Theme 3: How Scholars Work
From Establishing a Research Agenda for Scholarly Communication
Given the advent of cyberinfrastructure and the shift of organizational boundaries, it is essential for librarians to understand how the values and work practices of scholars and researchers are changing. This knowledge is needed for well-established disciplines and for nascent interdisciplinary and inter-institutional collaborations. New research, presentation, and dissemination methodologies are being used with resulting implications for libraries and their institutions seeking to balance investments in commercial publications with support for new research and publication models. More understanding is needed about how scholars create knowledge and how libraries can participate in the process.
While the sciences have long used team approaches to research questions, collaborative practices have also been adopted by social scientists and humanists are beginning to follow suit, depending on new partners to achieve their aims. Tools developed in one area can be employed across disciplines, though scholars may not be aware of the possibilities that already exist when they begin to imagine their own tool kit. Current means to match up scholars to each other and to tools and methods are ineffective.
Illustrative Challenges
Librarians should monitor and engage in the ongoing development and evolution of the tools and techniques scholars employ. Additional new tools will emerge to support new forms of scholarly discourse (i.e. the increasingly online “conversation” of science and digitally-aided scholarship) and to synthesize research across disciplines. Tools may be employed across disciplines differently from their original intent and application. How can libraries assist scholars with identifying existing tools, adapting them to new needs, and sharing the resulting forms of scholarship? How can we assist scholars with finding each other when they have similar needs and common approaches? How do we track and support technological and methodological developments in the disciplines so that we can serve in this new role?
There are also challenges in understanding the relationship between new methods of inquiry and methods of teaching and learning. Changes in pedagogy create new expectations for how students will be working and library services that could support them. Libraries must improve the availability of materials for courses taught in an online environment, increase their involvement in the technology and techniques of online teaching, and offer services that match the needs of online courses.
Research Possibilities
- Identify best practices regarding the collection and stewardship of software and data.
- Conduct meta-analyses to synthesize the results of recent studies on how scholars create and share knowledge and how to support their work.[1] Identify remaining knowledge gaps.
- Derive useful methodologies – including inventories, surveys, and ethnographic approaches – and apply them across a discipline or institutions to produce longitudinal data.
- Identify and analyze the tools and methods that scholars are developing themselves. Scholars are creating new interdisciplinary, informal, geographically unconstrained communities. Track and characterize these developments to reveal how they find each other. This may suggest new roles for libraries in matching work methods with communication habits and needs.
NEXT: Theme 4: Authorship and Scholarly Publishing
