Centenary Anniversary Conference

Leveraging the Digital Age: 21st Century Libraries in a Global Context

The 21st century, so far, has been a time of tremendous change for academic libraries. Information has become ubiquitous, with powerful search engines, wireless connectivity, online communities, and handheld mobile devices. Our students are at ease online, using digital technologies in their everyday lives. Researchers are embracing digital tools and technologies in order to increase their productivity and cultivate new relationships across disciplinary boundaries. Information seeking behaviour has been fundamentally changed by 24/7 access to scholarly material and hugely powerful search engines. Increasingly, people expect to be able to work, learn, and study whenever and wherever they want. In addition, it is unlikely that things will slow in the future. Indeed, rates of change are expected to accelerate. In this presentation, Ingrid Parent will look into the future and explore some potential scenarios for research and education; discuss the possible impact these futures may have on library services; and consider how research libraries can remain relevant in such tumultuous times.

Service Initiatives Recently Developed in Peking University Library

Along with the new development of higher education as well as library environment, academic libraries in mainland China are facing a lot of challenges. To meet the new needs  and fulfill the mission, they are making great effort to improve their services to users. Taking Peking University library as an example, the presentation introduces some new actions and services such as subject liaison services, reading promotion seminars, discovery tools, competitive information analysis, mobile services, etc. It is approved that in the digital era, library should constantly make changes, to meet users’ new requirement, in the meanwhile, traditional services still have a lot of spaces to be improved.

A British Colony and its Books: The University of Hong Kong and its Libraries, 1912-62

While the focus of this conference is very much on the future of academic libraries in today’s world, this meeting is nevertheless being held to coincide with the beginning of the centenary celebrations of the HKU Libraries, so it is perhaps not totally inappropriate to spend some time reflecting upon the past history of one of the oldest libraries in Hong Kong.  It is well known that the HKU Libraries played an important role in preserving some of the most valuable book collections in the British colony in the first half of the twentieth century, at the same time as building up teaching and research collections with a more academic focus.  But unlike great universities elsewhere in the world at that time, the University of Hong Kong was reluctant to invest too much money or effort in a resource which other institutions considered to be central to the whole academic enterprise.  The implementation of library policy in the first fifty years of the University’s existence therefore faced funding and staffing shortages, the destructive impact of the Second World War, and a lack of interest from government and philanthropists alike.  This paper will examine the early history of the University Libraries in the context of developments taking place elsewhere in the academic world up to the 1960s when the Hong Kong colonial government finally embraced the need for an up-to-date public library system, allowing the HKU Libraries to focus on building a more dedicated academic collection.

Library as Publisher: the Ideas and Experiences of National Taiwan Normal University Library
Due to the increasing wealth of global information readily accessible in e-formats via clouds computing and Internets, university libraries have constantly been updating their functions and roles to better address the needs of the academic world.  To meet the requirements to fulfill its mission to serve the intellectual population in the university campus as well as the general public, National Taiwan University has since 2008 been proactive in the business of publishing both in hardcopy and softcopy. In order to successfully implement such role and function in library, critical changes understandably are entailed in library management.  The aim of this paper is for us to share our ideas and experiences in incorporating publishing as a key part of our library operations.

Future Directions for Collection Development in Academic and Research Libraries

21st century academic and research libraries face many new challenges and opportunities as a result of changes in the nature of teaching, research, and learning brought about by technological advances, emerging patterns of scholarly communication, the globalization of higher education, and economic challenges.  Although academic libraries will remain vital to the academic success of faculty and students, their operational and strategic future will be significantly changed.  Perhaps nowhere will these changes be more evident than in the way research materials are identified, preserved, and made available.  In this paper, I will discuss future directions for collections that move away from a near-exclusive focus on the products of scholarship to one that embraces processes associated with the full life cycle of scholarship.  

Open Access, Open Data, and Open Innovation: Towards a Knowledge-based Open Innovation Service Platform

Open access is fast becoming the main stream model of scholarly communications in scientific fields. Research libraries are facing a future where the traditional subscription-based library solution will no longer be a robust and valid solution for research and academic institutions. A paradigmatic shift is called for new resource development strategies.
Open access, what is more, goes beyond free retrieval, to develop smart Open Data, linkable, re-usable, computable, to enable data/text mining, and to support strategic analysis, relationship detection and exploration, automatic knowledge construction, and many more applications. Examples prove the time is ready for this.
Open access with open data will provide strong support for open science and open innovation, where open knowledge commons with open application tools for collaborative research, development, and innovation by open communities. Open innovation theories will be revisited and current examples in research, learning, and industries will be presented.
All these point to a new type of supporting infrastructure for research, learning, and innovation: where knowledge is openly accessible, smartly organized, with tools developed openly and collaboratively, with knowledge experts working effectively with users and with data-centric knowledge discovery and learning processes, and with organizational structures supporting open communities and their open innovation processes. This is the essence of a research library, and the future.

Cycling to Success: Academic Libraries and the Research and Learning Cycle

Academic libraries have a unique perspective on the cycle of activity that drives research and learning. Indeed, the library is often the only area in a university that sees the interconnectedness between information research and learning skills, scholarly information, stewardship and dissemination of research outputs and the overarching activities of research and learning. This presentation will draw on the experience of one university library – Monash University Library – to demonstrate how university libraries can contribute to each phase of the research and learning cycle in creative ways. It focuses on advances in skills development programs and new ways of contributing to e-learning, as well as new roles in the curation of research data, research data coordination and the dissemination of research activity through an institutional repository and management of an open access press for the university.

Academic Library Trends in Hong Kong: Global and Local Issues

Globally, academic libraries are facing similar changes arising from the impact of technology, changing student demographics and expectations, societal views of education and financial uncertainty to name just a few.
The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) statistics of North America are often touted to demonstrate trends in academic libraries and to help paint a picture of possible future scenarios.  Other data, especially from surveys of university faculty, administrators and library directors (for example, the Ithaka S+R Reports) also provide readily accessible analyses of the current state of academic libraries as well as viewpoints pertaining to academic library directions.  But how relevant are such statistics and reports to the academic library world in Asia and specifically in Hong Kong.
The eight institutes of higher learning funded under the University Grants Committee (UGC) of Hong Kong each carry unique perspectives in terms of their teaching and research profiles and priorities.  Similarly, each of their libraries are distinctive and carry their own unique priorities and concerns.  Utilising collected statistical data over ten years as well as drawing on the results of a recent Hong Kong Library Director survey, this presentation will provide an analysis of trends and possible future directions for Hong Kong academic Libraries.

Commercialization of Library Special Collections
As academic libraries seek opportunities to build digital content, one natural partner emerges:  the commercial publisher.  This presentation will explore two models of successful library / commercial publisher digitization projects.  It will show how libraries can establish these partnerships to maximize benefits to our libraries and our users.