The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) in the US? say that they have has captured the essence of the research library in contextual and innovative ways with the publication of their ARL Profiles: Research Libraries 2010, a report that they say? includes a thorough content analysis of “narrative descriptions of research libraries at the end of the first decade of the 21st century. The profile analysis has engaged qualitative methods to describe research libraries that complement the annual quantitative ARL Statistics(r).”
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Here’s what they say
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The contextual information provided in this report documents the importance of the public good research libraries provide in an increasingly globalized environment by making their services more readily available; they are becoming an integral part not only of the physical but also the virtual academic experience in addition to setting standards and exploring best practices with national and international visibility, among other things.
When ARL directors were interviewed in 2005 and asked to describe a research library in the 21st century, there was general sentiment that the annual ARL Statistics(r) and the toolkit of assessment services developed by ARL, though useful, were not adequate to provide important contextual information on the transformation of research libraries. ARL Profiles: Research Libraries 2010 documents in an evidence based manner the changing environment and fills in this gap. Textual narrative descriptions of collections, services, collaborative relations, and other programs, as well as physical spaces, capture the essence of a research library today and demonstrate the value delivered to library users.
Between 2008 and 2010, ARL member libraries submitted narrative profiles that offer an alternative way of describing research libraries. These narratives stand alone as important descriptive information of the state of research libraries at the dawn of the 21st century. The profiles allowed for a creative approach with a focus on critical qualitative categories emphasizing institutional and research library community-level aspects of (a) services, (b) collections, and (c) collaborative relations. Our sincere thanks go to all of the institutions that contributed to this groundbreaking collaborative effort to describe the value of research libraries in new, meaningfully rich ways in the midst of a rapidly changing environment.
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All materials are publicly available-including qualitative descriptions (a discussion of the results), the content analysis, explanations and examples of how analysis was performed, and the original profile narratives submitted by each library-at
http://www.arl.org/stats/index/profiles/index.shtml
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The summary report will also be available in print.
Ordering Information
ARL Profiles: Research Libraries 2010
William Gray Potter, Colleen Cook, Martha Kyrillidou, Jennifer Rutner, Michael Maciel, David Green, Sarah Lippincott, Yolanda Glass, and Nicholas Woolf
2011 * 48 pages
ISBN 1-59407-863-7 * EAN 978-1-59407-863-7
$20 plus shipping and handling
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