Article in liber quarterly · October 004 doi: 10. 18352/lq. 7780 · Source: oai citations 45 reads 6,104 authors: Some of the authors of this publication are also working on these related projects

THE ROLE OF THE ACADEMIC LIBRARY IN UNIVERSITY EDUCATION 
The academic library has traditionally been seen as the ‘heart of the university’ serving 
the academic community of its parent institution. However, Grimes notes (cited in 
Brophy, 2001: 21) that the metaphor has been used loosely and with little evidence that it 
reflects institutional realities. He refers to a number of areas: “Students and faculty alike 
fail to involve library resources and services in regular learning and instruction, turning 
to the library primarily as an undergraduate study hall or reserve book room … National 
initiatives … fail to mention, much less to plan, improvement of library resources … 
[There is] a disheartening decrease in academic library share of institutional funding … 
they remain, for the most part, on the periphery of decision-making and innovative 
processes … librarians are often not involved in information policy development. … In 
all, the ‘library is the heart of the university’ metaphor leads librarians and academics to 
erroneous conclusions about the real relationships between the library and the university. 
Brophy (2001: 21) notes that many other commentaries on the academic library as the 
centre of scholarly activity neglect the fact that for most university researchers such 
notions simply do not reflect reality, if they ever did. 
In this context, there has been a continuous concern about the role and status of the 
academic library. Many authors have pointed out that academic libraries will have to 
change and the roles and responsibilities of librarians need reconceptualisation. For 
example, in 1979 Osburn highlights the need for change in research libraries because of 
the changing patterns of scholarship in America, the emerging dominance of the sciences 

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General Introduction to the Role of the Library for University Education 
 
 
 
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in the university’s hierarchy of disciplines and the demands of government funding 
agencies for relevant research. He emphasized that research libraries needed to be more 
responsive to the new academic agenda and more service-oriented model of collection 
development was needed (Osburn, 1979). In 1999, at the LIBER Annual General 
Conference in Prague, Wätjen (1999: 439) notes: “All of us know that we have to 
redefine the traditional role of the library: what and how to select, to acquire, to classify, 
to catalogue, to provide, to archive or to give access to and how to assist people in the 
use of information and more important: how to provide free and equal access to 
information according to the mission of libraries”. Brophy notes: “Libraries, among the 
most-intensive organizations in existence, will have to change (Brophy, 2001: xiv) … to 
enter any academic or public library in almost any part of the world is to be greeted by a 
scene not that different from that which would have met a visitor half a century ago” 
(Brophy, 2001: 5).
During the last decade the discussion about change in academic libraries focuses most 
frequently on the ICT developments, the implications
of information in digital format, 
new learning and teaching concepts, new economic models and legal frameworks. Many 
authors discuss expectations for the academic library in today’s information age, an array 
of new functions and partnerships for library staff that flow from changes in society and 
HE, the implications that these changes within the library will have for all parts of the 
academy and what will the changes mean for students, faculty, academic administrators, 
technical staff, and library staff themselves. Several authors believe that these “changes 
could catapult the library into a central role within the teaching/learning enterprise if 
appropriate adaptations are made; if not, they could further remove the library from the 
institutional center” (CETUS, 1997).
At the start or the 21st century, academic libraries explore service developments to 
support a series of new scenarios (Brophy, 2001: 25):
•
new publication and scholarly communication scenarios;
•
more intensive use and delivering of digital resources;
•
serving increasingly heterogeneous student population;
•
continuing high demand from students for traditional resources;
•
new modes of study, including ICT-based and distance learning, with which 
libraries have had little involvement in the past;
•
ever-reducing levels of resources, particularly in staffing, leading to enormous 
pressures on individual staff and a severe challenge to management. 
The new student-centred paradigm and new learning and teaching approaches have 
created the need for a reconceptualisation of the roles and responsibilities of librarians in 
learning and teaching processes. There is a growing literature that discusses 

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SIRJE VIRKUS AND SILVI METSAR 
295
bibliographic instruction, user education, and more recently, information literacy. 
However, the topic is mainly discussed among librarians and information professionals 
and is hardly explicitly and extensively recognized in other circles (Behrens, 1994; 
Town, 2002; Homann, 2003; Skov & Sk
ǽ
rbak, 2003; Audunson & Nordlie, 2003; 
Virkus, 2003b).