Future Roles of Librarians

Special issue call for papers from Library Management

About the Special Issue

Users of libraries can be academic staff, students, the general public (that is quite complex in terms of the user groups involved), depending on the focus (e.g. academic, public, special). The contributors to this Special Issue should address the necessary librarians’ skills created by new user needs, training strategies as well as how attitudes towards our own professional development should develop. Exploring future studies that examine the ways in which librarians are given an opportunity to define and assert new and significant roles would also surely be on this agenda.

Walters (2013) for instance, asserts that academic librarians are well-positioned to offer guidance to eBook vendors for the development of meaningful e-book licenses and usable platforms for the academic environment and this implies that they “have an important role to play in shaping the e-book environment, especially since publishers have yet to agree on the best ways of providing and marketing e-books to academic libraries” (p.2014).

This issue supports a range of questions around the new roles for librarians and how they can be empowered to shape the future of the profession. What are the current and future needs of users in a complex technological and open access environment and on what basis are the current and future skills required of librarians for these new roles and how can they can develop them more effectively?

The Guest Editors seek submissions presenting new insights into the following (but not limited to) topics:

The modern library landscape requires librarians to stay up-to-date with the external fast changing technological environments, the constantly evolving digital landscapes of librarians’ own working contexts and the complexity of their emerging roles.

how to develop digital literacy as library services are offered through a range of media, including social network sites, mobiles phones, discovery services that harvest information from a wide variety of publishers and open-access repositories and even virtual words;

how to establish a culture of openness and sharing that challenges the traditional controlled realm of library work and controlled, mediated information access;

how to develop more user-centred library services, signifying a transition in the way in which services are delivered to library users, e.g. how to involve user participation and feedback at the core of the evaluation process of library services and how librarians and their user communities can be ‘co-developers’ of library services.

Inherent in all of this is the abandonment of more traditional roles and positions and the impact which this does have on users management and librarians alike

These topics are examples only and you as an author should choose what you would like to explore. It is such an important and crucial issue for all of us.

Guest Editors

Dr Konstantina (Dina) Martzoukou

Senior Lecturer

iSchool - Aberdeen Business School

The Robert Gordon University

Steve O'Connor

Director

Information Exponentials

Adjunct Professor

Charles Sturt University

School of Information Studies

Important Dates

• Submission due: 31 December 2016

Submissions

The papers should be around 4,000 words in length, all papers must be submitted online.

Submissions to Library Management are made using ScholarOne Manuscripts, the online submission and peer review system. Registration and access are available here. Full information and guidance on using ScholarOne Manuscripts is available at the Emerald ScholarOne Manuscripts Support Centre.

Each paper is reviewed by the Editor and, if it judged suitable for publication, is evaluated using a double-blind peer review process.

The full author guidelines are available here.

- See more at: http://www.emeraldgrouppublishing.com/products/journals/call_for_papers.htm?id=6665#sthash.gSeJAFcI.dpuf