Libraries

Personnel

Library personnel typically consist of a mixture of professional librarians, paraprofessional staff, and student workers. Academic librarians often hold master’s degrees in library and information science. In large research libraries, librarians who serve particular disciplines may also hold other graduate degrees in their subject specialties. Librarians may or may not have tenure track status like that of other academic units. Traditional library personnel duties have included circulation, reference, instruction, cataloging, and acquisitions. Circulation duties are usually performed by paraprofessional staff or students. There is debate in the field as to whether non-librarians ought to staff reference desks, but doing so requires a large time commitment, which librarians often need to spend elsewhere. Libraries now typically import catalog records, so original cataloging is important mostly for research libraries whose holdings include rare materials. Newer roles in librarianship include web development, data services, and institutional repository management.

Collections

In industrially developed countries, the time when academic libraries were primarily print-driven enterprises is past. The bulk of academic library use in the digital age is through electronic journal article access. The average usage of electronic materials per library as reported by the doctoral-granting universities in the Association of College and Research Libraries (a U.S. association for academic libraries) in 2016 was about 30 times the average usage of print materials. Electronic resource use also vastly outstrips print use in masters-, bachelors-, and associate-granting institutions. Access to materials subscribed to by [Page 1003]an academic library often occurs through the medium of Internet search engines rather than through library websites, meaning patrons may not even think about their reading as library use.

Libraries in less industrially developed countries have a stronger print orientation than libraries in industrially developed nations. Stable electrical power is a prerequisite for making electronic materials useful. In industrially developed countries, the use of e-books has overtaken print books. Average e-book usage at doctoral-granting universities in the Association of College and Research Libraries in 2016 was over 8 times the average print materials usage. In the developed world, print materials, while still necessary, are predominantly needed by humanists who use them as primary sources rather than by scholars seeking secondary sources to review or keep up with the literature in their fields. Print can also be a matter of preference. As the body of scholarly knowledge grows, academic libraries collaborate to retain and preserve print copies of resources without all being responsible for dedicating shelf space to the same resources. The Rosemont Shared Print Alliance of North American academic and research libraries is an example of this. While they preserve print, libraries also digitize and add metadata to materials to make them discoverable and accessible remotely.

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