The video below (highlighted by the Scholarly Kitchen blog last week) discusses the success of independent bookstore in spite of online retailers such as Amazon.com.
If we see our product as books, and what we compete on as price, we lose. If we see our product as a service and a community, of which books are one piece, then we can compete. –David Sandberg
As is the case for independent bookstores, the “product” of an academic library has changed. It is no longer just a warehouse of books and the other resources. Rather the academic library provides a place for the community of scholars that exists on the college campus, and the resources are a piece of that community.
Like any community, a community of scholars includes experts (the faculty) and newbies (undergraduates). Courses, readings, research papers, and projects help to bring undergraduates into the community they are choosing to join, be it political science, business, English literature, or education, and moves them ever-closer to being experts themselves.
The academic library is the “intellectual hub” that supports that endeavor, providing the resources, people, services, and tools that make it possible. It has been almost twenty years since academic libraries functioned primarily as warehouses for resources, yet we’re still battling out-dated perceptions of what we do. I look forward to changing the conversation on R-MC’s campus.