Universities and libraries have both been characterised as the gatekeepers of knowledge.[5] The library, as the custodian of published knowledge, was both metaphorically and literally at the heart of its university, providing the fundamental infrastructure of scholarship. Publication[6] of a scholar’s work was the essential foundation for the creation of new knowledge. If scholars did not publish their ideas others could not build upon them. The library organised, made available and preserved these ideas, as recorded in published works. Librarians provided the specialist skills to assist people to find and use information. Traditionally, scholarly information has been created and reviewed by experts, classified and catalogued by specialists, and delivered by teachers expert in their field. Often, scholarly information was accessible only to those who had been taught to use the tools of hierarchical and classified access.
The amount of information published each year continues to grow. More than 3000 books are published daily, with an estimated 3.1 billion books published in 2006, an increase of 0.5 per cent on 2005 figures. A new weblog is created every half-minute; 50 million blogs were created in the second quarter of 2006. Podcasts, videos, machinima and digital archives further expand our information sources, and 2.7 billion Google searches are performed each month.[7]
What happens to the role of the university and the role of the library when we live in a digital world, a world where almost everyone can publish, almost everyone can access this published material, where the amount of information is growing exponentially? A world where there is an illusion that information is free, where public search engines, Open Access publishing and the increasing ubiquity of Internet-enabled computing have challenged the traditional sources of authority? A world where “The scarce commodity is no longer the information itself, which is often free, but the time and skills to use it well”?[8]