LAUSR

Higher education institutions are experiencing significant change within an ever increasingly complex political and economic environment. Universities are now more accountable than ever before as they try to operate in a highly competitive global market place. This competition and accountability cascades down to the constituent parts of the university, which, in turn, results in an internal market for resource, visibility, and attention, and the position of the academic library in this environment becomes all important. Over the last decade I have been involved in a number of discussions regarding the role and position of the academic library within the academy. Some of this debate was triggered through a movement to converge and super-converge academic library departments with other services (Heseltine, Marsh, McKnight, & Melling, 2009). The interest for me, in particular, conceerned my own involvement in a super-convergence project in which I was responsible for bringing together library services, IT support services, and student administration into a single super department known as Library and Student Support (Appleton, 2010). Such activity sparked debate, certainly within the UK higher education library sector, regarding the perceived role and value of the academic library within the institution when it is merged, converged, or blurred with other academic and support functions. However, convergence and super-convergence are not global occurrences, and there are a whole host of other elements which need to be considered when addressing the position of the academic library, many of which this volume will address. More recently, there have been some significant studies in the UK, around the future role of the academic library and a growing scrutiny of the leadership of 21st century academic libraries in ever changing higher education environments (Pinfield, Cox, & Rutter, 2017; Baker & Allden, 2017a, 2017b). Similarly, debate around the actual and perceived value of