When we were creating our first strategic plan at my library, we held some focus groups with faculty. One of them said something that still resonates with me: “It’s not about technology, it’s about pedagogy.” He thought we were paying attention to the wrong thing.

 

A decade later, when we were putting together a new strategic plan, I noticed that the word technology had essentially vanished from our discourse. It was assumed, like electricity, to be part of the infrastructure in which we teach and learn. It was so essential that it had seeped into everything else and disappeared.

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The Guardian provides a look at 10 academic libraries, including some IATUL members.

 

A representative from each institution is interviewed with the discussions focusing on the, “challenges they face, plans for the future, and their role in higher education.”

 

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While the concept of altmetrics has matured considerably in the three years since the altemetrics manifesto was released, the idea of the “one”—that solo he or she who turns to altmetrics to filter or analyse a collection of sources—has remained largely consistent in the movement’s development. The result of this focus has been, on one hand, a positive growth in the number of altmetrics tools customized to the needs and products of individual users. On the other hand, proportionately little attention has been paid to date to the development of core altmetrics tools for scholars identified in the institutional aggregate. From the perspective of academic librarians—a professional group that has long championed the importance of scalable scholarly filters—this contrast is part of a larger challenge that altmetrics faces in the tenure–and–administration dominated world of higher education. In this article, we take a moment to examine a few ways in which altmetrics has begun to address the needs of institutions and, more specifically, the key roles that librarians can play as partners, liaisons, and advocates in such endeavours.