2016 Charleston Library Conference

Academic Libraries continue to strive to stay relevant to their educational communities composed of students, faculty and researchers while metropolitan or public libraries serve the needs of the general community composed of multi-generational and ethnically diverse scholars, students, professionals, recreational readers and gamers, who seek information in varied formats. The challenges today to respond to this range of service and collection needs is unsurpassed. Libraries have taken on the onus to be instrumental in fostering lifelong learning in a society that changes careers more often, has greater access to information online and more demands on their time and attention than ever before. How do our libraries respond to these changing and intensifying needs and what can we do to collaborate more between the academic and public sectors?

An exchange among four librarians representing both academic and public libraries will showcase how their libraries address these challenges, and offer insights in to programming and collection strengths that maximize what they can offer to their user base. Elevating this conversation are librarians from the Netherlands and the UK who will share how their constituencies require increasingly specialized services and resources that demand the use of diverse technologies, delivery mechanisms and help make the library a relevant and meaningful institution in their communities. Surprisingly, the differences that distinguish academic and public libraries in this digital era may be less significant than we think and the nature of the work and how it is conducted may tend to over-emphasize these differences.