Libraries are the heart of every university. European quality standards of higher education institutions naturally stress the significance of libraries. The University of Ljubljana introduced systematic analyses and preparation of reports on quality (self-evaluation), which also applies to libraries.
The rationales for building SCIndeks: Serbian Citation Index are described. CIndeks was built as a hybrid product designed to meet the two “natural” priorities of science in a small developing country such as Serbia: promoting national research results internationally and supporting non-arbitrary, quantitative evaluation of academic entities.
Libraries represent an element of globalism of universities and a key factor influencing their quality. Commercial service providers emerge wherever libraries do not meet expectations. Two Slovene universities are provided with good library support, which does not apply to other higher education institutions.
Contemporary Albania inherited a government-managed higher education system, which eventually collapsed. Universities are emerging and developing in an unregulated environment with insufficient financial support. The libraries, though still very “modest”, are the ones that have achieved the highest level of organisation.
The software used in Bulgarian university libraries is not unified. Some years ago, as a part of the PHARE programme, a project was launched to create a union catalogue of Bulgarian university libraries.
Even ten years after the war, the state of science and higher education in Bosnia and Herzegovina remains critical, as discovered by a UNESCO expert group, which prepared a special document on this topic.
Prior to higher education reform, the University of Montenegro tended to develop as a loose association of separate organizational units and the University members, the University holding the greatest administrative and organizational autonomy and independence. The library system tended to develop in the same direction – with the central University library as the University member and libraries of faculties and institutes, which completely autonomously and independently worked under the auspices of the faculties and universities as their own organizational units.
A number of factors, such as the development of information technologies, the exponent growth of knowledge, globalisation as a world-wide process and university reform, rapidly transformed contemporary academic libraries and made them become information centres that enable access to a broad spectrum of knowledge resources and information objects.
This paper argues that the application of new teaching methods together with quality assessment of higher education institutions depend directly on the quality of teaching aids and services available to both students and teachers. For that purpose it is necessary to ensure the co-operation between teachers, pedagogues, librarians and information and telecommunication professionals.
