Alignment, Collaboration and the Social Turn: Our Agenda for the Relational Library

Abstract

Our profession is “Moving from collecting to connecting” (Kranich, Lotts, Nielsen, & Ward, 2020, p, 285). Academic librarians envision a “social future” (Schlak, Corrall, & Bracke, 2022) as connected connectors, “connecting ideas, knowledge and communities” (University of Leeds Libraries, 2022a), as outward-facing players who “seize opportunities to connect at local, national and international levels” and “purposefully connect and collaborate with strategic partners” (Lancaster University, 2020). Collaboration has emerged as a key theme in academic library discourse and was set to dominate the professional agenda until the COVID-19 pandemic pushed the digital shift into pole position. The pandemic gave commitment to “digital first” a new urgency, but we must not allow our current preoccupation with digital transformation to distract us from the equally important task of developing our capacity to collaborate and embedding a collaborative relational culture in our profession. We have been marching towards the digital library for more than three decades and our journey via online databases, electronic resources, virtual reference, networked services and shared systems has involved a lot of collaboration along the way and not just with other libraries. But our collaborative activities and social relationships have also evolved on a similar timeline, independently and in tandem with that technological trajectory; indeed, collaborations have been instrumental in securing our digital future in scholarly communications with both established and new organisations supporting our work in areas such as content licensing, open access, research data, library publishing and software development. Building tools and building relationships are both important tasks for libraries, but the latter is a prerequisite for the former, which is why we must commit to “collaboration first” (Norman, 1991). We cannot discover, define, design, develop and deliver interventions to enhance research and learning without “a deep, fundamental understanding of people and groups”; in particular, an understanding of their individual and group activities, which are “vastly different” and hence require an understanding of “the complex social and cultural aspects of their interaction” (Norman, 1991, p. 89). Norman’s (1991) call for systems designers to engage in “collaborative computing” is reflected in the collaborative and participatory service design processes that are now widely used in academic libraries, often led by user experience (UX) librarians (Bell, 2014; Marquez & Downey, 2015; Somerville & Collins, 2008). Steven Bell (2014, pp. 379, 380) goes on to suggest that “academic librarians must continue to seek out opportunities to leverage both the technology and the power of relationships to design a library experience that supports student and faculty success” and asserts that “The differentiating capacity of the future academic library ... is personal relationships with academic librarians”. The UX movement is one example of the “pervasive collaborative turn that has impacted many sectors of society, including higher education” (Saltmarsh, 2017, p. 3) and maybe not the first that comes to mind when we talk about collaboration and the academic library. But integrating co-design and other on-the-ground collaborative activity into everyday practice is just as urgent as lofty https://doi.org/10.1080/13614533.2023.2196277