Monday, April 4, 2011

Maintaining the Many Roles of Academic Libraries

The Chronicle reports on a new Ithaka survey, “Ithaka S+R Library Survey 2010: Insights from U.S. Library Directors,” which was previewed at last week’s ACRL conference. 

Key findings of the report include:

  • “Library directors at all types of institutions see supporting teaching and learning as one of their primary missions ...
  • “Library directors believe that it is strategically important that their libraries be seen by users as the principal starting point in the discovery process ...
  • “The librarys role as a buyer of materials remains of primary importance ...
The archive role remains important, too (see pages 12-15).

I was on a panel at ACRL that focused on primary source literacy and included a discussion of using an archives as a learning laboratory. Slides from my part of the presentation are below.