I am part of a working group with the title "Global Research Library 2020". Goal of this group is to discuss and to shape the Research Library of the future (http://www.grl2020.net/). Next meeting of this working group is in February in Taiwan. I attach the position paper, which I submitted for this workshop.
This position paper was also presented at the Rome ShareFair . I posted about this sharefair at
http://www.johanneskeizer.com/?q=node/738.

3rd GRL 2020 Workshop

Position Paper: Johannes Keizer, FAO of the UN

The Internet Revolution, the enormous speed with which knowledge becomes online available that once only was in the shelves of libraries or in the heads of researchers, the existence of powerful mainstream services like Google, the easiness of access to online materials by researchers themselves – this all has challenged the traditional role of libraries.

Knowledge materializes in different states in the process of scientific research. It stretches the entire range from “solid knowledge” in strings or numbers, publications and databases, over provisional datasets from experiments, opinions on scientific matters, discussion on a blog up to the personal interactions between people. These different states and associated media are shown in the figure below

Libraries were traditionally only involved in the left part shown in this figure and only in the limited way of managing collections of publications. Libraries now have lost their monopole position to access this part of knowledge, but they have gained a world of new possibilities to support the research work of their institutions.

a)Disseminate the Global Public Goods of your Institution! Open Access! Open Access! Libraries are mostly the only part with a strong own interest in becoming a herald for open access and the publishing hub of their institutions. This requires strong linkages between the libraries and researchers and research management to assure that open access publishing is not only preached but also practiced.

b)Catalyze and facilitate knowledge exchange! Everyone wants to do information management today. Everyone is a librarian. That is good and not bad. Never before Libraries had such a huge opportunity to catalyze communities of practice in their institutions and to link them to communities of practice outside their institutions. Outreach to scientific staff, which are already starting to consider their IKM needs and try to set up workflow and systems is a must. Libraries can elaborate the guidelines and principles that help to glue all these resources together and make a seamless access to all of them possible.

c)help to create integrated IKM platforms! Technology is not the main issue, but without appropriate technology very little works! Don’t leave the choice of platforms to the IT deparments. Catalyze the use of mainstream tools. Give the interoperability bit to all different software used by the researchers. Don’t think only about publications, there is communication, e-Research, lab management, e-learning, bring the different components together

d)Deliver targeted expert services! Everyone thinks to be an Information Management Specialist. But there is more out there. It has become highly complicated to cover a specific subject area. Become the prime knowledge source about the area in which your researchers are working. The researchers might know only their specific community. The library might know the others

e)Change your skill sets. We still need information science specialists. We also need subject specialist with passion for information and communication. Also technology skills are necessary. Do not depend on your IT department. Keep continuously update with that what is happening on world wide web

Research Libraries need to increase the speed of their transformation from units which mainly gave access to local holdings for resident users to units that link global resources to the users of their institution, and which disseminate the products of their institutions among internal stake holders and to the public world-wide