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Change management in academic libraries - 2
Introduction
Faced with multiple challenges to their historical role as the major provider of information resources in a university, mostly based on the pervasiveness of digital technology, university libraries are attempting to redefine their core activities to maintain their relevance. New activities and services include providing quality learning spaces, creating metadata, virtual reference services, information literacy, selecting and managing resource licenses, collecting and digitizing archival materials, and maintaining digital repositories ([1] Campbell, 2006). However, as [1] Campbell (2006, p. 20) opinions, as a group these activities do not amount to a fundamental purpose for the academic library. To define a role for the present and future, one broad approach for university libraries is to engage more closely with the University's core activities of research and teaching. While the mission of the University library has always been to support the work of the university, this was often a passive mission, in particular to build collections that would be used in teaching and research. The mission was something like the hope expressed in the popular baseball movie Field of Dreams : "build it and they will come." Even if collections and facilities are built in close collaboration with teachers and researchers, there is now no guarantee that they will come. The alternatives for sourcing information are now readily available. Realizing this, university libraries are seeking to embed their activities within academic programs, rather than just supporting or aligning with them. A key strategy to accomplish this has been promotion of the role of liaison of library staff with academic staff, frequently through designating some librarians as "faculty liaison librarians" whose primary task is to liaise with faculties, colleges or academic departments.
Evolution
The faculty liaison librarian role is not entirely new, evolving from the traditional subject librarian and university special/branch library role, but is now recognized as a major and even essential activity. Almost 30 years ago a short, seminal article by [21] Miller (1977) set out the challenges even then facing academic libraries as the primary information providers and suggested that this necessitated the marketing of library services and closer integration of these with academic programs. Miller defined liaison work as "a formal, structured activity in which professional library...