Improving access and delivery of academic content - a survey of current & emerging trends | Musings about librarianship

"Some readers might be thinking that this might be a odd time for us to start focusing on improving user experiences with delivery given that the coming of open access might make a lot of this moot.   There are two answers to this. Firstly open access even in the most optimistic of projections will still have a decade or more to go and is likely to cover only journal articles. Libraries will still need to provide access to other licensed resources (A&I indexes, image archives etc) that will not be covered by Open Access.   The other reason is that some content providers even in a open access world would still want users to authenticate, so they can track usage and users."