In the Service of University Libraries

With its variety of services, managerial responsibilities, incorporating treasures from the past into the digital world, connecting continuity with innovation, and preparing our patrons for the challenges in a networked information society, the modern university library is a cosmos in itself. It remains, however, part of the university, and is always linked to the service requirements of its members and goals set by the university management. Therefore, the library’s mandate and all our endeavours are primarily embedded in the university’s strategic processes, along with library services resulting from our mission. The consequences are manifold, go far beyond local concerns, and will be reflected in the theme of this year’s conference.

Make use of this opportunity to discover state of the art developments in librarianship and to catch up with colleagues from all over the world.

We look forward to welcoming you to this exciting event in Bolzano! Go to event website (link is external) for further information.

Every other year the ACRL Research Planning and Review Committee publishes a scan of the higher education environment with a focus on implications for academic libraries. The 2017 Environmental Scan builds on last year’s Top Trends in Academic Libraries and the 2015 Environmental Scan, which discussed other notable topics of interest to the academic librarian community, including student success measurements and open educational resources. Therefore, we have chosen not to repeat those topics in this year’s data. The topics discussed and reviewed in this year’s Environmental Scan include higher education funding and costs, enrolment trends within higher education, evidence-based decision making in academic libraries, information literacy issues, competency-based education, digital preservation, open science, open data, curating research data, scholarly communication issues, open access and collection management trends, collection assessment and evaluation trends, research evaluation and metrics, planning and designing library spaces, and social justice issues related to libraries and higher education.

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