Communicating New Library Roles to Enable Digital Scholarship: A Review Article

Abstract

Academic libraries enable a wide range of digital scholarship activities, increasingly as a partner rather than as a service provider. Communicating that shift in role is challenging, not least as digital scholarship is a new field with many players whose activities on campus can be disjointed. The library's actual and potential contributions need to be broadcast to a diverse range of internal and external constituencies, primarily academic staff, university management, library colleagues and related project teams, often with different perspectives. Libraries have significant contributions to offer and a focused communications strategy is needed to embed libraries in digital scholarship and to create new perceptions of their role as enabling partners.

The UK Scholarly Communication Licence: Attempting to Cut through the Gordian Knot of the Complexities of Funder Mandates, Publisher Embargoes and Researcher Caution in Achieving Open Access

“…Libraries have achieved the position in many HEIs of being seen as the natural place to initiate and coordinate such initiatives, as part of a wider set of activities around scholarly communication [53,56,61,62]. It is clear, however, that the ability of libraries to lead in this way, does vary from institution to institution, and even where the library has gained support for its proposals in relevant governance groups (itself a challenge), there remains considerable advocacy work to do in the institution as a whole.…”

“…Others further highlight the breadth of librarians' expertise, enabling them to advise on areas such as rights management, publishing, and discoverability [53]. A number of commentators have seen developments like this as evidence of the library assuming a clearer partnering role with researchers around managing the research lifecycle [56,[59][60][61][62].…”

Exploring the (missed) connections between digital scholarship and faculty development: a conceptual analysis

“…Since the librarians had constantly collaborated with scholars in both searching scientific information as well as in cataloguing and supporting the visibility of scholarly results for career purposes, the topic was easily perceived as research problem (J. Cox, 2016;Zhao, 2014). Moreover, the Open Access movement gave an impressive input to librarianship to reflect on the own practices and services, that was immediately transferred to academics' practices.…”

“…Oliveira et al, 2017). Moreover, the above mentioned terms often refer to different research issues and problems, like the cyberinfrastructures' affordances endowing scholars to become more "digital'' , like institutional repositories supporting Open Access (Borgman, 2007;Cox, 2016); or the uses and practices linked to open and social media as Facebook and Twitter as a mean to become a "social and networked" scholar (Manca & Ranieri, 2016;Veletsianos, 2012;George Veletsianos & Kimmons, 2016). The underlying values motivating these studies are also diversified: while some of them advocate for the need of opening up science, paying particular attention to the public nature of science and its products (Den Besten, David, & Schroeder, 2010;Pontika, Knoth, Cancellieri, & Pearce, 2015), others focus the scholars' struggle against power within the academia and their attempts to shape the own professional identity (Costa, 2014;Hildebrandt & Couros, 2016).…”

Publication Services at the University Library Graz: A New Venture, a New Role

“…J. Cox (2016) regards the library as a service provider throughout the entire research process. That such an enterprise should be collaborative by nature has been stated repeatedly (Depping, 2014;Corrall, 2014;Jaguszewski & Williams, 2013).…”