Libraries in informational world cities: Fid-Bau Portal

Libraries in informational world cities

Mainka, Agnes

According to Urquhart (1977), university libraries are in the heart of the university. If we follow this metaphor we could understand all kinds of libraries as the aorta of an informational city which pumps knowledge through all spaces of those cities. To strengthen the knowledge society is increasingly gaining in importance in city development plans. Many city governments start to follow the idea of becoming a smart city, for example, Amsterdam or Barcelona. The main objective of these plans is to foster the knowledge society based on information and communication technology for a sustainable future. The knowledge society is heavily related to scientific knowledge (Stock, 2011). This is recognized by the fact that innovation is driven by scientific-technical results or that the population’s life expectancy is depending on the level of science and technology in medicine. Thus, universities play an important role in scientific research and education and vice versa academic libraries are important as support for the university as knowledge hubs. In my research, I investigate the different pillars of informational world cities represented as infrastructures, namely the creative, knowledge, digital and green respectively smart infrastructure. Libraries figure prominently in supporting all of them, like through their different services e.g. in afternoon courses to foster lifelong learning, space for group and creative work, modular space for different kinds of activities and much more. They try to redefine their position within the knowledge society. They are in need to meet the modified demands of students and scientists in the 21st century. In my presentation, I will show up the current trends in public libraries, adapt them to examples from academic libraries and address new demands of the knowledge society. Stock, W. G. (2011). Informational cities: Analysis and construction of cities in the knowledge society. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 62(5), 963–986. http://doi.org/10.1002/asi Urquhart, D. J. (1977). The Future of library collections. In Proceedings of a seminar held by the Library Management Research Unit. Loughborough: University of Technology.