It's a small world afterall

One of the great pleasures of doing research is connecting the dots in our very small world. Last night I was doing some reading on academic freedom. I was reading a chapter on "Political Mobilization and Resistance to Censorship" (Downs, 2006) when I stumbled across a reference to to a book by political scientist Charles Epp (1998) "Wait, that's Chuck!" I thought. Sure enough, I hunted down the book on WorldCat, found a link to a Google Book preview, and confirmed that the author is someone I know from college, and the spouse of one of my wife's good friends. Wow, small world. But then the world got a little smaller, as I perused the acknowledgements of Dr. Epp's book and saw that he mentioned a political science faculty member that I've served on a committee with here at Baylor. I had this happy little moment, seeing diverse and distant threads from my life come together in this moment of research.

Downs, D. A. (2006). Political Mobilization and Resistance to Censorship. In Academic freedom at the dawn of a new century: How terrorism, governments, and culture wars impact free speech (pp. 61-78). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Epp, C. (1998). The rights revolution: Lawyers, activists, and supreme courts in comparative perspective. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

The Future of the Academic Library

I've been thinking a lot lately about the future of the academic library. I attended the University of Oklahoma Library's annual conference last week, which focused how research libraries might maintain relevance moving forward. Also swirling around in my head is a story on MSNBC about Google's unbelievably massive campaign to acquire permissions for it's book scanning project.

The academic library has centered around its role as a storehouse and preserver of the written word. Yes, yes, I know we do so much more. But at the core, literally and figuratively, of most academic libraries is the collection. The library's claim to its status as the "heart" of the university rests on a model in which information is limited, relatively expensive, and somewhat troublesome to acquire. In fact, the political infrastructure of higher education also rests on these assumptions. What, however, happens in a world where massive indexes and increasingly sophisticated software tools allow us to bypass expensive, proprietary databases for many needs? What happens to the role of the library, and the academic tenure system, when the best stuff out there is NOT in print, short-run, university press monographs and Elsevier journals, but in pre-prints, open access journals, blogs, online gray literature, etc.? What happens when reading on the screen, with accompanying tools like Zotero, becomes easier than reading on the printed page (a post about reading on my iPhone should be coming soon)?

We need to step back and ask what we are here for. We need to imagine what academe might look like in the future, either without us, or with an academic library that looks nothing like it does today...because one of those two futures is what awaits us.