An examination of the Systems and Procedures Exchange Center's (SPEC) file of 72 annual reports from Association of Research Libraries (ARL) member institutions found that administrators were using annual reports for several purposes: as communication links with library users, the university administration, and the general university community,…

This document is intended to stimulate thinking about the role of the library in the digital age, about the potential--and the imperative--for libraries to meet new needs, and about how these needs will influence the design of physical space. The goal of this document is to expose an array of perspectives on the future of the library and to…

This Systems and Procedures Exchange Center (SPEC) kit, an update of a 1975 kit, considers trends in the development and use of goals and objectives statements in Association of Research Libraries (ARL) member institutions, as illustrated in documents received in response to an August 1979 SPEC survey. The kit comprises: documents on developing…

This collection of statements of goals and objectives from member libraries of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) contains: (1) sections from management review and analysis program reports from the University of Washington Libraries and the University of Rochester Library; (2) a detailed organization description from the Columbia…

This report is the third in a set of three reports from the project, "Issues in Library Research: Proposals for the 1990s," which was launched in September 1986 to investigate library and information science issues in order to assess the current state of the profession and identify a research agenda to lead into the next decade. This…

Based on the Survey of Scholars conducted by the American Council of Learned Societies' Office of Scholarly Communication and Technology, this report examines the need for better two-way communication between libraries and scholars as a means of easing the transition to the use of today's new and diverse information resources. A concise summary…

The introduction to this Systems and Procedures Exchange Center (SPEC) kit explains the Conspectus method, which was developed in 1980 by the Research Libraries Group (RLG) as a means of systematically and qualitatively evaluating large library collections. The discussion considers advantages and disadvantages of this tool, which evaluates past…

At the 1989 annual meeting of the American Library Association (ALA), the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) used a think tank as a dynamic mechanism for exploring future directions both in the discipline of library user education and for the Bibliographic Instruction (BI) Section of ACRL. Discussion centered on the following…