The digital age has brought transformative change to the scholarly information environment and has dramatically changed the way faculty and students use libraries. Library users have a diversity of information needs and libraries worldwide are responding to the challenges of the digital age by rethinking approaches to library facilities, services, and collections. The previous paradigm of acquiring resources ‘just in case’ a user – now or in the future – might access the resource has largely been replaced by the paradigm of ‘just in time’ access and information delivery.
There are many external factors forcing transformative change in libraries, such as shifts in scholarly communication and how research is published and disseminated, technology that allows users to access information without intermediation, user demands for access to new types of scholarly information (e.g. data sets, multimedia resources), and accelerated globalization. Learners and researchers have new demands due to the complexities of blended learning, experiential learning, distributed learning and the concomitant need for mobile content delivery, increased focus on research data management and data mining, and increased options for disseminating research.