Dame Brindley began by talking about the current 12-15 year olds who will be university students in a few years time. Their needs are very different from any students before them, they spend much of their lives in an online world and libraries will need to adapt to their needs. She then covered a number of topics relating to the changing world of libraries. These included:
Differentiation
She talked about the need for libraries to offer differentiated services depending on the needs of students. In an academic, university setting this may involve offering different services to students from different faculties. So a Humanities student may need something quite different from a Biomedical student, for example. Dame Brindley, does see bookless libraries for libraries catering for subjects like Science and Engineering, while others, like History, will still need physical books. It is essential that library spaces are reinvented to accommodate changing needs.
As we know, libraries are currently facing many challenges. One challenge is the management of digital acquisition and archiving. Digital content is very different to the physical content that libraries have traditionally preserved. Digital content is much less durable and it is essential that ways are found to enable the long-term preservation of digital resources. The British Library is now working towards this by storing and maintaining digital content as well as physical.
Opening up access
Dame Brindley talked about the way that access to collections is being opened up. Digitisation is now a core function of all institutions that have heritage collections. 40 million pages of newspapers have been digitised by the British Library and, because they are outside of copyright, they can be made available to the public.
Discovery and navigation
The next topic was of particular interest to me, as I’m currently studying metadata as part of my Masters course. Dame Brindley mentioned the importance of metadata in creating the semantic web. People want easy access to information, with rankings, ratings and recommendations. They want to be steered towards quality resources and obviously this fits perfectly with the role of librarians.
The overall message of the talk was that research libraries must adapt for their changing role in the 21st Century.
Here you can see Dame Lynne Brindley talking about the future of research libraries at a lecure series on Innovations in Digital Scholarship supported by the Oxford eResearch Centre's Digital Social Research Programme: