Today, a college colleague of mine working
on PhD asked me to help her access an article she identified on Google Scholar.
My first thought was to check her university’s e-journal collection... That was
a daunting task – the interface was pretty unusable; students’ reluctance to
use peer-reviewed journals is not groundless, I thought.
To speed up the process, I repeated the
search on Google Scholar, found six places the article was available from, one of
those places was academia.edu – a social platform for research paper exchange.
(The rest were paid-for platforms, we ignored them).
This made me to think that in the world
were the published research becomes available free at the point of use more often,
the role of libraries and librarians will be moving further towards enabling, research community organising, facilitation,
advice and curation – away from offering access to the paid-for resources as their central function.
Saying that, I am surprised that academia.edu was invented not by librarians –
we’ve been in the business of institutional research publishing and archiving
for years.
That, of course, relates to HE. For the FE
sector, the picture is murky. I have just completed the last year SAR; most of
the traditional KPIs (active borrowers, number of loans, even ebook usage etc.)
are flat, growth happened in use of ILT/ICT equipment, PCs and learning space
utilisation. If we logged IT- and study/research skills-related enquiries last year,
those numbers would go through the roof too. And so, the murky picture starts
getting shapes... One of my forthcoming posts will be on that.
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