Services for Academic Libraries in the New Era

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to document the integration of Web 2.0 services into the working framework of some of the most advanced academic libraries in the world. It reports a follow-up study that builds on a previous study conducted approximately two years ago. The comparison of those two studies produces interesting findings, notably an increase in the integration of web-based services. However, when some of the most core Web 2.0 services were examined, user participation was quite low. A quantitative approach to the content analysis of library web sites was performed to examine the prominence of twelve pre-determined services. In addition, the literature review focuses on the critical opinions expressed regarding the use of these web services by academic libraries, highlighting some of the problems and issues that have been raised, but are often overlooked.