movement to digital materials is not the only reason users no longer come to the library; increasingly, they are searching the web on their own for their answers, and are remarkably satisfied with their results (regardless of the quality). Less and less do they turn to librarians for assistance, or to our webpages at all. This shift is indeed changing the nature of the library itself, as we are now required to defend the relevancy of our jobs in a world where the users are almost all going to Google for their information. As funding becomes more restricted, and administrators look for where to cut costs, libraries are more and more likely to become the slaughtered pig, if we cannot justify our existence by morphing our culture, our work, our holdings to better meet the needs of our users, at the point of need. We are being challenged to find new niches in a rapidly changing landscape; the bedrock we thought we stood on has crumbled to dust beneath our feet. Not only do we need to find better ways to provide access to our materials and services, we also need to expand the range of our domain to curate web content, teach information literacy, develop open access repositories, create digital collections with web agent support, and master the growing problem of digital preservation. Is this bad? I don't know. But, yes, the face of libraries must change, or they will quickly become a curiosity of the past.