(15 Jul 2020) Choice announces the publication of the sixth in a series of white papers designed to provide actionable intelligence around topics of importance to the academic library community. Despite the fact that the paper, “Supporting Scholarly Research: Current & New Opportunities for Academic Libraries,” was researched and written during the uncertainty of the COVID-19 pandemic, this report can provide libraries with practical information and ideas for current and future strategies for supporting evolving research workflows and researcher needs.
Researched and written by Ngoc-Yen Tran, research impact librarian at San Jose State University, and Emily K. Chan, associate dean for research and scholarship at San Jose State University, the researchers surveyed academic librarians and interviewed academic library administrators in the United States and Canada. The goal of the mixed-method study was to investigate how academic libraries are looking to deepen their support for research activities within the identification of funding opportunities, research data management and data services, new venues for publishing and dissemination, and collection of research metrics and impacts.
Commenting on the publication of the latest white paper, Choice Editor and Publisher Mark Cummings noted, “In an interesting adjunct to our last study, on research data services (#5), this paper explores the broader issue of library support for a broad cross-section of research workflows. Here, as in other studies, issues of library funding and staffing loom large, and through their interviews, especially, the authors provide valuable information about how librarian roles are changing to meet these challenges. It is equally instructive to read this paper in conjunction with our first study, on institutional repositories (#1), as librarians look to leverage them as a support mechanism for open publishing.”
Funding for this research was provided by a generous contribution from ProQuest. “Supporting Scholarly Research: Current & New Opportunities for Academic Libraries” is published under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license and is available at www.choice360.org/librarianship/whitepaper.
Source: ALA member news
