Beyond the Information Commons

A Field Guide to Evolving Library Services, Technologies, and Spaces

By: Charles Forrest (Editor), Martin Halbert (Editor)

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Hardcover | 22 August 2020

At a Glance

Hardcover
248 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
26.39 x 18.52 x 1.98

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$199.75

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In the closing decades of the twentieth century, academic libraries responded to rapid changes in their environment by acquiring and making accessible a host of new information resources, developing innovative new services and collaborative partnerships, and building new kinds of technology-equipped spaces to support changing user behaviors and emerging patterns of learning. The "Information Commons" or "InfoCommons" blossomed in a relatively short amount of time in libraries across North America, and around the world, particularly in Europe and the British Commonwealth.

This book is more than a second edition of the 2009 book A Field Guide to the Information Commons which documented the emergence of a range of facilities and service programs that called themselves "Information Commons." This new book updates this review of current practice in the Information Commons and other new kinds of facilities inspired by the same needs and intents, but goes beyond that by describing the continued evolution. This new book is an attempt to answer the question: "What might be the next emerging concept for a technology-enabled, user-responsive, mission-driven form of the academic library?"

Like its predecessor, Beyond the Information Commons is structured in two parts. First, a brief series of essays explore the Information Commons from historical, organizational, technological, and architectural perspectives. The second part is a field guide composed of more than two dozen representative entries describing various Information Commons using a consistent format that provides both perspective on issues and useful details about actual implementations. Each of these includes photos and other graphics.

Industry Reviews

Information commons bring together technology, resources, and services in one "common" physical space to appeal to students. In this update to the 2009 edition of A Field Guide to the Information Commons, editors Forrest and Halbert describe evolutions in information commons over the past 10 years, and discuss how academic libraries are keeping pace with the needs of campus communities. Like the first edition, this book is divided into two distinct parts: essays that explore information commons from "historical, organizational, technological, and architectural perspectives"; followed by more than two dozen descriptions of information commons in academic libraries worldwide. The book's photos and floor plans are helpful for visualizing the space being described. This is a solid work for understanding the past, present, and future of the information commons. Librarians, as well as library science students and professors, will benefit from this worthwhile read.

-- "Library Journal"

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