As a child growing up in Sri Lanka and India, I was used to how impossible it was to keep anything private. It almost felt like gossip was a full time job for many idle folks who stayed home and didn’t have much in the way of diversion. No television and radio programs of interest were fairly limited. As a result, these folks were theorizing about everyone else’s lives and fake news was all over the place. I have witnessed many cases where this had resulted in irreparable reputational damages to many.
After moving to this country, I began to appreciate the value of privacy. It is not that people didn’t gossip or wanted a window into others’ personal lives, it just was very different, both in terms of scale and the distance people liked to keep. Now, with the recent advances in technologies and lack of policies and laws, I feel that we have lost privacy forever. Anyone with a little time, minimal technical savvy and intent can learn so much about many of us at a scale that was unprecedented. As a result, it has become much easier for people to be judgmental and cause harm either intentionally or unintentionally. Worse, corporations and governments have gotten in on this to monetize and spy against the citizens.
Every day we hear one thing or the other. Today, it was Unroll.me selling to Uber information they had collected.
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Ithaka S+R is a “not-for-profit service that helps the academic community navigate economic and technological change.” They published the results of an extensive survey of academic library directors on the strategy and directions for the libraries. This is a triennial survey and is part of a collection of related surveys of faculty and students. This is a very informative survey and I strongly encourage you to read through it carefully. The authors point out that there are significant differences in many areas of the survey by the institution type. But, there are several topics in which there are commonalities. It is notable that the response rate for Baccalaureate institutions is only 43% whereas for Doctoral institutions is 68%.
Here are the key findings:
- Library directors anticipate increased resource allocation towards services and predict the most growth for positions related to teaching and research support.
- Library directors are deeply committed to supporting student success, yet many find it difficult to articulate these contributions.
- Collections have been digitally transformed, and directors are interested in expanding their collecting to include more non-textual materials.
- Library directors are increasingly recognizing that discovery does not and should not always happen in the library.
- Library directors are pursuing strategic directions with a decreasing sense of support from their institutions.
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