Reimagining the Academic Library

by David W. Lewis

Academic libraries are in the midst of significant disruption. Academic librarians and university administrators know they need to change, but are not sure how. Bits and pieces of what needs to happen are clear, but the whole picture is hard to grasp.

Reimagining the Academic Library paints a simple straightforward picture of the changes affecting academic libraries and what academic librarians need to do to respond to the changes would help to guide future library practice. The aim is to explain where academic libraries need to go and how to get there in a book that can be read in a weekend.

David Lewis provides a readable survey of the current state of academic library practice and proposes where academic libraries need to go in the future to provide value to their campuses. His primary focus is on collections as this is the area with the greatest opportunity for change and is the driver of most library cost. Lewis provides an accessible framework for thinking about how library practice needs to adjust in the digital environment.

The book will be useful not only to academic librarians, but also for librarians to share with presidents and provosts who a concise source for understanding where and how to focus their expenditures on libraries.

Genres: Nonfiction

192 pages, Hardcover

First published May 12, 2016

About the author

David W. Lewis is Dean of the IUPUI University Library and Assistant Vice President Digital Scholarly Communications for Indiana University.

Reviews

[Alexander Rolfe · Rating 3 out of 5]

I appreciate his effort at synthesis, and I agree with much of it. But the book is badly marred by the usual librarian narrative: the journal publishing model is broken and must be abandoned and replaced with open access. He quotes a Huffington Post article that gives Elsevier and other publishers a profit margin about double what they really enjoy, as any quick check on yahoo finance or their publicly-available annual reports will show. Librarians do this all the time. If they don't know the difference between operating profit and net profit, fine-- but then they shouldn't write books about the wickedness of publishers. Lewis also lets slip the fact that universities spend about half of what they used to spend on libraries several decades ago (as a percentage of their overall budget). Over that time collections have grown enormously; my library's journal holdings have increased 60-fold in less than 20 years (not counting open-access titles). In other words, the current model is serving us very well, on the whole. But it's almost impossible to find a librarian who doesn't think something better than capitalism is always just around the corner.

[Mills College Library]

025.1977 L6737 2016

[Michael R · Rating 4 out of 5]

A sound albeit unoriginal discussion of key trends and necessary but challenging shifts in how academic libraries should reposition themselves in the digital age.

[ACRL]

Read by ACRL Member of the Week Mark E. Shelton. Learn more about Mark on the ACRL Insider Blog.

[Mckinley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good points to think about.