In April, leading independent academic and professional publisher SAGE convened a roundtable in association with the British Library into the role of the academic library in an open access (OA) future. Chaired by publishing consultant Simon Inger and attended by an international panel of 14 senior librarians and other industry experts, the conclusions of this discussion have been published in a report, “Moving towards an open access future: the role of academic libraries.” Among the key discussion points:
- Managing metadata will be very important for good discoverability of open access resources.
- Functions such as metadata management and preservation are likely to be done at Webscale, rather than on an institutional level.
- Individual library value will be judged on quality of service provision rather than on breadth of collection; value will also be added by digitizing and making available unique collections.
- Libraries will increasingly need to work together and share functions and services.
- Attention will shift from the library to the librarian: ‘the information professional is the library of the future.
- External discovery systems may be favored over the library catalog. Click here for more
