Going Digital: The Transformation of Scholarly Communication and Academic Libraries

Not since the age of Gutenberg has an information upheaval so thoroughly disrupted the processes of scholarly knowledge creation, management and preservation as the digital revolution currently under way. Academic libraries have traditionally been structured to effectively facilitate the access, use and storage of mostly static, print-based research collections. In the midst of sweeping change university libraries are attempting to re-imagine services, embrace emerging technologies, reallocate resources and provide proactive leadership in a new digital knowledge society. This article provides both historical perspective and a forward-looking examination into how academic libraries are transforming themselves to both cope with, and help shape, unprecedented transitions in scholarly research and communication. Over the last 15 years academic libraries have found themselves in the throes of an information revolution probably without parallel since Johannes Gutenberg's invention of the movable type printing press in mid fifteenth-century Europe. The introduction of Gutenberg's technology meant that content formerly ensconced within handwritten manuscripts or handed down by oral tradition could now be rapidly formatted, organized and uniformly distributed to far-flung locales at an astonishing rate. The last 300 years of scholarly communication can scarcely be understood apart from this remarkable historical development.(1) While there are plentiful discontinuities between the print-based information revolution of the fifteenth century and the digital information revolution of the twenty-first, there are also strikingly similar thematic parallels. Unprecedented opportunities were created for remotely situated scientists and scholars to share discoveries; reproduce experiments; share, save and refer to mutual documents; conduct textual criticism; develop standards; challenge misconceptions and engage in high levels of relatively simultaneous dialogue. Indeed, in significant respects these chronologically disparate revolutions could be viewed as conceptually analogous. Understandably, the monastic manuscript libraries of medieval times had been primarily tasked with securing and safeguarding rare, irreplaceable treasures. As knowledge came to be gathered, codified and transmitted in printed form, universities continued their steady rise in prestige and influence through the Renaissance and Reformation periods and into the early modern era.(2) With academic libraries gradually holding books so common as to be entrusted to open shelves, new processes, functions and activities emerged as a matter of course. While maintaining continuity and solidarity with the long-standing monastic library tradition of knowledge preservation, university libraries also began to take on the complementary roles of systematic knowledge gathering, organization and access provision. Over time there also developed a need for basic finding aids, reference assistance and instruction in identifying relevant printed resources in existing collections.(3) To be sure, modern academic libraries hold innumerable advantages over their ancestral counterparts through their transition to a digital age. Today's libraries are built upon generations of