Transforming Roles: Canadian Academic Librarians Embedded in Faculty Research Projects

Abstract

Academic librarians have always played an important role in providing research services and research-skills development to faculty in higher education. But that role is evolving to include the academic librarian as a unique and necessary research partner, practitioner, and participant in collaborative, grant-funded research projects. This article describes how a selected sample of Canadian academic librarians became embedded in faculty research projects and describes their experiences of participating in research teams. Conducted as a series of semistructured interviews, this qualitative study illustrates the emerging opportunities and challenges of the librarian-researcher role and how it is transforming the Canadian university library. Introduction and Purpose of Study With the advent of new technologies and the importance of new knowledge economies within higher education, the role of the academic librarian is changing. As collections become increasingly patron-driven, and libraries share evolving service models, traditional duties such as cataloguing, reference, and collection development are not necessarily core duties of all academic librarians. 1 As a result of this shift, librarians have been gaining-and demonstrating-increased value within higher education as it relates to the life cycle of research, learning, and teaching. Clearly, competition is increasing within higher education, and individual institutions throughout Canada and the United States strive to distinguish themselves through their research and innovation. 2 To demonstrate measurable return on investment, faculty researchers are striving to diversify their research teams to gain increased success in grant competitions and remain current in their field of research. Increasingly, Canadian academic librarians are recognizing the changes in the landscape and the opportunities available to them to become embedded in grant-funded faculty research teams. As academic librarians, we were inspired by a desire to contribute to a larger discussion around trends in research in Canadian academic librarianship through an exploratory study that examines the experience and learning of Canadian academic librarians who were embedded in faculty research and to show how these experiences

The Role of Academic Libraries in Scholarly Communication. A Meta-Analysis of Research

“…There was evidence that results of this project infl uenced library work in a positive way although authors concluded that there is a need for systematic procedures which strengthen this, otherwise accidental, kind of cooperation. Embedded librarianship also interested researchers from Canada (Bedi & Walde, 2017). Their study showed that librarians taking part in primary research may offer essential contribution to entire research process.…”

Opportunities for intra-university collaborations in the new research environment

“…These approaches contribute to researchers' increased understanding and better management of the research life cycle and to maximising potential research impact, thus providing a tangible value-add to researchers. This has provided a basis for librarians to transition to full partners in research collaborations (Bedi & Walde, 2017).…”

Catalyzing research, building capacity: Research grants and the academic library

“…This theme emerged in a subsequent research paper I wrote with my UVic Libraries' colleague Shailoo Bedi, published in 2017 by College & Research Libraries and entitled "Transforming Roles: Canadian Academic Librarians Embedded in Faculty Research Projects." 3 In our research, Bedi and I discovered that a librarian's involvement with grants is not only a critical path to engagement with faculty, but it also acts as a catalyst to the development and advancement of an academic librarian's own research practise. This was certainly true for me, since my involvement in Ross's research has resulted in a fruitful scholarly output, recently culminating in a chapter-length article on ontology development in Doing More Digital Humanities 4 with my fellow collaborators, Jana Millar-Usiskin and Caroline Winter.…”