How is electronic technology changing the academic library?
This is a watershed change that runs through every aspect of library work — how we do operational support and procure materials, how we catalog things, how we communicate with our constituencies, where we get the information and creative works they seek. How we search, what we search, how we store and generate and share information. We were using electronic systems when I first became a librarian in 1977, so it’s not as new as it seems, but back then we just had automated versions of manual tracking or indexing. What’s new is that the information itself is born digital; it changes constantly. It is produced by everyone, not simply a few commercial enterprises. It is multimedia and iterative and peer-to-peer. The entire learning environment can be digital, the processes as well as the products. This means we need different approaches to license information, describe it, deploy it, recombine it. Library work requires a much broader skill set these days, which we seek through expanding t
