Internet editorial
Writing this column at the start of another year I find myself pondering on what the future might hold; on the rate of change within reference services, on technology generally and the internet in particular. Most intriguing of all is how reference libraries and services might look in five years time. What changes will we witness over the coming years in the areas of stock, space and services within the reference library?
Services, what they might be and how they might be delivered, tend to be moving in the same direction in both public and academic libraries. Most obvious is the move towards serving the needs of independent lifelong learners who use the resources of the library or learning resource centre to support and enhance their learning experience. There are a lot of factors to be considered, not least the necessary fundamental shift in culture from resource and book focus to a learner and technologies focus. Inherent in this shift has to be the acceptance that Web 2.0 and Library 2.0 technologies are set to empower the user, and, quite rightly, this demands greater creativity on the part of the librarian.
Space where services are delivered is becoming one of the most exciting areas of library policy and management activity. The space typically required by a traditional library design has, for hundreds of years, needed to consider the size of the stock holding and the policy on stock retention and renewal. With the constraint of physical size becoming less important and in some cases almost irrelevant, coupled with the ability to deliver services beyond the walls, new library design concepts are beginning to emerge. In an electronic world space may seem less important, certainly space for storage, however the library user will most likely need to operate a range of specialist and non-specialist equipment in order to access resources. Many of the old issues remain, albeit in different guises; for example, when planning for the amount of natural light that should be allowed into the library building – are we considering bookstock preservation issues or are we concerned about the glare on computer screens? Are enquiry desks, returns counters and large bookstack areas actually needed in the new era of radio frequency identification, self-issue systems and wi-fi technologies? Communal areas juxtaposed with, and zoned into, dedicated quiet areas, will, one hopes, challenge the stereotypical image of the stuffy imposing building. Stock retrenchment, as more and more physical materials are replaced by electronic sources, is a trend that seems certain to continue. With,for example e-journals as a source of reference material, there are bound to be challenges ahead. As we have seen so many times in the recent past, changes in business models will impact on publishers and this in turn will filter down the chain to the library and its users.
Of course when we try to predict the future we are often tempted to glean some clues from the recent past, perhaps to spot a trend or to decipher a sequence in a complex pattern. For the past eight years this column has witnessed and reported on the ever-changing world of electronic reference work. It has been an interesting period of change and one that will be remembered for the impact it has had and how it has transformed, utterly, the library profession.
Ronan O'BeirneInternet Column Editor, Reference Reviews and Principal Libraries Officer, Bradford Libraries, Archives and Information Service, Bradford, UK
