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Librarians around the world gathered here for a three-day International Conference on Changing Landscape of Science & Technology Libraries (CLSTL 2017) to discuss the future of libraries and shift in their role from sharing of knowledge to supporting knowledge creation.
Held at the Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar (IITGN), the conference had librarians visiting from various countries, including the US, the UK, Canada, France, Japan, Portugal, Singapore, Sri Lanka, and Saudi Arabia.
Neelam Bharti from Marston Science Library at the University of Florida explored the idea of libraries turning into collaborative and creative spaces apart from being repositories of books.
"Traditionally, idea generation and knowledge sharing have been the core essence of the libraries and book stacks, and Xerox machines were supporting that philosophy very well until now. Libraries are experiencing a paradigm shift from sharing knowledge to supporting knowledge creation. In this changing scenario, libraries are becoming more creative, inventive and inclusive."
The participants also discussed about new challenges and priorities.
Julia Gelfand of University of California Irvine Libraries said, "Research libraries today reflect multiple and complex roles that contribute to collection strengths through sophisticated instructional design and delivery, assessment, asset management, preservation, independent publishing, journal hosting, digitisation and maximising relationships with both users and partners to capitalise on the forthcoming opportunities."
Rick Anderson from the University of Utah, USA explained about the evolution from World Wide Web to open access movement. "The landscape of scholarly communication has been in an unprecedented state of flux for twenty years now, and the rate of change and disruption show no signs of slowing."
The 3-day conference also had presentations by Karrie Peterson of MIT Libraries in US on the future of science and technology libraries, Aaron Tay of Singapore Management University on technology and trends in academic libraries, among others.
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