Lorcan Dempsey at Rutgers

Today I attended a presentation organized by Rutgers University Libraries by Lorcan Dempsey, Vice President for Membership and Research and Chief Strategist at OCLC. He spoke about the changing nature of library collections. Collections were the definition of the analog library, but in the primarily digital library, collections are a service among other services and sources. The “facilitated” library is primarily concerned with helping users access research and learning resources. Research has also fragmented across multiple systems and researcher identity and output are strongly tied to scholarly identity online. This change in research has led to a change in the relationships between researchers, libraries, publishers, and research managers. There’s a diversification of services and users are likely to use the library in addition to many other services that do overlapping things. Libraries can emphasize their shared collections and work to access collective collections to meet user needs.