Healthcare and Science thomsonreuters.com

I am responsible for running the library here at Waseda. There are three key areas to manage: people, library resources and budgets.

I am very pleased that we are able to support our students and researchers effectively. The quantity and quality of our electronic journals are higher than most other universities in Japan and comparable with universities in the West. We support exchange programs and students from universities such as Yale and Columbia have told us that they are very satisfied with the information resources we offer. We listen very carefully to our students returning from overseas placements so we can further improve our services.

Waseda University has over 50,000 students. We have the highest percentage of overseas students of any university in Japan. Currently we have 3,000 overseas student but our aim is to grow this to 8,000 over the next five years. Every year we welcome 10,000 new students. We have a number of introduction education programs and 101 tutorials for our first year and sophomore students. If we are going to produce excellent researchers, our students must learn basic skills. We also send them out to gain work experience as part of their education.

The biggest change to occur in the last 10 years is the student preference to obtain all the information they need from the network - rather than from the library. Students cut and paste from the Internet and this trend is only going to grow. I have been thinking that in the future, students and researchers may only use network resources and traditional users will not come to the library. People might think we will not need this expensive building and land in the middle of Tokyo. I do not think that way. We need to create a new model for the library: library as place. A place to collaborate with colleagues, to learn from experts, to challenge and meet. It's not just about content. Human interaction is important to the research process, as in any area.