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.