Issues for South African Academic Libraries in the Post-Apartheid Era: A Review of Selected Literature -Christopher Stewart
Abstract
Since the end of the apartheid era in 1994, South African higher education has been in an ongoing process of transformation. The goals of this transformation include higher education reform, expanded access, financial and operational efficiencies, and improved academic quality. South African academic libraries are faced with many significant challenges in this environment. Institutional mergers, limited financial resources, information literacy, and organizational uncertainties are a few of the major issues facing academic libraries in South Africa today. This paper will explore these and other issues faced by South African academic libraries in the post-apartheid era.
Introduction
Since the end of the apartheid era in 1994, changes in the South African higher education system have reflected the new democracy's goals of redressing the inequities of the past while building an open and equitable system for the future. The purpose of this paper is to explore recent research and ideas about the academic library in this change process. General areas of inquiry will be academic libraries within the context of higher education reform, organizational change, economics, intellectual and cultural capital, and dissemination of AIDS information. The themes identified in this paper are not meant to be inclusive of all of the issues facing South African academic libraries. Rather, they are intended to provide the reader with an overview and a reasonable sample of the major issues facing South African academic libraries in the post apartheid era in general, and over the past 5-10 years specifically.
Higher Education Reform
The change process currently underway in many South African academic libraries is intertwined with the "transformative agenda" (Reddy, 2004) for higher education that began after the democratic elections in 1994. Other academic library issues linked to higher education reform and the transformative agenda are quality assurance, assessment, user services, and information literacy. All four of these issues will be discussed in this section.