Reshaping academic librarianship in the context of 21st century scholarly communications and information fluency: a case study of the Scholarly Communications Management team at Imperial College London Library Services

Abstract

Academic librarianship remains under constant scrutiny, and for both research-intensive and teaching-intensive higher education institutions, this has been particularly so in the past decade. In response to an increasingly regulated and surveyed university sector in the UK, decreasing budgets and reductions in staff resourcing, accompanied by a rise in information literacy and scholarly communication as professional concepts and issues to be tackled, academic libraries are having to reassess how the traditional and current demands on their library services can be met. At Imperial College London, the professionalism of information literacy teaching was a key focus for a number of years; Since 2012, the recognition that scholarly communication – open access publishing especially – should be one of the library’s key strategic priorities has led to and enabled the expansion of the professional support to academic and research staff in this area. This case study will examine how Imperial College London Library Services has approached this challenge, the ongoing implications and those yet to be addressed. Primarily this has been achieved by the expansion of the Education and Research Support team to become the Scholarly Communications Management team, without restructure. We have not introduced services because everyone else is, but taken the time to consider the appropriate time to do so, and focussed on system support to ensure efficient workflows.