Stewart

Page 2

Introduction

Since the end of the apartheid era in 1994, changes in the South African higher education system have reflected the new democracy's goals of redressing the inequities of the past while building an open and equitable system for the future. The purpose of this paper is to explore recent research and ideas about the academic library in this change process. General areas of inquiry will be academic libraries within the context of higher education reform, organizational change, economics, intellectual and cultural capital, and dissemination of AIDS information. The themes identified in this paper are not meant to be inclusive of all of the issues facing South African academic libraries. Rather, they are intended to provide the reader with an overview and a reasonable sample of the major issues facing South African academic libraries in the post apartheid era in general, and over the past 5-10 years specifically.

Higher Education Reform

The change process currently underway in many South African academic libraries is intertwined with the "transformative agenda" (Reddy, 2004) for higher education that began after the democratic elections in 1994. Other academic library issues linked to higher education reform and the transformative agenda are quality assurance, assessment, user services, and information literacy. All four of these issues will be discussed in this section.

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