En stor och viktig undersökning av Ross Housewright och Roger 
Schonfeldhar nyligen publicerats och
tacknämligt komprimerad till 34 sidor som alla börläsa som bryr sig om 
sitt forskningsbibliotek.

Ithaka’s 2006 Studies of Key Stakeholders in
the Digital Transformation in Higher
Education
August 18, 2008

http://www.ithaka.org/research/Ithakas%202006%20Studies%20of%20Key%20Stakeholders%20in%20the%20Digital%20Transformation%20in%20Higher%20Education.pdf

Många av resultaten är tankeväckande och många är oroande för 
forskningsbiblioteken, inte bara i USA utan med största
sannolikhet även för svenska forskningsbibliotek

Några citat ur rapporten

It will be a surprise to no one that when data collected in 2006 are 
compared with findings from 2000 and
2003, faculty increasingly value electronic resources. At the same time, 
while they value the library, they
perceive themselves to be decreasingly dependent on the library for 
their research and teaching and they
anticipate that dependence to continue to decline in the future. There 
appears to be growing ambivalence
about the campus library.

Over the course of these three surveys, we have tested three “roles” of 
the library – purchaser, archive and
gateway.6 We have attempted to track how the importance of these three 
different roles has changed over
time. Most highly rated among these roles is that of library as 
purchaser – faculty don’t want to have to
pay for scholarly resources, a finding which holds across disciplines 
and has remained stable over time.
There is slightly more variation by discipline in views on the 
importance of the library’s preservation
function, but valuation of this role is also uniformly high and has 
remained static over time. The
importance of the role of the library as a gateway for locating 
information, however, varies more widely
and has fallen over time (see Figure 3).

The declining importance of this role to faculty stands in stark 
contrast to the perceptions of librarians, as
shown by our 2006 librarian survey. Although the importance of the 
library’s role as a gateway to faculty
is decreasing, rather dramatically in certain fields, over 90% of 
librarians list this role as very important
(see Figure 7), and almost as many – only 5 percentage points less – 
expect it to remain very important in
5 years. Obviously there is a mismatch in perception here.

Och naturligtvis är det enda sättet att vända den trenden är att 
biblioteken börjar samarbeta. Det räcker
inte längre med att alla sitter på sin kammare och försöker skapa något 
som kan konkurrera med Google
eller är nöjda med att historiker och klassiker fortfarande älskar sina 
bibliotek trots att alla andra i allt större
inte bryr sig. I slutändan, varför betala dyrt för något som dom flesta 
inte tycker är viktigt?

Jan




-- 
De åsikter som framförs här är mina personliga 
och inte ett uttryck för Göteborgs universitets-
biblioteks hållning

Opinions expressed here are my own and not
that of Göteborgs universitetsbibliotek



Jan Szczepanski
Förste bibliotekarie 
Goteborgs universitetsbibliotek 
Box 222
SE 405 30 Goteborg, SWEDEN 
Tel: +46 31 7861164 Fax: +46 31 163797 
E-mail: [log in to unmask]