the role of the academic library and librarian

There is a fundamental question for a library that serves researchers only.
Once you have either licensed sufficient access to online journals, or built your own local repository holding the major commercial titles, is there anything left for you to do?

For a university library I can see there are certainly ongoing roles because of the undergrads and the university community.  They need a neutral place to meet, and they often need lots of help with information location, course-related materials, paper writing, proper citations, plagiarism etc. etc.

But other than that, what roles are left?
In Changing a Cultural Icon: The Academic Library as a Virtual Destination, Jerry D. Campbell writes

Today, however, the library is relinquishing its place as the top source of inquiry. The reason that the library is losing its supremacy in carrying out this fundamental role is due, of course, to the impact of digital technology. As digital technology has pervaded every aspect of our civilization, it has set forth a revolution not only in how we store and transmit recorded knowledge, historical records, and a host of other kinds of communication but also in how we seek and gain access to these materials.

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Need for a New Mission

As this change has rushed upon us, academic libraries have continued to operate more or less as usual. Though this may be partially assigned to institutional inertia, another factor is that many necessary and important legacy operations remain in place. These include providing physical access to and related services for all those monographs and other published media awaiting scanning by Google and others. Library print-based resources may be in less demand than resources on the Web, but they are still in some demand. In addition, many libraries maintain (or are devoted to) rare book and special collection operations, which are unlikely to change their basic mission even as business declines. Similarly, libraries have many valuable nonpublished and not-yet-digitized holdings that are critical for research in many areas. Simply put, even a revolution as rapid as this still requires a transition period—during which current library operations remain necessary.

Assuming that such a transition may take another decade (which would almost double the current life span of the Web), we must look to the longer-term future. Academic librarians are asking, and the academy must also ask: “What then?” Should the academic library be continued? If so, what will be its purpose? If serving as the world’s primary source of trustworthy knowledge has in the past been the fundamental purpose around which libraries have evolved, what will be the fundamental purpose(s) around which libraries will continue to evolve?

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Numerous creative and useful services have evolved within academic libraries in the digital age:

• providing quality learning spaces;
• creating metadata;
• offering virtual reference services;
• teaching information literacy;
• choosing resources and managing resource licenses;
• collecting and digitizing archival materials;
• and maintaining digital repositories.

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Caught between Money and Icons

Although these emerging, digital-age library services may be important, even critical, in the present era, there is no consensus on their significance to the future academic library—or even on whether they should remain as library functions carried out by librarians. In addition, at this point, the discussion of the future of the academic library has been limited to librarians and has not widened, as it should, to involve the larger academic community. Consequently, neither academic librarians nor others in the academy have a crisp notion of where exactly academic libraries fit in the emerging twenty-first-century information panoply.

Librarians must widen the discussion and raise the questions concerning the future of academic libraries.

article link via The Distant Librarian

I think one area not explored is about support to academic activities, tools for researchers, and inter-library services.

A lot of science today is very computation and data intense.  I think there is a big role for academic libraries as custodians of data and research output.  I'm not talking about a static archive of shelves with dusty CDs, I'm talking about a living archive of the data and programs used by scientists.  So often both the data and the code used to produce a paper is lost.  This must stop.  As well, typing a couple words into a search box is a pretty primitive mode of information exploration.  Visualization and better linking of information has a huge potential to improve research productivity.  Even simple things like better tools for recording citations and following paths of citation could have an impact.

In terms of library services, I think librarians as custodians of information (rather than creators of metadata for books sitting on shelves) have a role to play in creating services that take us from InterLibraryLoan to inter-library information exploration.