Raising the Profile of Library Research Support
By Hilary Davis and Colin Nickels
How well do you know what your library offers to help you in your work? In academic settings, library engagement with the research enterprise is a primary goal that relies on collaboration with faculty and students at the intersection of research, interdisciplinary collaboration, emerging technologies, and scholarly communication. The success of libraries as part of the academic community depends not only on delivering on what we promise, but also on making our collections, spaces, technology, services, and expertise easy to access and evident at the point of need.
Researchers at colleges and universities expect little to no learning curve in discerning how their library can support their workflows and needs. At the same time, librarians repeatedly find that researchers are unaware of the fullest scope of what their library has to offer in terms of research services, spaces, teaching/instruction, technology interventions, and experts. The problem: library outreach strategies, as a whole, don’t rise to the same level of attention-grabbing as commercial services like Amazon.
At the North Carolina State University Libraries, we recognize that we need to develop better outreach strategies so that we can uncover research engagement opportunities that will scale and concomitantly help us transform our model of research support strategies and engagement. To this end, we are embarking on a strategic initiative that aims to (1) Pilot outreach strategies that provide an easy starting point for different types of researchers (students, early career, mid career, senior, etc.) to intersect with the Libraries’ research assets; (2) Outline a framework to learn about researcher needs and library strategies to support those needs, including modes to support open research practices and incentives.
Our approach for outreach strategies hinges on learning about current user needs and using those to surface what the library has to offer. Imagine a visual recipe of library support linked together in a way that guides researchers to the libraries resources to match their needs from start to finish.
Let’s look at an example researcher need: creating a video abstract. At present there is no single place on our website for a researcher to discover the range of services, collections, technology to check out, and expertise that we offer. It’s all tucked away in discrete pockets, and not surfaced as a clear path. Above is a prototype of what a visual path or circuit for that need might look like. A researcher could review examples in our library subscriptions that feature video abstracts, take part in a workshop that we offer on promoting research using video, borrow one of our HD video cameras, get help from one of Digital Media experts in the library, and use our Media Production Studio to put the finishing touches on the video.
To achieve the goals of the initiative, we are collecting data about researchers’ intersections with library assets (services, roles, spaces, expertise, technology, and collections) via interviews with librarians and research-centered library staff as well as a sample of researchers (students, early career, mid career, senior, etc.).
We interviewed librarians from all aspects of librarianship: from departmental liaisons, to IT and digital technology experts; from digital media creators, to systems and discovery managers. Through the interviews with librarians, we have identified assumptions about researcher’s needs and potential outreach opportunities. We also investigated optimal modes of outreach to different types of researchers — what’s worked and what hasn’t. We also collected suggestions from these librarians and library staff on which researchers we should interview. You can read more about this round of interviews here.
Through our interviews with researchers, we hope to unpack the library-centric assumptions about what researchers need and shed some light on preferred modes of outreach from librarians to researchers. We will use the interview data to articulate specific needs of different subsets of researchers and surface patterns of common needs to create a framework for ongoing alignment of research support strategy and engagement within the campus context. We’ll prototype and test with user groups a collection of outreach objects and exemplar stories of research engagement that showcase simple defined paths composed of library services, collections, spaces, and expertise.
By presenting our researchers with simple, defined paths through our portfolio of services we hope to help catalyze integration of the broadest set of library assets into the research workflow and create a feedback loop into the shifting landscape of what researchers need.
You can learn more about this initiative here. Do you have any thoughts, comments, or questions? Want to engage with us further? Leave a comment below or reach us via email at crnickel@ncsu.edu or hmdavis4@ncsu.edu.
