The Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL – a division of the ALA, of which I am not a big fan) Research Committee unveiled the top ten assumptions for the future of academic libraries during ACRL National Conference on Saturday March 31, 2007. You can listen to the podcast here.

Top ten assumptions for the future of academic and research libraries:

1. There will be an increased emphasis on digitizing collections, preserving digital archives, and improving methods of data storage and retrieval.
2. The skill set for librarians will continue to evolve in response to the needs and expectations of the changing populations (student and faculty) that they serve.
3. Students and faculty will increasingly demand faster and greater access to services.
4. Debates about intellectual property will become increasingly common in higher education.
5. The demand for technology related services will grow and require additional funding.
6. Higher education will increasingly view the institution as a business.
7. Students will increasingly view themselves as customers and consumers, expecting high quality facilities and services.
8. Distance Learning will be an increasingly common option in higher education, and will co-exist but not threaten the traditional bricks-and-mortar model.
9. Free, public access to information stemming from publicly funded research will continue to grow.
10. Privacy will continue to be an important issue in librarianship.

My reaction to most of these was, “duh!” I have some thoughts of my own, but I want to hear about you think academic libraries will change, or about how you would like for them to!

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My library Was dukedom large enough.

William Shakespeare, “The Tempest”, Act 1 scene 2

As I mentioned earlier, I am devoting April to reading several books about, well, books. One of them is actually a history of bookshelves, and it arrived over the weekend. The appendix of Henry Petroski’s The Book on the Bookshelf describes twenty-seven ways of arranging a personal library. They are:

1. By author’s last name
2. By title
3. By subject
4. By size
5. Horizontally
6. By color
7. By hardbacks and paperbacks
8. By publisher
9. By read/unread books
10. By strict order of acquisition
11. By order of publication
12. According to the Dewey Decimal Classification System
13. According to the Library of Congress Classification System
14. By ISBN
15. By price
16. According to new/used
17. By enjoyment
18. By sentimental value
19. By provenance
20. By author’s first name
21. By opening sentence
22. By closing sentence
23. By third sentence
24. By antepenultimate sentence
25. By reverse-order spelling of the last word in the index
26. By number of words
27. By number of entries in index

What? Really? “By antepenultimate sentence”? That’s just plain weird.

I tend to arrange by subject, then alphabetical by author within that subject. The subjects are not Dewey or LC, just subject groupings that are helpful to me.

You? Please, I’d like to know, especially if you use a different schema or one of the “more esoteric arrangments” listed above. Come on, leave a comment. You know you want to.

Three questions: How? How many? And for how long?

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