An academic library is a library that is attached to a higher education institution which serves two complementary purposes to support the school's curriculum, and to support the research of the university faculty and students.^[1] It is unknown how many academic libraries there are internationally. An academic and research portal maintained by UNESCO links to 3,785 libraries. According to the National Center for Education Statistics there are an estimated 3,700 academic libraries in the United States.^[1] The support of teaching and learning requires material for class readings and for student papers. In the past, the material for class readings, intended to supplement lectures as prescribed by the instructor, has been called reserves. In the period before electronic resources became available, the reserves were supplied as actual books or as photocopies of appropriate journal articles.

Academic libraries must determine a focus for collection development since comprehensive collections are not feasible. Librarians do this by identifying the needs of the faculty and student body, as well as the mission and academic programs of the college or university. When there are particular areas of specialization in academic libraries these are often referred to as niche collections. These collections are often the basis of a special collection department and may include original papers, artwork, and artifacts written or created by a single author or about a specific subject.

There is a great deal of variation among academic libraries based on their size, resources, collections and services. The Harvard University Library is considered to be the largest academic library in the world and has the third largest collection in the United States.^[2] Another notable example is the University of South Pacific which has academic libraries distributed throughout its twelve member countries.^[1]

History

History by Umukoro Faith Department of LIS, Research Analyst, DELSU, Abraka.

Introduction From the beginning, libraries and learning have been inseparable. The libraries at the Nippur temple and at Aristotle’s Peripatetic School, the Alexandrian Library, the libraries at the Persian Academy of Gundishapur, at the Grand Umayyad Mosque at Aleppo, and at Benedictine and other monasteries, the Medicean-Laurentian Library in Florence, the Bodleian Library at Oxford, and the libraries at every college and university worldwide—in all these of these times and places, libraries have been integral to learning. For virtually all of this more than four thousand year history, books were scare, highly prized, and closely guarded. Their creation and reproduction were labor intensive enterprises on which wealth and artistic skill were often lavished. In the West, this began to change with the introduction of moveable type in the fifteenth century; but because of the high cost of paper, books remained luxury items through the eighteenth century. With the Fourdrinier machine in 1807, massproduced paper started to become relatively inexpensive and arguably the chief industrial product of the nineteenth century.2 Books, magazines, and newspapers became much less expensive and much more abundant throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.3 A twentieth-century technological revolution, introduced by the computer chip driving relatively inexpensive personal computers and worldwide telecommunication systems, has now made information superabundant. For the first time in human history, information is not a scare commodity. Each of these three revolutions in information technology—moveable type, the paper making machine, and the computer chip—strongly advanced the democratization of knowledge. My purpose is not to chronicle the technology-driven changes that have redefined our societies, but more modestly to trace three paradigms in the design of library space that reflect the transformation of information from a scarce to a superabundant commodity. All three continue to exert strong influence on our thinking about library space. I name these the reader-centered, the book-centered, and the learning centered paradigms of library space design. I sketch the long and rich history of the first two quite briefly so as to give most attention to the third, which is the product of the current revolution in information technology. I exemplify all three paradigms with library buildings at institutions where I have worked. In the first of these paradigms, books are decisively in the service of readers. In the Western world, this paradigm of library space design springs from the monastic scriptorium and library. The defining feature of a monastery was its cloisters, the space set apart for secluded prayer and reflection—and for access to the scriptorium and library. Contemplative and library space are closely interconnected. And because books were few and precious, the space was designed primarily for readers: typically a reading lectern or carrel for the monk, placed perpendicular to a window for the sake of light. This design paradigm has been extraordinarily strong. As late as the 1920s, when James Gamble Rogers was designing Yale’s magnificent Sterling Memorial Library, he used the gothic church as his design idiom. Immediately adjacent to the nave-like entrance to Sterling is a large courtyard, on two sides of which are walls with large windows illuminating small bays for reading. This focus on readers is reinforced by a set of reading rooms opening off the nave, rooms dominated by light and reading tables, not by books [Figure 1]. Where Sterling Memorial Library echoes the monastery with extravagant splendor, it was with a restrained Georgian design proclaiming Enlightenment values that Johns Hopkins University built Gilman Hall, the home of its humanities departments and of the library supporting their work. Here again, the idea was to make the most immediate connection possible between readers and books. The architectural idiom was as different as possible from a monastery, but the building bespoke the same purpose. Gilman’s “core was a system of central stacks. . . . Gilman was designed to sustain scholarship. It had everything a man of letters—they were all men in the early days— needed for his work: offices, classrooms, seminar rooms, and books [Figure 2].”4 The idea that books should be at the heart of scholarly endeavor also informs the idea of the departmental library in larger colleges and universities. In my own experience, mathematics faculty members have believed tenaciously that their journals and books must be located in the closest possible proximity to their offices and classrooms. At both Northwestern University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign this resulted in the conversion of what had once been the universities’ main libraries—Lunt Hall and Altgeld Hall, respectively—into mathematics libraries. Lunt Hall, a Beaux Arts design, opened in 1894 and became a departmental library in 1950. The Romanesque Altgeld Hall opened in 1897 and became a departmental library in 1927. The Georgian Gilman Hall opened in 1916, while the academic gothic Sterling Memorial Library was dedicated in 1931. As different as these buildings are in their outward and most obvious design idioms, they all were nonetheless designed or came to be used with the purpose of affirming the unity of readers and books. Book-centered paradigm Gilman Hall opened in 1916 with a collection of just under 200,000 volumes distributed over three floors of book stacks, faculty offices, classrooms, and seminar rooms. By 1941, Gilman held just over 535,000 volumes and could hold no more. Alternatives had to be found, but faculty members strongly resisted changes to a design that was so well suited to the particular character of teaching, learning, and scholarship at Johns Hopkins. Collection growth ultimately forced the issue, with the decision to build the Milton S. Eisenhower Library. The new library opened in 1964 with just over 1.1 million volumes, about six times the number of books with which Gilman opened not quite 50 years earlier.5 The new building had five and half floors, four of them almost entirely given over to shelving the collections; books, not readers, were regnant in the new library. This allocation of space signals the defining characteristic of a second paradigm for the design of academic libraries: the shelving of large collections. Throughout the nineteenth century, most academic library collections were comparatively small. They could often be accommodated in a single room or set of rooms in buildings with other academic purposes. Libraries built as late as the 1890s were, like those in Lunt and Altgeld Halls, dominated by reader spaces, not by shelving.6 But the explosion of paper-based publications in the nineteenth century caught up with academic libraries, making Lunt and Altgeld and Gilman obsolete within just a single generation. These libraries did not need simply to be redesigned; and in the case of Gilman, the library could not be redesigned or expanded. A new paradigm was needed, one that would accommodate large and growing collections.7 The imperatives of this new book-centered paradigm are perhaps nowhere more sharply evident than in the building that replaced Altgeld Hall at the University of Illinois. Construction of a new Main Library began in 1923; the building was first occupied in 1926 and completed in 1927, just thirty years after Altgeld Hall had opened. Additional book stacks at the west end of the building were part of the original plan and were completed in 1939. The unrelenting need for more shelving drove the construction of additional book stacks in 1958, in 1968, and in 1982 [Figure 3]. The 1982 addition maximized its holding capacity through the use of high-capacity moveable shelving. The library building finally stopped its westward expansion not by slowing the growth of its collections but by opening a separate high-capacity shelving facility at the edge of campus in 2004. The second module of this facility was completed in 2008. Book space, not reader space, came to dominate this library over a period of just fifty years. While this change may be most evident in research libraries, with their exceptionally large collections, it was in fact characteristic of academic libraries of all sizes, which saw over time an apparently unavoidable displacement of readers by books. A building type once thought to bring readers and books together was now less and less congenial to readers as books took over the space. The history of academic libraries in the twentieth century can be written in terms of the rate at which books drove readers out, and of the Sisyphean efforts of institutions to escape this tread. This dominance of books over readers appeared in a survey of academic library projects completed between 1992 and 2001, where library directors were asked what motivated new capital investment in library space. By far the single most frequent motivator (in 57% of the 240 responses) was the need to accommodate collection growth.8 Information technology and the end of the book-centered paradigm But change was afoot. Notably, in follow-up interviews with those associated with library projects completed between 1992 and 2001, most library directors “expressed little anxiety about future shelving needs. . . . Many felt that—with burgeoning online resources and off-site shelving facilities a possibility—it was unlikely that shelving needs would ever again drive library space design in the way it had in the past.” One liberal arts dean countered this optimism by observing that “one of the things that happened when we got done with the renovation and expansion is that the space got so much more attractive that the number of visitors [i.e., readers] simply doubled or tripled. . . . And so the question is, can the library if it gets significantly more full [with print material] still accommodate that number of students? And it will be difficult” (Libraries Designed for Learning, p. 12). This chief academic officer could imagine a future when his college would once more treat shelving the collections as the primary function of the library building, in time driving readers back out of the building. 5 These two views dramatize the conflict between the first and second design paradigms of library space, between library designs where readers and where books are the dominant consideration. These two views pose the question of how long the second, book-centered design paradigm would prevail into the twenty-first century. The end of that paradigm may have been signaled in a 1993 meeting of the Board of Trustees at Denison University. Given the severely over-crowded condition of the library’s book stacks, President Michele Myers asked the trustees to approve a substantial expansion of the library. One of the trustees, William Bowen, then President of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, was profoundly uneasy with this approach. He wondered whether its driving force, the seemingly ineluctable growth of the print collections, might be changed. From this uneasiness grew JSTOR, now an immensely important online source of journal back files.9 One measure of the success of this digital publishing project is that by 2002, less than a decade later, library directors “regularly commented on their newly acquired ability to remove back files of journals from prime shelving space or from the collections altogether” (Libraries Designed for Learning, p. 11). Bowen is an economist; his aim was to avoid unnecessary spending on library space, not to create a new paradigm of library space design. But by easing the stranglehold of the book-centered paradigm, he and others who led the shift of collection growth out of physical space and into virtual space in effect opened the possibility of a new paradigm for library space planning. If library planning might now be driven primarily by something other than the need for additional shelving, what would it be? The 2002 survey found that the second most frequent motivator for new library space was the changing character of the space needed for student study (45% of the responses, as compared to 57% for growth of the collections). Might a new paradigm focus on this need? Might learning be the primary motivator for a third paradigm of library space planning? Learning-centered paradigm Putting the learner at the center of library space planning is a return to the first paradigm, with the critical differences that information is now superabundant rather than scarce and now increasingly resident in virtual rather than in physical space. The first paradigm of library design brought the reader and printed material together in a particular physical space. But once every space 6 is potentially a library space—that is to say, an information rich space—the design challenge is less with the interaction of readers and books and more with the connection between space and learning.10 How has library space design dealt to this challenge? One important response was taking shape at much the same time as JSTOR was being created. Starting in the early 1990s with the Information Arcade at the University of Iowa and the Leavey Library at the University of Southern California,11 librarians and information technologists joined forces in designing a new set of services meant to respond to the revolution in information technology. This approach, embodied in what is now called the information commons, sees rapid and fundamental change in information technology as primarily a service and pedagogical problem. Students and faculty need well-equipped facilities and instructional help in mastering information technology. The information commons offers both and represents a new element in the traditional panoply of library service spaces: reference, circulation, technical services, and departmental libraries. The information commons requires a fundamentally new degree of collaboration between librarians and information technologists, who bring different professional training and cultures together in newly designed spaces in support of student and faculty learning. The information commons is now a well-established feature of library space design and has spawned its own professional literature.12 Another approach is evident in the Vogel Library, completed in 1999 at Wartburg College. The Vogel Library includes an information commons, but the library’s design had a quite different genesis. Jill Gremmels, then director of the Vogel Library, argues that: libraries have tried to support learning, but I don’t think libraries have traditionally said, “We want to make learning happen here” . . . . We didn’t start out [our library planning] with what I think is the traditional question, “How much stuff do we have to get in this building and what kind of stuff is it?” . . . We started out the planning by saying, “What do we want to happen in this building?” And the answer to that was that we wanted to be much more proactive about promoting learning (Libraries Designed for Learning, pp. 3, 28). What resulted from the wish “to make learning happen” was a library on three floors, with virtually all of its books held in compact shelving on the entry floor, next to the current periodicals, a curriculum collection, and a café. Reference services, an array of computers, classrooms, and staff offices occupy the second floor. A third floor is entirely devoted (except for the college archives and a student services office) to a variety of learning spaces, with no print library materials and no library or information technology staff present [Figure 4]. This design, especially in its refusal to 7 allow books to dominate the space and its third floor focused almost exclusively on student learning, is a radical departure from the book-centered paradigm of library design.13 If we want to join Jill Gremmels in making learning happen in libraries, if we want to make learning the central concern of library design, we are obligated to develop some understanding of the process of learning. To do this, we might think of learning as involving four distinctive stages happening in a variety of spaces and realized through two quite different modes, as represented in Figure 5. Within this framework, the key question is how to design space that helps prompt the second stage decision by which a learner takes responsibility for and control over his or her own learning. Acting on this question can produce a third design paradigm that strongly aligns the library with the shift toward the learner-centered pedagogies that are transforming higher education.14 Figure 5 argues that classrooms are vitally important in launching learning. But the instructor remains in control of classroom learning, which makes the second of the four stages described here the first opportunity the learner has for taking responsibility for and control over his or her own learning. This second stage can be thought of as a “magical moment” in learning. There is no way to force this moment into being. It happens when the learner decides that a particular learning activity is intrinsically important and one way to shape knowledge, personal character, values, and a way of living. It happens when study becomes learning.15 Another way to characterize this transformative stage is to observe that in the absence of taking responsibility for and control over one’s own learning, one can be a history major but not a historian. Even more clearly, it is impossible to become a musician without taking ownership of the discipline and skills needed to play the piano, oboe, or other instrument. Scholars describe this transformative moment in learning in a number of ways. Phil Race puts the individual’s wanting to learn at the center of a set of five interacting factors that underpin successful learning.16 The editors of the landmark survey How People Learn use the term metacognition to designate a set of activities through which a person becomes a self-conscious and self-regulating learner. These activities include “the ability to orchestrate one’s learning: to plan, monitor success, and correct errors when appropriate—all necessary for effective intentional learning” (p. 97). The term intentional learning, as developed by Carl Bereiter and Marlene Scardamalia, is particularly instructive. They use intentional learning to refer to “cognitive processes that have learning as [an intrinsic] goal rather than an incidental outcome,” and they 8 describe how all too often learning instead remains process-driven and degenerates into schoolwork. Speaking of primary school students, they argue: The work that characterizes classroom life may have originally been conceived with learning goals in mind, and it may even achieve some learning objectives, but from the standpoint of students, doing schoolwork is what is school is about. It is their job, not attaining learning goals. . . . We could find nothing in [children’s talk about their classrooms] . . . to suggest that the children thought of themselves as learners. . . . By interpreting learning activities as jobs to be done, students not only concretize them but assimilate them to the rich knowledge structure that surrounds work in industrialized societies. Even young children know something about what it means to have a job, to be a good worker, to take pride in a job well done, and so on. All this knowledge can immediately be brought to bear on schoolwork, making what might otherwise be an incomprehensible enterprise something easy to understand and adjust to. The drawback, however, is that schoolwork rather than learning becomes the object of effort.17 To escape being trapped by schoolwork, Bereiter and Scardamalia argue that “students need to direct mental effort to goals over and above those implicit in the school activities.” These goals include building a problem-solving framework for approaching learning, taking responsibility for high-level skills normally exercised by the teacher, setting personally meaningful learning goals that subsume (and therefore satisfy) externally imposed schoolwork goals, and self-assessing their own success in learning (pp. 385-388). To act successfully on such goals is to become an autonomous learner. The first concern of a learning-centered design practice will be to create spaces that foster intentional learning. In the twenty-first century, we need constantly to affirm that the most important educational function of physical library space is to foster a culture of intentional learning. We must show how the library building is—or can become—a major factor in the transformational trajectory of such learning. How often do we actually do this? One might paraphrase Bereiter and Scardamalia to say that while we may often begin our planning with learning goals in mind, and may even achieve some learning objectives, the accommodation and delivery of services is what the design of most library space is about. Group study spaces, cafés, computer laboratories, and information or learning commons are common features in contemporary library design. They all offer possibilities for intentional learning, and their design may be driven by learner-centered concerns. But intentional or autonomous learning has rarely been a planning goal. With the possible exception of group study spaces, none of these spaces inherently demands a learner-centered design practice. Space for learning frequently devolves into space for service.18 The predictable result has been design decisions that most strongly support an instructor/service or a schoolwork-centered mode of learning —evident, for instance, in the inclusion of electronic classrooms in new library space. 9 Bereiter and Scardamalia conclude by saying that a list of the various factors that constitute intentional learning fails “to convey the sense of a whole educational environment geared to the pursuit of learning goals.” They reference instead the community of scholars, where “the degeneration of knowledge building into schoolwork or other routines, although it inevitably occurs, is actively resisted” (p. 388). John Seely Brown strongly reinforces the ideas of community and intentional learning when he observes that it is through participation in communities that deep learning occurs. People don’t learn to become physicists by memorizing formulas; rather it’s the implicit practices that matter most. Indeed, knowing only the explicit, mouthing the formulas, is exactly what gives an outsider away. Insiders know more. By coming to inhabit the relevant community, they get to know not just the “standard” answers, but the real questions, sensibilities, and aesthetics, and why they matter. The task of the university is to make these communities, and especially the real questions, sensibilities, and values of those communities, open and accessible to those who want to learn. It is “the learning communities that universities establish and nurture,” as Brown says in language especially pointed for librarians, “that remove . . . [universities] from the realm of a delivery service, or from being mere traffickers of information.”19 Brown was not describing space planning in writing of campus communities. But those of us responsible for libraries and other non-classroom learning spaces should be mindful of what he says if we want buildings that foster intentional learning and escape the pitfalls of schoolwork, if we want to promote learning communities rather than trafficking in information, if we want ourselves to enact institutional mission rather than merely to support it. Conclusion: enacting mission Some features of a learning-centered design—the generous provision of group study space and of information and learning commons chief among them—are now regular features of library planning. But it is far from clear that our concern with learning goes much beyond these features or that a systematic understanding of learning deeply informs our design work. The library directors responsible for projects completed between 1992 and 2001 responded to a question about what they needed to understand to succeed with their projects by identifying library operations 85% of the time but modes of student learning only 41% of the time. Follow up interviews indicated that what library directors had in mind in answering affirmatively about learning was little more than student preferences regarding group study space and types of seating (Libraries Designed for Learning, pp. 10 20-22). I am aware of only two studies that were part of library space planning and aimed at a systematic understanding of the culture of student learning.20 If we want to make learning happen in libraries, then understanding learning processes and applying that understanding systematically to our planning and design work is the key to further advance. To do this, we must think more like educators and less like service providers. We must build an understanding of how people learn, consider the pivotal role of intentional learning in that process, and—most critically—choose to enact the learning mission of our institutions rather than simply support it. Most academic library mission statements say that the library’s purpose is to support students and faculty, to support learning and scholarship, to support—that is—the institution’s mission. For more than a century, the clearest way to provide that support has been to build the largest possible print collections of information resources, which inescapably came to dominate library space. But the viability of this book-centered paradigm began to fade in the 1990s, as vast quantities of information became available in virtual space and libraries became but one, and often not the preferred source for information.21 Our obligation is now to create a new paradigm for the academic library.22 Fundamentally, the choice before us is that between viewing the library as an information repository on the one hand and as a learning enterprise on the other. We may continue to see the library as a source of information; treat readers as information consumers; and cast library staff as people who support learning by facilitating the use of information resources. Alternatively, we may choose to treat students as intentional learners rather than as consumers; view the library building as one of the chief places on campus where students take responsibility for and control over their own learning; and employ library staff to enact the learning mission of the university through being educators. Making this second choice is to make the choice for learning in library design. Making this choice is to launch a design practice centered on learning.23 I have been a librarian for more than thirty years. I have worked at institutions where parts of library buildings were strongly influenced by the reader-centered design paradigm. Primarily, however, I have worked in buildings where books reigned supreme, and it must be said that I have done my part to fill these buildings to overflowing with printed information resources. But it has been my extraordinary good fortune to be a librarian at a time of technological change comparable in its revolutionary impact to the changes introduced in the Western world by Gutenberg and the 11 Fourdrinier machine. Changes in information technology have only recently catalyzed the conditions in which a third design paradigm, focused on intentional learning, is possible. This possibility will best be realized when librarians cease to think of their mission as primarily one of supporting the academic work of others and instead come to see themselves primarily as educators, accepting the very considerable challenge—amounting to a paradigm change in profession24—of joining with students and faculty as collaborators in enacting the learning missions of our institutions. 4

United States

The first colleges in the United States were intended to train members of the clergy. The libraries associated with these institutions largely consisted of donated books on the subjects of theology and the classics. In 1766, Yale had approximately 4,000 volumes, second only to Harvard.^[3] Access to these libraries was restricted to faculty members and a few students: the only staff was a part-time faculty member or the president of the college.^[4] The priority of the library was to protect the books, not to allow patrons to use them. In 1849, Yale was open 30 hours a week, the University of Virginia was open nine hours a week, Columbia University four, and Bowdoin College only three.^[5] Students instead created literary societies and assessed entrance fees in order to build a small collection of usable volumes often in excess of what the university library held.^[5]

Around the turn of the century, this approach began to change. The American Library Association was formed in 1876, with members including Melville Dewey and Charles Ammi Cutter. Libraries re-prioritized in favor of improving access to materials, and found funding increasing as a result of increased demand for said materials.^[6]

Academic libraries today vary in regard to the extent to which they accommodate those who are not affiliated with their parent universities. Some offer reading and borrowing privileges to members of the public on payment of an annual fee; such fees can vary greatly. The privileges so obtained usually do not extend to such services as computer usage, other than to search the catalog, or Internet access. Alumni and students of cooperating local universities may be given discounts or other consideration when arranging for borrowing privileges. On the other hand access to the libraries of some universities is absolutely restricted to students, faculty, and staff. Even in this case, they may make it possible for others to borrow materials through inter-library loan programs.

Libraries of land-grant universities generally are more accessible to the public. In some cases they are official government document repositories and so are required to be open to the public. Still, members of the public are generally charged fees for borrowing privileges, and usually are not allowed to access everything they would be able to as students.

Canada

Academic libraries in Canada are a relatively recent development in relation to other countries. The very first academic library in Canada was opened in 1789 in Windsor, Nova Scotia.^[7] Academic libraries were significantly small during the 19th century and up until the 1950s, when Canadian academic libraries began to grow steadily as a result of greater importance being placed on education and research.^[7] The growth of libraries throughout the 1960s was a direct result of many overwhelming factors including inflated student enrollments, increased graduate programs, higher budget allowance, and general advocacy of the importance of these libraries.^[8] As a result of this growth and the Ontario New Universities Library Project that occurred during the early 1960s, 5 new universities were established in Ontario that all included fully catalogued collections.^[7] The establishment of libraries was widespread throughout Canada and was furthered by grants provided by the Canada Council and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, which sought to enhance library collections.^[7] Since many academic libraries were constructed after World War Two, a majority of the Canadian academic libraries that were built before 1940 that haven’t been updated to modern lighting, air conditioning, etc., are either no longer in use or are on the verge of decline.^[9] The total number of college and university libraries increased from 31 in 1959-1960 to 105 in 1969-1970.^[10]

Following the growth of academic libraries in Canada during the 1960s there was a brief period of sedation, which was a primary result of some major budgetary issues.^[11] These academic libraries were faced with cost issues relating to the recently developed service of interlibrary lending and the high costs of periodicals on acquisition budgets, which affected overall acquisition budgeting and ultimately general collections.^[11] Canadian academic libraries faced consistent problems relating to insufficient collections and overall lack of coordination among collections.^[12]

Academic libraries within Canada would not have flourished and continue to be strengthened without the help of outside organizations. The Ontario Council of University Libraries (OCUL) was established in 1967 and is concerned with promoting unity among Canadian academic libraries.^[13] The Ontario College and University Library Association (OCULA) is attached to the Ontario Library Association (OLA) and is concerned with representing academic librarians in regards to issues that are shared in the academic library setting.^[14]

See also

• Academic journal
• Google Scholar and academic libraries
• Internet search engines and libraries
• Research library
• Research Libraries Group
• Research Libraries UK
• Library assessment
• Trends in library usage

Notes and references

Further reading

• Jürgen Beyer, « Comparer les bibliothèques universitaires », Arbido newsletter 2012:8
• Ellsworth, Ralph E. (1973) Academic library buildings: a guide to architectural issues and solutions 530 pp. Boulder: Associated University Press
• Giustini, Dean (2011, 3 May) Canadian academic libraries' use of social media, 2011 update [Web log post]. Retrieved from http://blogs.ubc.ca/dean/2011/05/canadian-academic-libraries-use-of-social-media-2011-update/
• Hamlin, Arthur T. (1981). The University Library in the United States: Its Origins and Development. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. ISBN 9780812277951
• Hunt, C. J. (1993) "Academic library planning in the United Kingdom", in: British Journal of Academic Librarianship; vol. 8 (1993), pp. 3–16
• Shiflett, Orvin Lee (1981). Origins of American Academic Librarianship. Norwood, N.J.: Ablex Pub. Corp. ISBN 9780893910822
• Taylor, Sue, ed. (1995) Building libraries for the information age: based on the proceedings of a symposium on The Future of Higher Educational Libraries at the King's Manor, York 11–12 April 1994. York: Institute of Advanced Architectural Studies, University of York ISBN 0-904761-49-5