Last Updated on May 30, 2025, 9:39 am ET
More than 30 senior library leaders gathered on April 28 at the ARL Spring Meeting in Minneapolis to discuss partnerships with research offices and other units supporting the institutional research enterprise. The conversation was sponsored by ARL’s Scholars and Scholarship Committee, which is focusing this year on strengthening these partnerships as they relate to issues like public access and societal impact.
The session began with an interactive timeline exercise, where small groups of participants were invited to brainstorm past efforts to deliver research services in partnership with other units beyond the library. For each example, participants considered: How successful was this effort, and why? What mental models did this effort rely on? What did the partner(s) understand about research libraries, and what did they not?
Examples at the institutional scale moved from an early focus on institutional repositories and research information management systems through support for data management planning and adoption of ORCID identifiers to organizational innovations like joint hiring and spinning off library initiatives as core facilities. Examples at the subnational or national scale included interinstitutional collaboration on compliance with accessibility standards and the consolidation of the Digital Research Alliance of Canada, as well as ARL’s own work with higher education organizations on publications like the Implementing Effective Data Practices report.
A number of group discussions referenced the persistence of a collections-centered view of research libraries as a barrier to overcome. The concept of social interoperability was mentioned as a useful way of talking about the relevance of cross-unit partnerships to an expanding swath of library roles and the need to move beyond a narrowly technical framing of gaps in service provision. Existing relationships with research computing offices were also seen as a resource for meeting new demands around AI.
In the second half of the session, participants reflected on the extent to which lessons learned from past partnerships could be extrapolated to the current moment, particularly in the context of disruptive shifts in the US research policy landscape. For instance, while libraries have built out systems and services to help increase the visibility of researchers at their institutions, do we now have a role to play in helping researchers become less visible to avoid doxing and other politically motivated attacks? As priorities for public research funding shift, what responsibility do libraries—and institutions more generally—have to maintain the conditions of possibility for forms of inquiry that have fallen into disfavor? And with whose help?
Moving forward, participants saw opportunities for reviewing existing evidence about what research officers value and bringing a library perspective to the spaces where they convene. As one participant put it, libraries’ message to prospective partners ought to be “help us help you” in responding to uncertainties about funding, international student enrollment, and more. Rather than seeking to establish formal structures connecting units in new ways, this may also be a season to embrace a spirit of agility as institutions adapt to a rapidly changing environment while remaining steadfast in their commitment to research, teaching, and learning.
