Hi Katherine! Thanks for your great post. I enjoyed your post because it made me reflect on my own. I spoke in depth about the importance of in-class library lessons/services. This post reminded me, as you stated, that in fact many tertiary students are external. While I believe, out classes at QUT have created an exceptional solution for external students (real time, mediated lectures and new recordings each week) there are certainly many universities that do not yet provide this solution. I realise now, that in-class library lessons still may exclude many people!
I particularly like your comment ‘libraries have proved their resilience and evolutionary qualities by adopting technologies that allow them to provide reference services in an online environment’. A lot of the literature speaks in a negative tone about how libraries are not evolving quickly enough, especially in the area of reference. It seems that many libraries are doing much better than they are given credit for. This seems particularly potent in your example of the McGoogan library. It seems that many libraries are at least trying to evolve, even though it may take many attempts to get to the perfect form (by which time, they most likely need to start evolving again).