Unlocking the power of research: The Atlassian Research Library
It’s almost a year since the Atlassian Research Library was launched (Dialogues on a Digital Library: Co-designing the Atlassian Research Library) and I was recently asked by a connection on LinkedIn how the library is going.
That’s a very good question given that many research libraries, launched with great fanfare, fizzle out and are never heard of again.
As someone who has created and managed three libraries or knowledge services, I knew that while launching a library required persistence, encouraging the adoption of a library after launch is way harder and less assured.
As discussed in my previous blog, the Atlassian Research Library is a digital library offered in the context of a highly distributed workforce, most of who work remotely.
So, after almost a year, how are we faring?
The metrics
Pure metrics tell us that the library is garnering significant interest at Atlassian.
In less than a year, around 6% of all Atlassian staff have used the library at least once. The total number of library users grew by about 16% in the most recent quarter.
Additionally, at least 30% of our users are return users, with at least 13% of users having used the library 3 or more times. These percentages are increasing over time.
Feedback on the Atlassian Research Library
I seek regular feedback on the Atlassian Research Library and library users are finding it easy to use, appreciate its relevant content and consider it worth a return visit.
Users have reported that the library enables them to efficiently self-serve into the insights they need arising out of research, significantly reducing the time it takes to access relevant research, in some cases from weeks to minutes. Coupled with this, users no longer rely on asking others to find relevant research. This has led to queries about the availability of research on specific topics in our help channels roughly halving since the library became available, as Atlassians are now able to find relevant content themselves.
The Atlassian Research Library and the Research & Insights team
While the benefits to all Atlassians of being able to self-serve into the library and find relevant research is substantial, the library has an even greater impact on the work of the Atlassian Research & Insights Team.
For the first time, it is easy for researchers to find all the research on any topic.
Not long after the launch of the library, a lead researcher received a request from a stakeholder regarding what we knew about an issue where the answer lay in content spread across a number of reports. The lead researcher was able to gather up the relevant content, give that content to her team and ask them to synthesise from the content provided.
Before the library existed, gathering such content might have taken a couple of weeks.
With the library available, it took no more than an hour to gather the content and to focus the team on synthesising content to answer the stakeholder’s question.
Likewise, a researcher recently approached me with an urgent question from a stakeholder team asking big questions about company strategy. The researcher and I pulled together a page responding to their question, utilising research content we quickly discovered through the library. The page was delivered on the same day and to the satisfaction of the stakeholder team.
Because we can now easily conduct meta-analysis across a range of reports and other research content for the first time, such secondary research is becoming much more common. This has led to the discovery of new insights by the Research & Insights team. The content produced by this meta-analysis is then also recorded back into the Atlassian Research Library. When the library was being developed, we hoped it would create new knowledge over time, through making meta-analysis possible. It turns out that adding new knowledge gained from meta-analysis on top of the older knowledge on which it was based compounds into an ever richer basis for our research and the possible depth of our responses to stakeholders.
Why is the Atlassian Research Library successful?
The undoubted success and adoption of the Atlassian Research Library can attributed to the following factors:
Involving researchers in library design
The first factor in the library’s success was the involvement of the whole Atlassian Research & Insights Team in the design of the Atlassian Research Library. As described in Dialogues on a Digital Library: Co-designing the Atlassian Research Library , this library was co-created with extensive input from the researchers. They suggested everything from some new fields for inclusion in the library to how related content could be connected in the library. The fact that library users find the library relatively easy to use is substantially due to the design suggestions made by the research team, who understood much better than I did what Atlassians look for when seeking research and the language they use in such searches.
Ensuring the library is sufficiently staffed
The second factor in our research library’s success is that it is fortunate to have access to the staffing truly needed to successfully run a library.
Having a role dedicated to the library is absolutely essential to a library being successful.
Quite a few people in the wider research industry who have talked with me about the library have been unclear on the post-launch requirements of a library. Some recognise that new research content needs to be added and that taxonomies and term lists need maintenance but are not sure there’s anything much else to be done with a library after launch.
The main goal of any library is not to create and maintain the library. The main goals of the Atlassian Research Library are
- to enable all Atlassians to find and use relevant research for decision-making and
- to enable those who do research to build on existing work and reduce duplicated effort.
While these benefits have been realised thanks to the existence of the Atlassian Research Library, these benefits do not arise simply because a well designed, well curated library is available.
It takes someone dedicated to the library who is genuinely curious and aware of the information needs of
- the research team,
- others in the company who do research and
- research stakeholders
to get the library adopted through offering a library service underpinned by the library. The library passively sitting in its space, as well curated as it might be, won’t insert itself into discussions on solving problems answered by research or even be top-of-mind for someone simply needing to know what the research would tell them. Therefore, library adoption takes a dedicated person who constantly supports people in using the library and who helps them imagine how the library can be used.
A dedicated person who looks a lot like a librarian.
A librarian? Are you serious?
I am not necessarily suggesting that you must hire a librarian to give a research library a good chance of being adopted by your organisation. But I am definitely imploring any research team wanting to create an effective research library to consider having your library overseen by an information professional who truly understands the space between gathered information and the people such information can serve. This ensures that your library is accompanied by a proper library service, driving a diversity of use cases and improving adoption. This person might be a librarian like myself or could be an archivist, records manager or similar professional.
Driving adoption through offering a library service
So, how does offering a library service help drive adoption? And what even is a “library service”?
There’s two main parts to my role:
- The operational work of ensuring the library remains functional and accessible. This involves creating new records, maintaining taxonomies, term lists, and similar tasks. This foundational work supports everything else that the library can offer as a result of its existence and proper maintenance. and
- The library service which involves collaborating with Atlassians to help them make better use of the library. This is where the drive for library adoption comes into play. As people gain a better understanding of the library and its potential, it becomes an integral part of their everyday work rather than something novel to visit once.
Some current activities we are undertaking with the library were not initially anticipated during its development. Approaching nearly a year since the launch of the Atlassian Research Library, the library service:
- supports researchers to use the library for secondary research, whether helping researchers directly with finding or synthesising information or through workshopping together to create something new from content recorded in the library. This increases researchers’ confidence in the integrity, accuracy and utility of the library.
- Connects related content in the library to enable its easier discovery. For example, I am working with a researcher to ensure their well crafted customer profiles can be quickly discovered by Atlassians through the library, distinct from the reams of content also in the library that supports these profiles or which has applied these profiles. Connecting such content is most easily done through the library and directing Atlassians to the library to find these essential documents, which I do all the time, introduces new people to the library.
- Shares content in innovative ways. For example, a team supported by one of our researchers recently approached me about how the team could keep current with research on a hot topic. I helped create a page on our Intranet which automates a feed from the library of new research on the topic to the Intranet page. Such sharing enables our researchers and other Atlassians to see how the library can help with keeping them updated on research content and again, draws new people into the library.
Sometimes, adoption of the library happens at scale, such as when a team discovers they can visit the library to be kept updated on a topic of interest to them. However, I am also a big fan of enabling individuals to discover the depths of how the library can help them. Each person who truly gets and adopts the library spreads the word about how useful they are finding the library, influencing others around them to at least take a second look.
What could we improve?
The hardest aspect of getting a library truly adopted is changing workplace behaviour, beginning with raising basic awareness of the library.
Ensuring that people know the library exists remains a key challenge, particularly when promoting a digital library run by a librarian working remotely, to colleagues who are often also remote and always working in distributed teams. The response to the library of “Why haven’t I heard of this before?” remains all too common.
However, once people do know of the library, they are demonstrably more willing to use the library as a first option. So, raising library awareness through means such as
- strategic communications in a wide range of communications channels
- educating colleagues across the research team about how the library can be used and when it should be offered as a solution to someone’s needs and
- encouraging researchers, particularly those embedded in teams outside the Research & Insights team, to model the use of and talk about the library as part of their daily work practices
is proving vital in ensuring adoption of the library.
An adopted library
By hiring a librarian to create and run the library and through actively participating in creating the library, the Atlassian Research & Insights Team now has a well-designed and easily maintained library. The resulting library service, led by me with ideas and input from my researcher colleagues, facilitates the adoption and innovative use of the library by researchers and Atlassians in general, addressing various research-related challenges. Some of the solutions provided by the library were anticipated, but there are countless new possibilities for both researchers and Atlassians that were inconceivable before the existence of the library. The magic combination of a library, a librarian, a library service and a collaborative and supportive research team helps significantly in ensuring our research is responding proactively to critical business questions with evidence-based answers.
