Marketing and Outreach for the Academic Library by Eden Bradford Lee;

Author:Eden, Bradford Lee;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 8

It’s the End of the World as We Know It . . . or Is It?

Rebecca Parker and Dana McKay

Looking beyond the New Librarianship Paradigm

Librarianship is often described half-jokingly as “the second oldest profession” (Myburgh and Tammaro, 2013). Not wishing to take the analogy too far, it could be said that the two oldest professions share their basis in a service culture, where the customer is always right and every need is catered to. But for libraries at least, this hasn’t always been the case.

Part of the charm of libraries and the appeal of the profession is that libraries provide their services free of charge. Rather than being perceived as devaluing librarians’ skills by giving them away, libraries are seen as having more intrinsic worth because of it. Yet in an increasingly competitive higher education environment, academic librarians are a conspicuous target. Libraries cost money, and they don’t (obviously) make any. Higher education is rapidly changing, and for the first time libraries and librarians are challenged to justify their value as well as their cost.

This book series looks at librarianship in the twenty-first century, where the role of the academic librarian has expanded to include research metrics, open access, data curation, repositories, and many other areas conceived of as “a new librarianship.” In addition to these new concepts, librarians still retain their traditional skills of information organization, collection management, and reference. This blend of old and new has made libraries indispensable to their parent universities in the first decades of the century. But how long will this last? Like any forward-thinking profession, it is time academic librarians looked into the crystal ball and made some predictions for the future. Are library skills still valuable? Are librarians ready to embrace the next librarianship?

This chapter looks at how academic librarians’ skills can be applied to areas outside libraries, where they are much in demand. These include corporate information management, knowledge management, intranets, search engine optimization, business analysis, enterprise architecture, information policy, and learning space management.

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