5 - The Social Mission of Academic Libraries in Higher Education

Summary

When libraries served more as warehouse utilities, data-driven decision-making was crucial. Now as more of our work increasingly revolves around forming complex relationships and ongoing interactions, a more humanistic approach is required for growth and improvement.

(Mathews 2014, p. 461)

Introduction

Our review of social developments in higher education (HE) showed how key trends such as the shift from an elite to a mass system coupled with the drive for social inclusion and reductions in public funding against a backdrop of digitalisation and globalisation are shaping policies, pedagogies and professions for the 21st century. Significant developments include the expansion and diversification of student services to support larger heterogeneous populations through educational and social transitions, including the adoption of lifecycle models and a commitment to educating the whole student; a renewed focus on the so-called third mission of universities, which puts their responsibilities to the economy and society on a par with their roles in learning, teaching and research; and the resurgence of a global student-led movement to decolonise the academic curriculum, the HE sector and the whole scholarly knowledge system, which has foregrounded difficult questions for institutions around colonialism, Eurocentrism and racism, and also forced a step-change in evolving relationships with students as partners.

The present chapter returns to the narrative on the social turn in HE, with a closer look at the service responses of academic libraries to the many complex challenges of the 21st century. The chapter adopts a topical structure and concentrates on areas where the social transformation of HE is having a major impact on library work. We start with a classic business dilemma, the challenge of serving very large diverse populations with different needs at different times in ways that are affordable, equitable and inclusive. We next review library participation in university strategies for socio-economic development based on reaching out to business and the local community, and then switch to the global arena with library strategies for international students. The following sections deal with two other areas where librarians have assumed broader responsibilities, namely student well-being and literacy development, while our final section provides a selective review of the growing body of work using intellectual and social capital and related concepts to provide insights into academic library resources, roles and relationships.