Trends for Academic Art Libraries: The Herron Art Library -- Driving Digital Content

Abstract

Traditionally, as librarians in academic art libraries our roles have been to collect, organize, and provide access to art-related information in print and non-print formats such as books, journals, picture files, 35 mm slides, and video. Our content development efforts were focused towards developing and managing collections of content that met the research and instruction needs of our library’s primary clientele, the faculty and students. Today’s rapid changes imposed upon our profession by technology and higher education are pushing art librarians and libraries into new and varied roles that expand our everyday jobs and embrace new responsibilities related to scholarly communication, preservation and stewardship of digital collections.