Digital library : transformation of academic librarian roles

Higher education literature abounds with dark forebodings regarding the impact of the Digital Library on the traditional academic library. In this paper it is argued that, by playing to their strengths and maintaining their values, academic librarians are enlivening the profession and opening new opportunities for accessing and using information. For every service no longer needed, other services for which there is more demand take their place. The paper looks especially at digital content and new modes of scholarly communication, at data curation, the semantic library and mobile technologies. Higher education literature abounds with dark forebodings regarding the impact of the Digital Library on the traditional academic library. In a vein that will be familiar to most of us, the ‘Academic Library Autopsy Report 2050’ from the Chronicle of Higher Education argues that librarians are becoming victims of their own success, innovating themselves into irrelevance (Sullivan 2011). But as Bess Sandler of Stanford University Library comments, Mr Sullivan seems to have mistaken transformation for death (Sandler 2011). It is at this transformation that I will be looking in this paper.