New professions for academic research libraries

The Note e discussioni's section of the journal's current issue focuses on the new professional profiles for academic research libraries. All the papers included in this section were presented during a workshop held in Rome in November 2012, and are introduced by a preliminary note by Maria Cassella on the new role of academic research library. Ellis Sada, Liliana Gregori and Paolo Sirito claim the necessity, for information professional, to be no longer passively engaged in the cycle of knowledge (e.g. by the mere selection, acquisition and distribution of content) but to became an active part of the very same cycle too. Maddalena Morando analyses the repository manager's professional profile, whose job is the planning and management of the Institutional Repository (IR) as a showcase of the university's scientific production. She also tries to imagine which good practices could be adapted from the existing literature to the context of Italian universities. Pierfranco Minsenti gives an effective account of what a coordinator of online information services (i.e. the person in charge of the web-based library portal) does: the management of a library portal - not just a technological platform, but an actual service - requires improved synergies among back-office activities (such as systems management, metadata creation, electronic resources management) and front-office activities (such as document delivery and assistance in accessing electronic resources). Finally, Paola Gargiulo describes the core competencies and abilities of the electronic resources librarian, who covers all the activities related to the acquisition, licensing, management of ER.