One of the notable tenets of the Library 2.0 philosophy is the centrality of the user. Library 2.0 reaffirms the library as a user-centered enterprise, and then looks for ways to incorporate users' information culture into the culture of the library, paying special attention to the long tail of user needs.

It has occurred to me that we in academic libraries need to think beyond the idea of users-as-people when we consider Library 2.0. We also need to see our campus as a major constituency. In other words, the campus is a user. When we do this, we can use principles of Library 2.0 to put perspective on our changing roles in the intellectual, scholarly and pedagogical lives of our institutions.

Case in point: ACRL recently published Changing Roles of Academic and Research Libraries, an essay that emerged from a Roundtable on Technology and Change in Academic Libraries that took place last November. What I especially appreciate about this document is its focus, as reflected nicely in its title. This is a document that devotes a good part of its text to the changing roles of academic libraries on their campuses. The text doesn't explicitly refer to Library 2.0 - and that's just fine - but many of us exploring the 2.0 world would be comfortable with what this document has to say.

Many of you reading this entry probably have already seen the ACRL document. When I read it, one sentence in particular stood out for me: "What is at stake is the definition of the indispensable library—indispensable to faculty and students in the first instance, and to the knowledge and information industry in the second."

The indispensable library. That's a climactic concept. I've already blogged about academic libraries and captive audiences. To remain essential to the life of our campus, we need to earn it. The ACRL document acknowledges this and offers a number of strategies.

In my own practice, I've been contentrating recently on a couple of things in this context.

Scholarly communication. Librarians have been leaders in this area, but we could do more. We need to be more active about committing to new practices with our own scholarship. This means that we publish in open access journals when we can, routinely use pre- and postprint repositories, make deals with publishers to create hybrid publications, and use social software tools to create living, incomplete publications. I'm sure there are other ideas out there that are ripe for experiment.

We librarians should be pushing the envelope. I'm still surprised that ACRL accepted my suggestion to create a hybrid book/wiki publication of the forthcoming Library 2.0 Initiatives in Academic Libraries. I thought the idea would be rejected, but took the risk anyway.

Preservation. We need to think about new types of preservation initiatives. I'm especially interested in preserving the social computing of our campus community. This might take the form of blogs, comments, evaluations, tags,wiki contributions, and other types of online interactions. This is why I'm so keen on libraries themselves sponsoring social tools rather than seeing the use of these tools outsourced to third-party services. I'm not saying that libraries necessarily need to host all the infrastructure, but we should lobby to become a key player in the development and presentation of these initiatives.

Preserving networked read/write activities in teaching, learning and research should be a paramount goal of academic libraries. When - if - the social Web passes on, our libraries could become the repositories of a very rich history. We would do well to use this argument when advocating for the infrastructure and staff to develop, support, and preserve this campus heritage. Now that I'm back from sabbatical, I'm pitching the idea of my library's integral involvement in campus-wide programs to offer blogs and wikis. We'll see what happens.

Kudos to the ACRL Roundtable.