Communicating New Library Roles to Enable Digital Scholarship: A Review Article

ABSTRACT

Academic libraries enable a wide range of digital scholarship activities, increasingly as a partner rather than as a service provider. Communicating that shift in role is challenging, not least as digital scholarship is a new field with many players whose activities on campus can be disjointed. The library's actual and potential contributions need to be broadcast to a diverse range of internal and external constituencies, primarily academic staff, university management, library colleagues and related project teams, often with different perspectives. Libraries have significant contributions to offer and a focused communications strategy is needed to embed libraries in digital scholarship and to create new perceptions of their role as enabling partners.

KEYWORDS:

• Digital scholarship
• communications strategy
• digitization
• open access publishing
• roles
• scholarly communication
• university libraries

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank my colleagues in the Digital Library Strategy Group at NUI Galway for their support and insights.