With the recent social development and the rapid progress of information technology, the value of the library has not been self-evident any more, and people launches questioning the role of that.This paper firstly looks at the library' s impacts which ISO 16439: 2014 (Methods and procedures for the impact libraries) has introduced. And then studying two cases for the relationship between students' library usage and their learning attainments, the analytics (the discovery and communication of meaningful pattern in data) should be utilized to find impacts of libraries for demonstrating the significance of library, as well as the metrics having been used so far.

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Inter-library cooperation is essential for university libraries to support individual institution's educational and research activities. Organizations such as Japanese Coordinating Committee for University Libraries, Japan Association of National/Public/Private University Libraries, as well as National Institute of Informatics that has been providing Content Services over many years play an important role to build a network among university libraries. The framework of such programs has been under restructuring process in above organizations.In this article, an overview of a recent trend of collaboration and cooperation of university libraries is being discussed with 3 examples; 1) e-resources consortium, 2) promotion of institutional repositories, and 3) reconstruction of union catalogue database "NACSIS-CAT".

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This paper discusses potential of academic library in research support. After looking back the relationship between Research Office and Media Center (library) in Keio University, we discuss library's new roles in a university context. With the arrival of the open science era, the expectation for library's involvement in managing research data is getting higher. In order to respond to this, library should change their collection-centered service to researcher-centered service based on knowledge and skills nurtured by librarians. We think a new challenge for librarian could be a research liaison or coordinator in a university.

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The value and/or impact of special libraries has been assessed in various ways. Most researches have been revealed the fact that special librarians produce greater value compared to the estimated cost which they spend. However, the clients of special libraries stare at special librarians with hard eyes. Special librarians have to communicate their value effectively.

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This paper makes clear the images of U.S. public libraries and the working conditions of professional librarians, utilizing of federal government statistics and a famous private think-tank's report. Japanese society is as much fully developed country as U.S. society, so Japanese public librarianship has almost the same problems as U.S. library world. U.S. public librarians are tackling with cyber space and digital technology very well, but almost of all Japanese public libraries have now remained old-fashioned style. The author is afraid that they will miss a bright and shining future.

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