Guest editorial

What are the new paradigms for academic libraries in the digital age? What are the new paradigms for information services in the digital age?

Let me briefly introduce you to the main topics of the 8th International Bielefeld Conference: topics, which can be expected to be of key relevance for the strategy of libraries in the digital age. You will find a representative sample of the conference papers in this volume. In addition, presentations can be found on the conference website (http://conference.ub.uni-bielefeld.de/2006/docs/).

Transnational networks and joint strategies

No one library in the world is today in a position to develop information services on their own.

The plethora of digital information, transnational search services and subject gateways, international digital libraries, the definition of information description and access standards, new models of scholarly publishing, and the preservation of cultural heritage and science records – we could easily continue to specify the apparently endless list of new competences, concepts,policies and technologies for libraries.

In the pre-digital world librarians were free to collaborate; in the digital,globally networked world of information, librarians have no other choice than working closely together.

In Germany, the Bertelsmann Foundation, together with the German Library Association (DBV), initiated a collaborative approach to formulate a joint strategy for German libraries by assembling a nationwide group of experts in a series of publications.

Four European countries (Denmark, Germany, the UK and The Netherlands) felt the need to support knowledge-sharing among libraries and information service providers. The result is the new Knowledge Exchange Office in Copenhagen. The German Goethe-Institute, which represents German culture abroad, has a well organised system in place, comprising a widely dispersed, decentralised network of libraries, supported by centres which provide a shared infrastructure for regions around the world.

Rethinking information services I – challenges and support for library managers

Where are we heading as academic information service providers? What will be our areas of activity, where the focus of our strategy? How can library managers cope with the new challenges for academic information services?

On the one hand, there is the need to justify the resources invested into our services. What is the balance between investment and outcome for the users? On the other hand, libraries need a much clearer picture of their users’needs. “Customer intelligence” is a marketing concept in the commercial world, which will find its way into library managers’ strategy repertoire.

Are new converged organisational models for libraries and other academic service units the solution for integrated service concepts? Or can integrated services be equally offered by collaborating service units, without a tighter organisational umbrella?

Rethinking information services II – innovative services and future challenges for libraries

Offering support infrastructure for scholarly publishing and e-science will become, beyond repositories and preservation, two main areas of activity for academic libraries. E-science is a new approach which regards other types of information, in particular research data, as an integral part of a future information service infrastructure. But e-science is more than just research data: it encompasses new ways of generating knowledge – supported by information technology – within all academic disciplines and it considers a self-organising middleware infrastructure within scientific communities as an important element.

What will the role of libraries in e-science be? And how do digital libraries relate to e-science? The concept and technology of digital libraries itself will change in the future, and libraries and computer scientists will work more closely together.

Searching scholarly information in the digital age

Preparing the Bielefeld Conference, I came across a new book, written by John Battelle (2005), co-founding editor of Wired and founder of The Industry Standard, both journals closely linked to the new Internet economy. The book is entitled: The Search: How Google and its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed our Culture. That is it! The title of this book expresses explicitly one of the major paradigm changes for academic libraries and their services. The search for scholarly information, a key activity of libraries for centuries, has become a competitive market –and a prosperous business. According to John Regazzi (2004),Elsevier’s Managing Director of Market Development and CEO of Elsevier Inc., internet search engines have reached sales of US$3 billion and a market capitalization and estimated value of nearly US$30 billion in their last five years of development. Google entered the stock market in Summer 2004. Since then their share value has quadrupled.

It does not go beyond the power of imagination to think of scholarly information discovery environments without our current online library catalogues and databases. Instead we may see scholarly search engines like Google Scholar,Scirus, Cite Seer, Microsoft and Yahoo – and others to come – as the search tools of choice for our users. I personally would not be afraid of these scenarios, as long as libraries can choose between a range of service providers and as long as we can integrate external services through standard technology,such as web services, into modernised library information service systems. Bielefeld University Library has been taking the first steps towards integrating Google Scholar and selected functionalities into BASE, the Bielefeld Academic Search Engine. From our point-of-view, it makes good sense to re-use existing services instead of re-building everything from scratch. But those external service providers must be willing to become part of other systems, and so far we have made good progress with Google Scholar.

Hands-on workshops

For the first time, the 8th International Bielefeld Conference organised“hands-on workshops”, offering reports on practical implementations and concepts. The thematic areas covered three central topics for libraries in the digital age:

• 1.

  National and international networking of digital repositories, which promises to form the new, cross-institutional infrastructure for all types of science and scholarship records. The relevance of this topic has just been underpinned by a European grant for Digital Repository Infrastructure Vision for European Research (DRIVER), a project that aims to build the testbed for a new repository infrastructure in Europe.

• 2.

  Archiving and preserving the records of science through nationwide coordinated networks and projects.

• 3.

  Marketing approaches for libraries, placing the users’ interests and demands at the heart of library managers’ strategies.

Conclusion and acknowledgements

The programme committee for the 8th International Bielefeld Conference assembled a programme, which proved to be the right framework to discuss many of the aspects described above. The impressive number of almost 500 participants from 35 countries, who again came together in Bielefeld, was encouraging for the organisers to continue their efforts with this conference. My warmest thanks go to my colleagues on the Programme Committee, Ronald Milne from Oxford University(UK) and Hans Geleijnse from Tilburg University (NL).

Summing up my thanks to everybody who helped to make this conference happen,I have to emphasise the unbroken enthusiasm of my own colleagues at Bielefeld University Library. Every second year, when the conference preparations reach their peak, almost 100 of my colleagues lend a hand to carry out all the upcoming multiple smaller and bigger tasks. This conference, I must stress again, would not exist without the unanimous support of all library staff.

My special thanks also goes to Emma Leeson, Oxford University Libraries, for her assistance in preparing the proceedings.

I wish you an inspiring and thought-provoking read.

Norbert LossauBielefeld University, Germany