BUILDING A NEW GENERATION SCIENCE LIBRARY: THE KAUST STORY

Abstract

If you had the opportunity to build a science library from scratch for a new generation of researchers and students, what would it look like and how would it operate? We will show you the vision and reality of the new King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) Library that won the 2011 ALA/AIA Library Architecture award and that for the last three years has been providing a high level of information services to top level international scientists and graduate students. We will describe the major characteristics in contemporary science research, education, and information management that guided the design of our library facility, technical infrastructure, and services. We will give concrete examples and evaluations of our implementation of new information services and tools. And we will end with the challenges still before us, most notably the effective integration of science knowledge management into the workflow of scientific research and enterprise based information technology organization.