Towards a New Alexandria

I can't believe that this is the last week of class. It seems like we just started on our journey to learn about academic libraries and now it's almost over. And to partly reflect back, I wanted to touch on the New Alexandria.

In the beginning of this semester, we were asked to discuss the similarities between the Alexandria libraries and current academic libraries. A few days ago when I was reading the online version of Library Journal, I came across an article about a blogger's summary of The New Republic's article "Towards a New Alexandra: Imagining the Future of Libraries".

Author Lisbet Rausing discussed how copyright and the high fees of journals and online databases can cause the downfall of academic libraries as we know it. Because of these issues, scholars are unable to pass around and share information like scholars did during the time period when the Alexandria libraries were around.

But, Rausing says there is some hope. Many journals are open accessed and peer reviewed. Some academic libraries, like Harvard, are putting some of their collection in a public domain Website. Rausing would like to see academic libraries, universities and other institutes to find ways to open up their research to the general public so researchers' works will not be lost forever because they were not used.

So how do academic libraries open up information so everyone can use it? It is something that will have to be looked at over the next few years. For academic libraries to be new Alexandrias, they must find a way to open up their information to the public. It will be interesting to see how academic libraries will evolve in the future and see if they will become 21st Century Alexandrias.