About 97% of the many journals and periodicals the university receives each year are now held only in electronic form, with university staff and students accessing, via the internet, material held, in most instances, on overseas databases.
Mr Amos, who succeeded Sue Pharo as university librarian in October last year, says the university receives 175,000 of those journals - known as "serials" - in electronic form, many of them being specialised academic publications.
Much of the overall electronic publication growth has taken place over the past decade.
Nevertheless, about 5200 "serials" - including the Woman's Weekly received regularly by the Hocken library - still arrive in hard-copy form.
The job of university librarian involves not only change management, dealing with a rapidly changing information technology scene, but also safeguarding and making available the university's important collections of hard-copy books, amounting to a million volumes, including those held in the Hocken Collections.
The university library now also holds 360,000 volumes of e-books, electronic books accessed by users via desktop personal computers or other electronic devices.
Mr Amos noted the continued usefulness of books in hard-copy form, and was not predicting the death of the physical book, despite the strong rise in electronic publications.
As the university library moved from "being print dominated to print being part of the collection" much of the space that otherwise would have been occupied by books could be freed up as "student learning space", he said. The library had "very good people with a very high level of professional expertise" and he really enjoyed working with those experts.
University libraries had to be responsive to the actual needs of academics and students, he said.
His plans include continuing to develop support services for electronic research, managing the growth of e-books and ensuring the libraries meet the changing needs of students. He is also trying to open libraries earlier - 7am rather than 8am during examination times.
And he is keen to increase public access to the university's nationally significant Hocken Collections.
Last month, Snapshop was launched - an internet site offering more than 33,000 images from the Hocken's photographic collections.
More information about the Hocken photographs is available at http://hockensnapshop.ac.nz, via the internet.
Mr Amos was raised and educated in Ashburton and Christchurch and lived in Australia for 24 years before taking up his Otago post last year.
He was previously deputy university librarian at the University of New South Wales (2004-10).
