Libraries at University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Date of this Version
3-2010
Abstract
Objective: Review the International Campaign to Revitalise Academic Medicine (ICRAM) Future Scenarios as a potential starting point for developing scenarios to envisage plausible futures for health sciences libraries.
Method: At an educational workshop, 15 groups, each composed of four to seven Association of Academic Health Sciences Libraries (AAHSL) directors and AAHSL/NLM Fellows, created plausible stories using the five ICRAM scenarios.
Results: Participants created 15 plausible stories regarding roles played by health sciences librarians, how libraries are used and their physical properties in response to technology, scholarly communication, learning environments and health care economic changes.
Conclusions: Libraries are affected by many forces, including economic pressures, curriculum and changes in technology, health care delivery and scholarly communications business models. The future is likely to contain ICRAM scenario elements, although not all, and each, if they come to pass, will impact health sciences libraries. The AAHSL groups identified common features in their scenarios to learn lessons for now. The hope is that other groups find the scenarios useful in thinking about academic health science library futures.
Comments
Published in Health Information & Libraries Journal 27:1 (March 2010), pp. 28–36 doi: 10.1111/j.1471-1842.2009.00853.x Copyright © 2009 Logan Ludwig, Joan Giesecke, and Linda Walton; journal compilation copyright © 2009 Health Libraries Group. Published by Wiley-Blackwell. Used by permission. “The definitive version is available at www3.interscience.wiley.com” Submitted November 20, 2008; accepted March 24, 2009; published online October 11, 2009.