Challenges and Opportunities for

Academic LibrariesCollaborative Imperatives to Support Collections,

Digital Initiatives, and New Services for a Changing Academic Environment

Four Pillars of Library Work

• Curation / Collection Building• Publishing / Dissemination• Engagement with research and learning• Creating and managing spaces devoted to

users and collections

Collaboration Axis

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Courtesy: John Wilkin, Dean University of Illinois Library

Trend 1: Collaborative Collection and Curation

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Challenges:

•Library funding is decreasing as proportion of university budget

•Collections funding is flat – we are just keeping-up with inflation

•Electronic resources take up increasing proportion of budget

Solutions:

Networked approach to collection development, digitization, and even technical services spread costs for infrastructure and allow funds to be allocated toward user needs.

Declining share of resources

Serial Expenditures in ARL Libraries, 1986-2009

Source: Kyrillido and Morris eds. (2011)

Digital Collections:

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Established in 2008

Currently Digitized12,667,070 total volumes6,489,942 book titles330,942 serial titles4,433,474,500 pages568 terabytes150 miles of shelving10,292 tons of books4,759,432 volumes(~38% of total) in the public domain

HathiTrust Digital Library is a digital preservation repository and highly functional access platform. It provides long-term preservation and access services for public domain and in copyright content from a variety of sources, including Google, the Internet Archive, Microsoft, and in-house partner institution initiatives.  http://www.hathitrust.org/home

Annual Operating Cost of Hathi TrustYear Operations

2009 $1,932,830

2010 $1,364,750

2011 $1,969,476

2012 $2,034,749

2013 $1,724,396

Cooperative Collections:

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• Shared Positions:– Cornell U. and

Columbia: Slavic Studies;

• Shared print repositories: – Print Journal backfiles

among 15 universities

Trend 2: Data & Digital Scholarship

10LOD Cloud Diagram as of September 2011CC BY-SA 3.0 Anja Jentzsch

Data Services

11http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=127043

The National Science Foundation and its federal partners commit to the direction by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy to develop policies in collaboration with all stakeholders to accomplish full public access on behalf of science and the future of the United States.

Image Credit: Thinkstock

Data Services

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Impact on Academic Libraries

•Open Data•Data Plan Management•“Big Data” Research

Within Library and Information Science Education New programs focused on:•Data Mining•Data Curation

Digital Scholarship

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Spatial Humanities – Mapping, GIS, Humanities Scholars

Visualization through topic modeling

Textual Analysis – using large digitized collections to analyze impossibly large bodies of work.

Web Archiving – Environmental NGOs

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• Archive of web sites from NGOs around the world (currently over 100 sites)

• Focus on Sustainable Development

• Attempt to collect & preserve “grey literature” from local, non-international, organizations

• Potential use for future scholars

• Could be preservation option for organizations

• Does not require organization’s scarce resources

http://webarchives.cdlib.org/a/WorldSustainability

Digital Acquisitions – “Catch and Release”

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• Fund onsite digitization within regions / countries

• Make resources available in US without export of cultural heritage

• Support new forms of digital research

Trend 3: New Service Models

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Creating new spaces and modes of engagement

International Reference Services

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Slavic Reference Service:•Established in 1976 •Funded by Library and grants from the US State Department. •Nearly 3,000 reference questions per year to patrons around the world•Focus on reference / access through ILL and purchase

International Reference:•Current strategic plan to expand on Slavic model•Hired International Reference Librarian in Summer 2014•Working with librarians across the Library to integrate international into reference services / develop new service areas – Latin America etc…

Engagement / Outreach

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Reception for President of Bosnia and Herzegovina

Music and Culture Lectures Workshops Film

Thank You

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Steve WittAssociate ProfessorHead, International and Area Studies LibraryUniversity of Illinois at Urbana-Champaignswwitt@illinois.edu