State of the art and future of Hungarian academic libraries

Abstract

Owing to well-known external – economic, social, and technological – causes, the institutional environment of libraries has recently undergone considerable changes. This shift in external conditions has obviously entailed changes in the expectations of users. While they tend to be confronted with an array of new tasks within their respective institutions, the libraries serving higher education have since 2000 supported an increasingly growing student population against the background of decreasing resources. Are libraries in a position to meet these new challenges? What sort of paradigm changes should higher education libraries implement to measure up to their already achieved significance and position, and to fulfil their tasks in their respective institutions and within the library system in Hungary?