From the Chronicle of Higher Education
Know your library user—and worry about who’s not using the library. That’s the main advice to librarians in a new white paper that notes “a growing ambivalence about the campus library” among faculty members as more and more knowledge goes digital.
The report was released last week by Ithaka, a nonprofit organization that promotes the use of technology in higher education. The paper probes the relationship between libraries and the faculty at institutions of all sizes, and how the digital shift is altering that relationship.
The authors, Roger Schonfeld and Ross Housewright, pulled together the highlights from two surveys conducted in 2006: one of American faculty members and another of librarians in charge of collection development. Mr. Schonfeld is Ithaka’s manager of research; Mr. Housewright is a research analyst. Ithaka conducted similar faculty surveys in 2000 and 2003, so the new report is able to examine trends over a six-year period…. MORE
