Futures Studies and Scenario Planning of Academic Libraries in Iran Using Cross Impact Analysis Approach

The progress and emergence of new technologies in the present century have made academic libraries revise, develop, and transform their programs and services. In other words, recent developments have prompted the managers and librarians of libraries around the world to take the changes seriously, think about the horizons of the users’ present and future needs, investigate the challenges they are likely to face on their way to achieving their goals, and devise serious plans, particularly strategic ones, by predicting the trends of future developments. So, systematic future studies need to be conducted on academic libraries to enable them to keep up with modern developments, deal with them effectively, and maintain their status and persistency in current competitive conditions. In this regard, the current article aims to study and design scenarios for the future of academic libraries in Iran in order to help provision of suitable strategies for the promotion and development of these libraries.

The current research is a survey-applied in which 16 academic libraries have been selected by the quota sampling method and a number of professors and related experts, together with the managers or assistants of the libraries of the selected universities, have formed an expert panel. Besides, four questionnaires were developed to gather the required data. To achieve the research goals, firstly, a comprehensive literature review was conducted to extract the drivers affecting the future of the target academic libraries. These drivers were localized and screened by experts, using the fuzzy Delphi method. After that, the weight of each driver was calculated using the fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process method. In the end, the key drivers and final uncertainties were determined by combining the results with Cross Impact Analysis. 

In the first step, reviewing the studies led to the extraction of 112 candidate driving forces that can influence the future of academic libraries in eight dimensions, including the political, economic, social, technological, legal, and environmental dimensions (for investigating external environments) in addition to the “structural-managerial” and “the nature and services of libraries” dimensions. After determining the key drivers, and analyzing their mutual effects, the second stage was completed by formulating scenarios facing university libraries by forming a panel of experts, using the Delphi method and future research software.

Finally, after analyzing the aspects of the final uncertainties, among the possible candidate scenarios, four plausible scenarios, namely, Utopia, Treasure key, Vicious circle, and Ruins, were drawn as the future possible state of Iranian academic libraries, from which the “Utopia scenario” was picked up as the imagined future.