THE FUTURE OF THE ACADEMIC LIBRARY AND THE ACADEMIC LIBRARIAN: A DELPHI STUDY RELOADED

At the 20th IATUL Conference held in 1999 in Chania, Greece, the authors presented a paper The Future of the Academic Library and the Academic Librarian. A DELPHI Study 3. The aim of that study was to identify trends and present a probable scenario for the year 2005. After six years that have passed since the Conference in Chania, we live in a different world. Different not only because of terrorism and the latest natural disasters, but also because of changes in technology (e.g. the boom of mobile communication, transition from CD/DVD to online services, ease of digitization, etc.), internationalization of studies or changes in scholarly communication and publishing models, which in turn have imposed new law regulations. All these factors have strongly influenced libraries and changed the library image in a way hardly to be predicted 6 years ago. This paper presents the results of a new study conducted in 2005. It had two main objectives: • to verify the results of the previous study (comparison of the experts’ predictions with the reality as of the year 2005) • to make further extrapolation, focused on competencies that librarians should develop as professional information suppliers and experts, to meet future needs. A Delphi method of forecasting involves two consecutive rounds of questions, subsequent analysis of the responses to the open and closed questions and a development of the expert consensus about the topic of the study. The panel of experts was composed of the librarians and information professionals many of who were also involved in the previous study.