are academic libraries oriented to service or lifelong learning?

Mike Ridley considers this question in access, v. 14 (1) Fall 2008, p. 22-23 (published by OLA) with respect to our physical space.

It's a darned good question we should also apply to our activities.

Do we actually turn a critical eye to what we are doing within our academic libraries to sustain the new focus on lifelong learning (LL)?? I don't think so. We tend to speak about relevance to our users as a service concept. We assume we are relevant in the services we offer our users and we evaluate them as services (as opposed to partners in LL?). We consider LL as an addition to what we do and thus consider it a service. Maybe if we consider it central to what we do, even as an academic exercise ;0) we can begin to consider what we offer/may offer as more than a service?

Yes, we provide service value in the following ways: study space, information literacy and critical thinking and research skills, we acquire resources for programmes, faculty and grad students, and we make these resources available and respond to user needs. They relate to LL as services to enable LL. But what are we doing to engage in the "process" of LL as librarians, and as librarians supporting and engaging our users? What do our users need us to do to engage in this process? Do we continue to insert ourselves in users' workflows (passive supply) and/or do we also add engagement (active participation).

I guess this reflects my bias. LL requires active participation on our part as Librarians (along with a declining need for passive supply). If you don't agree with my assumption or bias, does this argument fall apart? What do you think?

Do we respond to the different learning styles of users in what we, as librarians, do? Do we allow our users to guide our activities/services, as in "do we put them in the driver's seat re: when they interact with us?" Do we work with our users, alongside them on their research or processes in the labs, classrooms, homework? People are staring to speak of the "embedded" librarian, taking the roving librarian external to the library as a physical and conceptual space and into our users physical, conceptual and intellectual spaces. Is this the future?

so what was niggling at me back in April?!!

Wow,

It has been that long! Dang. Well, I'm back considering the research stuff. What had been whispering in my ear back in my April post finally materialized. While I coded the discussion and definitions in the articles (the theory and "definitions" respectively) as one entity, I realized that I needed to code each separately or independently. I don't know why it took me so long to figure that out. In retrospect it is blatantly obvious.

I really needed to take a step back and investigate how the authors' have organized their thoughts and expressed constructs. I need to consider these as two independent conceptualizations of the concept of competency, because this is how the authors' are approaching the concept (what % is unclear at this time). By discussing competency and then defining competency within a single article, they are implicitly joining the two parts, but when they write about them, the text is sometimes (%?) independent of the definition (typically located in a table or figure, typically). The two conceptualizations, based on my impressions, contain minimal overlap in terminology used, and further, there is internal consistency within each conceptualization.

So the exciting slog begins again. I may even have to revisit my initial coding after this second approach/coding is completed. Why does this have to take so long?