Abstract:

Academic libraries have traditionally been at the core of the scholarly activities in Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) and are key players in the educational processes of students. At their onset, their emphasis was on collecting and preserving printed resources of information. Today, with the surge of technology, the diversification of formats of information resources, the explosion of information and the growing development and adoption of technology-based trends in education, libraries are at risk of lagging behind and failing to meet patrons´ needs and expectations if they do not understand and embrace technological change as an opportunity to keep abreast with these trends and changes.

The New Media Consortium (NMC) in its Horizon Report, Library Edition 2017 has set forth "trends accelerating" and "challenges impending technology adoption in academic and research libraries", as well as "important developments in technology" that academic and research libraries should adopt in the short, medium and long terms if they want to keep a prominent place in education.

This paper explains what libraries can be doing to address these challenges and developments and focuses on cross-institution collaboration as a means of supporting new trends in education. As an example, it explains the experience gained in the Library Working Group of the Association of Jesuit Universities in Latin America (AUSJAL) and the way in which this group is doing the shared development of electronic collections in order to support different forms of delivering information literacy instruction to its patrons.

Keywords:

Academic libraries, new trends in education, cross-institutional collaboration, collection development.