Research Intelligence: The University Library and the Research Enterprise.

About a year ago I was privileged to participate in a small conference in Berkeley, California on "research intelligence" called Enabling Data Informed Strategic Planning for the Research Enterprise. Sponsored by Elsevier, the conference brought together notable research officers and librarians from across the United States and Canada to present, and discuss the informed use of data to facilitate the university research agenda and to support faculty in new and interesting ways.

While Elsevier sponsored and planned the program, the program was not about Elsevier and their products, though a few products were mentioned in several of the presentations. The program focused on eight themes: 1) fostering collaboration between academia and industry, 2) building institutional research capacity, 3) building collaborative teams, 4) open science research articles and data, 5) measuring what we manage: using research intelligence to build capacity, 6) evaluating research capacity, 7) developing and enhancing international collaboration networks, and 8) addressing challenges in research data management. 

Libraries at research-intensive institutions have the opportunity to become an indispensable part of the university’s research enterprise. Being a true partner in supporting the university research agenda will take intentionality, hard work, and will only succeed if it is a strategic direction and part of the library’s mission. Here are a few things that I think that make sense as a basic support strategy.

1.      Partnership with Research Office: University Research Offices, usually headed by a VP and staffed with a variety of other support positions and offices, are important partners if the library is to be an effective support for the research enterprise. Most research offices are understaffed for the amount of work that happens and if a partnership is to develop the library should take the lead. The library must show itself as an informed partner and one that can provide real and sustained assistance to faculty.

2.      New positions: Making a real contribution to support the research enterprise cannot be an add-on to people who already have jobs that could be described as “overly full-time.” New positions may come from hard-won additional positions that get the support of the Provost or come from a re-alignment of existing positions. One or more new positions will be needed to demonstrate value to the university and to faculty.

3.      Research Intelligence: While most libraries will say they want to support their university’s research efforts, I would also say that most libraries do not have a clear and consistent picture of the universities research at the college/school and department level, let alone individual faculty. In order to accomplish this, I believe that having a Research Intelligence officer (librarian) on board will be essential. This position would be charged to gather intelligence across the university research enterprise and bring it back to the library in reports that are useful to liaisons, to collection officers, institutional repository managers and to the dean. Depending on the size of the institution, it will take more than position to meet this need.

4.      Advertising/Marketing: One of the chief reason for failure in many initiatives aimed at faculty is the lack of informed, directed, and sustained marketing of services directly to faculty. In a recent conversation with the chair of a large department, he had no idea that the library offered help in developing data management plans for federal grants, even though the library had been doing it for several years. Figuring out a marketing strategy will be critical and one that teaching and research faculty need to be consulted on.

5.      New tools and skills: As new tools of scholarship develop it will be important for librarians to understand the tools and develop enough skills in these areas to assist faculty and graduate students. In many cases, the library should offer workshops in such areas as data carpentry, text and data mining, and digital humanities/digital scholarship.

6.      New collection practices: In order to fully support faculty, researcher, and graduate students, it will be necessary to license digital collections, e-journal packages, etc. to fully support text and data mining. Besides the licensing, librarians will need to create guides that easily allow users to understand how to use the collections for text and data mining, what the limitations are, and what software and computing needs might be.