Access, Delivery, Performance: The Future of Libraries without Walls

It is normal in some subject disciplines to publish volumes of edited papers in honour of a respected colleague, usually to mark a significant birthday or career change. The contributors to such Festschriften are usually made up of former colleagues or pupils of the person being honoured. This volume celebrates the work of Professor Peter Brophy, the founder of the Centre for Research in Library and Information Management (CERLIM), which since 1998 has been based at the Manchester Metropolitan University. This volume contains twelve chapters written by sixteen contributors, many of them colleagues or ex-colleagues of Professor Brophy. Peter Brophy has had an outstanding career both as a librarian and researcher. Alan MacDougall, Visiting Professor at Manchester Metropolitan University provides an outline in the opening chapter. A career that started at the Library Research Unit at Lancaster University in the early 1970s progressed to professional posts at Strathclyde University and Teeside Polytechnic, before Brophy eventually became Librarian at Bristol Polytechnic. From there, he moved to the University of Central Lancashire in 1989, where in 1993 he set up CERLIM. A selected bibliography of works by Professor Brophy fills eleven pages at the end of the volume, revealing the range and diversity of his research interests over the past few decades. The contexts of the early years of Professor Brophy's career are sketched in more detail in the opening chapter by Michael Buckland, Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. Buckland was a colleague of Brophy's at the Library Research Unit at Lancaster in the early 1970s.This chapter gives a good flavour of how library and information research was undertaken in this time when the libraries at what were then 'new universities' had an active interest in innovation and when almost all library research in the UK was funded by the Office for Scientific and Technical Information of the Department of Education and Science.