Open Research Community

According to the research report by Hayes, Henry, and Shaw (2021), workflow management is increasingly germane to library operations, as patron needs evolve. While academic libraries are dedicated to supporting the educational and research missions of their associated institutions, around the world these undergo transformations, under the impact of digitization and the continued need to remove barriers to knowledge access. Likewise, librarians serve both faculty and student constituencies with differing content usage preferences and profiles. Thus, albeit to different degrees, libraries ensure the success of their patrons, in correspondence to their usage patterns. This takes place on the background of a more than 30% growth in digital resource adoption between 2020 and 2021, in the pandemic period. That can, however, be hampered by a limited user friendliness of library interfaces and systems, as enterprise services become increasingly important for knowledge discovery, such as for literature search purposes. This is also likely to contribute to the information- and productivity-centric transformation of academic libraries, as they become decreasingly perceived solely as book or journal warehouses. Similarly, transitions to Open Access emphasize the growing focus of libraries on expertise and skill transmission (Hayes, Henry, and Shaw, 2021).

Reference

Hayes, M.A., Henry, F.A. & Shaw, R., 2021. Librarian Futures: Charting librarian-patron behaviors and relationships in the networked digital age. [online]: Lean Library. DOI: https://doi.org/10.4135/wp.20211103.