Managing Change in Academic Libraries

This book explores how academic librarians can respond imaginatively and nimbly to economic, political, and technological change that is enveloping their professional work. The chapters represent a mixture of radical and rational approaches to managing change, with each chapter giving a particular academic librarian's views on how to manage change in the academic library.

Managing Change in Academic Libraries helps academic librarians plan, implement, and manage changes to the fundamental structure of their organizations. It shows readers that in academic libraries the two driving forces behind most change are economics and technology. Declines in funding for education and in the purchasing power of libraries have made it impossible to maintain the status quo, let alone realize growth, in traditional information services and collection development. Add to this downward trend in library economics, the explosion of new information technology and its potential for radically altering communications and knowledge management, and one has the ingredients for some amazing changes in libraries.

To help manage these many changes, chapters in Managing Change in Academic Libraries approach change with a mixture of radical and rational ideas. Readers learn academic librarians’views on dealing with change as they read about:

• an environmental scan which identifies both internal and external forces that are increasing the amount and scope of change in academic libraries
• technological change and its impact in academic libraries
• the academic library director’s role as an agent of change
• how two large library systems managed to change in some very fundamental ways when faced with serious economic and political challenges
• difficult personnel issues faced by academic libraries as they move into new organizational structures and adopt new management styles
• the future of traditional reference services in light of rapid developments in computing and networking
• how to change bibliographic control to better serve the changing expectations and needs of user communities
• conducting a restructuring study and recommendations for organizational change in a large research library system
  
  Each chapter shows academic librarians how they can respond imaginatively and nimbly to economic, political, and technological change that envelopes their professional work life. Academic librarians will refer to Managing Change in Academic Libraries again and again as a survival tool as they meet with challenging and unpredictable changes.