Digital Library Services and Digital Collections

Libraries are successful to the extent that they can bridge communities and can leverage the diversity of the quest, the research, and the discovery. By building bridges among various sectors, libraries will be able to define themselves in the next generation.

"In 2006 the ACRL Executive Committee asked the ACRL Research Committee to determine ten assumptions about the future that would have a significant impact on academic libraries and librarians. In the ensuing months, members of the Research Committee reviewed previous similar reports; surveyed ACRL committees, councils, and sections; conducted literature reviews; and reviewed the ACRL Environmental Scan of 2003. What emerged was a long list of statements that, after deliberations, was shortened to the ten most pertinent assumptions. These assumptions identify present conditions that the committee feels will have a significant impact on how academic libraries and librarians plan for the next ten years."

The authors discuss recent studies conducted to gage the academic librarian's and faculty member's view on the increasing use and offering of electronic resources. One could conclude from the studies that the "transition to an electronic environment poses significant strategic and management challenges for higher education" and that there is a "need for libraries to take leadership in helping academia's transition to the new environment".

The collective expertise of digital libraries in making available the diverse literatures of science and artistic expression, in concert with the increasing sophistication of commercial partners and the development of distributed, interactive forms of publishing, require libraries to chart the engineering of new architectures for teaching, learning, and research. Digital libraries must work to forge the new collaborations required to enable and build these services.