Many researchers don’t know that it is the library that is providing their desktop resources, reveals a new report. Communication between librarians and researchers needs to be improved, so researchers become advocates for library services, says James Brown.
Academic libraries have for centuries played critically important roles in supporting research. The last decade, however, has brought a sea-change in relationships between researchers and libraries – technological developments and the availability of information resources online have changed how research is carried out, and also the services that academic libraries provide to their research communities.
How can we ensure that, in future, these relationships are as successful as in the past? This was one of the questions involved in the early stages of a study of how researchers use and perceive academic libraries in the UK, and how they will use them in the future.*
It was commissioned by RIN (Research Information Network) and Curl (Consortium of Research Libraries), with input from Sconul (Society of College, National and University Libraries), and was undertaken by Key Perspectives Ltd.
At the same time, librarians were asked to comment on the current services they offer researchers, and on the forces precipitating change in those services. More than 2,250 researchers and 300 librarians volunteered their views in detail.
Our ultimate aim was to create an evidence base which could be drawn on to develop policy and strategic advice to libraries and information services, their host institutions and colleges, and funding bodies, on how to support and develop library services in the coming years.
The study is an authoritative account of the current state of relationships between researchers, academic libraries and the latter’s services, and provides pointers about how they might develop in the future. The evidence base is now in place, and we are working with our key stakeholders to ensure that it is used. This process began with an event to launch and discuss the report at the end of April.
A key conclusion of the report is that good communication between the research community and librarians will lead to researchers’ present and future needs being met more effectively, and increase the chances of them becoming advocates for the library, securing the top-level support that is needed.
The digital environment
Almost all researchers report that they use online journals, though in the arts and humanities the level of provision of such journals still lags behind the sciences. Nonetheless, the number of e-journals in the arts and humanities increases year on year and is welcomed by that community. This trend will continue, and with monographs too, although the market for e-books has been slow to develop in the UK.
This digital environment has radically changed the way researchers find articles, as well as how they retrieve them. Researchers must master an array of finding tools, which themselves form part of the complexity of materials and services incorporated in modern digital libraries. Librarians can be the guides of users in this respect. Building electronic collections is a key issue. What is the best way to do this, bearing in mind researchers’ actual usage of the material?
The bulk of researchers (79 per cent) access electronic information most commonly from their office – to a much lesser extent from home. Few do so from within library buildings. Consequently, researchers are now able to (and often do) live some considerable distance from their host institution.
There has been a sharp fall over the past five years in the number of researchers who regularly visit their institution’s library. This is most pronounced in the sciences, but in all disciplines there is clear evidence of declining attendance. The role of the library as a place in researchers’ working lives is becoming very different from what it traditionally has been. By 2011 just 10 per cent of physical science researchers and life sciences researchers see themselves visiting their libraries at least once a week. Twenty-three per cent think by that time they will never visit the library in person.
In the focus groups and interviews that contributed to the study, we detected another tendency on the part of researchers: beset by time pressures, and in some ways rather well supplied with information, they are adopting a ‘good enough’ and not necessarily rigorous approach which relies on finding aids which are familiar or which produce some sort of result. Some researchers said that they like to use Google and behaved as if they agreed that, ‘if Google doesn’t find it, it doesn’t exist’.
It is commonly said nowadays, with reference to scholars’ information-seeking behaviour and information use, that unless something is available in digital form it is invisible. This study did not entirely support that notion, but researchers told us that they would ideally like to be able to find everything they need in digital form. Information resources that cannot be found electronically may well be overlooked, since few researchers will invest the time required to track them down. Once they have identified the information they want, most researchers, particularly in the sciences, will not spend long trying to obtain it.
Increases in the scale of research, and the growth of collaborative and inter-disciplinary research teams, present challenges to libraries in seeking to provide effective services and equitable access to the members of such teams. And this growth, along with the development of e-research and virtual research communities, is also leading to rapid growth in the volume of digital research outputs in many different forms; these are likely to create new challenges for librarians in data management, storage and preservation.
Future roles
There is an urgent need for greater clarity in the roles and responsibilities of all those involved in the research cycle – researchers, research institutions and national bodies, as well as libraries – in managing these increasing volumes of digital research output.
As Figure 1 shows, the views of library directors and their professional colleagues are broadly congruent except in two key areas. First, more library directors than other librarians think libraries have a core role to play in managing non-technical metadata issues. Second, more directors believe subject-based expertise offered in the library will be a core role for librarians in five years time.
Perhaps more significant are the similarities and differences between the views of researchers and librarians. They agree in seeing librarians’ core roles as being closely linked to the administration of information services, the custodianship of archives and special collections, and the management of institutional repositories of digital information. They also agree that librarians’ core roles do not include: IT support; specialist support for virtual research environments; becoming subject-based experts embedded in departments or research groups; or the management of datasets produced by e-science and grid-based projects.
They differ significantly, however, in four key areas:
- Teaching information literacy and
- Offering subject-based expertise - are seen by librarians as core roles for them, and central to what they do; researchers are generally supportive, but more equivocal about whether these are core as distinct from ancillary roles for librarians.
- Managing metadata issues and
- Facilitating e-learning - are considered core roles by librarians: relatively few researchers think they are.
The report also found that around half of UK researchers don’t think librarians have got the balance right between teaching and research. In contrast, 81 per cent of librarians think that the teaching and learning needs of people in their own institutions are ‘very important’ in driving library policy; and 82 per cent thought they formed a strong driver in acquisition of new resources.
Once again, there is a clear need for dialogue between the two groups to ensure that library services and expertise are developed and deployed in the most effective way.
Let’s talk about it
For librarians, liaison with the research community presents a number of problems, arising from the transience of many of the individual relationships that can be formed, the increasing tendency for researchers to use library services remotely, and researcher independence. There are significant differences between researchers and librarians in attitudes, perceptions and awareness of key issues.
The first comment made in the first librarians’ focus group for this study was ‘It’s hard to serve researchers properly because it’s almost impossible to find out what they want’. This was repeated in other sessions, accompanied by discussion of possible remedies and sticking-plaster solutions.
Figure 2 looks at librarians’ replies to the question: ‘How easy is it for your library to liaise with the following types of researcher in your institution?’ An explanation was offered to help ensure the question was addressed in a consistent fashion: ‘liaise… refers to meaningful communication in terms of discovering researchers’ needs and obtaining feedback on library-related activities’. Overall around a third of librarians do not find it easy, with few differences between researchers’ career stage.
It was said that, while the teaching community regards the library as a partner, the research community tends to ‘do things by itself’. The communities are of course largely one and the same, but the differences in behaviour of academics when they are in teaching or research modes are significant for library professionals trying to align their services with researchers’ needs.
Many believe that communication channels need to be improved but achieving this is not easy. There is a danger that the role of libraries may be diluted as researchers, particularly younger ones, turn to the social networking space to share research-based information. This potential divergence of paths is not inevitable; but libraries need to proclaim their value so that researchers understand and acknowledge what the library is bringing to their working lives, and most particularly to their desktops. At present, many do not know, perceiving only that these resources are delivered by the institution in some general guise. The successful research library of the future needs to forge a stronger brand identity within the institution.
Branding and self-promotion
The concept of branding the library was raised at a focus group, in the context of discussions about the library-researcher relationship, and we pursued it in the survey. Researchers often say they do not use their library, though of course they do use its services; the gap between the library building(s) and the library’s services that pervades the whole campus and beyond brings with it a branding problem. The library has a much weaker identity in researchers’ minds nowadays than it did when researchers had to visit it regularly in person.
There appears to be a lack of connection, which can be quite marked, between what is provided for scholars by the library and their recognition of it. Librarians told us that there is often a low recognition of the fact that it is the library that has purchased content and services that researchers use from their desktops. Researchers often see these things as being provided somehow centrally by their institution rather than originating from the library.
This often goes hand-in-hand with a lack of understanding about the nature of specific library services. For example, when we asked researchers where they find information relevant to their work, they not uncommonly answered ‘in Athens’. They saw the Athens access and authentication system used in UK university libraries as an information provider. It is thus important to note that, while researchers are generally very satisfied with what their libraries provide, many lack a clear understanding of what the library is actually doing on their behalf. This may have a significant impact when libraries seek support for developing their services and their role in the institution. It points once more to the need to improve communication and dialogue between researchers and libraries.
The sell: getting top-level support
Researchers are well aware of the constant struggle to balance the demands for the support of research and of teaching with tight budgets, and are concerned in particular about the increasing pressure on the provision of materials to support their research. Library budgets now stand at around three per cent of total institutional budgets. To some researchers this comes as a surprise: they expect the proportion to be higher. It is clear that support comes from right across the research community – the majority think that their library services deserve high funding priority.
Only a fifth of librarians believe that their research community is active in promoting the library to top management; just under a third believe that when they seek support they can usually count on securing it; but 42 per cent of librarians believe that the library usually has to strive to win top-level support on its own. Clearly the task facing librarians varies from institution to institution: 22 per cent report that it is relatively easy to secure top-level support at their institution, whereas 26 per cent disagree and presumably face a tougher challenge. Figure 3 shows the full breakdown of results.
These themes were picked up during the report’s launch event earlier this year, ‘Who Needs Libraries, Anyway?’ The importance of demonstrating the impact of libraries to institutional managers was highlighted; and it was agreed that both a local and national approach to foster communications will help turn researchers into advocates for the library.
Turning these thoughts into programmes of action will be a key issue in the expert seminar we are planning for this autumn.
*The report, Researchers’ Use of Academic Libraries and their Services is available to view and download from the Research Information Network’s website (www.rin.ac.uk/researchers-use-libraries).
James Brown (james.brown@rin.ac.uk)
is the Research Information Network’s Communications Officer.
Updated: 12 July 2007