The changing purposes of university libraries.

This article explores recent developments in national policy for academic libraries. It considers the shift from traditional to managerial academic librarianship; the move to 'social space' and multi-use systems; changes in the balance between meeting teaching and research needs and in public funding priorities; the difficulty of making decisions about moving to electronic resources and saving space in holdings of paper copies; the consequences of the policies of 'deduplication' and disposal of 'surplus' copies; 'aggregation' of library with other functions; the impact of the Open Access policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]