The Strategic Positioning of Academic Libraries: Global Challenges, Local Politics and Strategy Development

The Strategic Positioning of Academic Libraries explores the influence exerted by trends in higher education and the wider world on the position of academic libraries, alongside an analysis of their strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. It provides an essential foundation for effective library strategy formulation and positioning in a highly dynamic and competitive environment.

Examining a complex mix of global volatility, campus uncertainty, societal change and technological shifts, all generating new pressures and opportunities, this book is a practical guide to understanding the situation of academic libraries and advancing their positioning in parent institutions. Chapters cover:

• The historical evolution of academic library positioning;
• The global political, economic, social and technological context;
• The changing higher education environment;
• An in-depth SWOT analysis of academic libraries;
• Positioning strategies for successful academic libraries;
• An academic library positioning toolkit.

Drawing on the author's 30 years of library leadership experience, this book is a valuable resource for academic library directors and leadership teams in developing strategy and for staff across the library seeking to make sense of changes shaping their working lives. Students of library and information science will benefit from the book's overview of where academic libraries fit in, how they are seen and the forces driving their advancement or decline.

John Cox writes about and analyses issues impacting academic libraries and their strategic positioning. Before he retired, he was University Librarian at the University of Galway in Ireland and held other library leadership roles at University College Cork and the Wellcome Trust.