Stewart -Part 7
Conclusion
South African higher education faces significant challenges in the pos-apartheid era. While the transformative agenda reshapes higher education, academic libraries are compelled to adjust to new organizational and financial realities. These realities often find the academic library without adequate resources to maintain quality and ensure educational outcomes. Institutional mergers and re-organizations place additional pressure on libraries that are not equipped to meet the needs of institutions hastily re-classed as research universities. Within this climate of mandated (and often uncertain) organizational change, there is growing debate on the benefits of unionization for academic library professionals. As this occurs, core library functions such as information literacy are compromised by a lack of institutional support, low faculty awareness, and uneven levels of student preparedness given the economic disparities that still exist in South Africa. Broader economic issues, especially for under-resourced institutions, include the high cost of telecommunications in a country that faces major challenges in improving and expanding its telecommunications infrastructure as its economy globalizes. Despite these significant challenges, South African academic libraries have not retreated from their responsibilities in ensuring access and teaching students the skills to navigate increasingly complex information environments. Equally impressive, amid the uncertainty and anxiety that accompanies rapid change, South African librarians have embraced their responsibilities in preserving the nation's intellectual capital and opened avenues for research and scholarship across one of the world's most diverse cultural landscapes.
It is clear that South African academic libraries take their role in the transformative agenda very seriously. South African higher education has made tremendous strides since the end of the apartheid era in addressing decades of inequality as has, of course, the entire nation. In the coming years, South African academic libraries will need to make strong arguments for the library’s role in strengthening quality in a higher education system that endeavors to be a mechanism for access and change across all sectors of South African society. Hopefully, the ideas presented here will provide the reader with a good starting point for further inquiry on these issues. Most of the research papers and articles discussed in this literature review are accompanied by extensive bibliographies that invite further investigation for anyone interested in the scope of change underway in South African higher education. As an academic librarian, I invite my colleagues to learn more about the role South African academic libraries are playing in institutional and societal change. We can learn a great deal from them. End of article