RESOURCE: Finding Our Way: A Snapshot of Scholarly Communication Practitioners’ Duties & Training

Maria Bonn (UIUC), Will Cross (NC State), and Josh Bolick (University of Kansas) have published “Finding Our Way: A Snapshot of Scholarly Communication Practitioners’ Duties & Training” in the Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication. 

From the abstract:

INTRODUCTION Scholarly communication has arisen as a core academic librarianship competency, but formal training on scholarly communication topics in LIS is rare, leaving many early career practitioners underprepared for their work.

METHODS Researchers surveyed practitioners of scholarly communication, as defined by the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL), regarding their attitudes toward and experiences with education in scholarly communication, job responsibilities, location within their academic libraries, and thoughts about emerging trends in scholarly communication librarianship.

RESULTS Few scholarly communication practitioners felt well-prepared by their graduate training for the core set of primary and secondary scholarly communication responsibilities that have emerged. They deploy a range of strategies to fill the gap and would benefit from support in this area, from more robust education in graduate programs and through continued professional development.

DISCUSSION The results of this survey support the assertion that as academic libraries and academic library work have increasingly recognized the importance of scholarly communication topics, library school curricula have not developed correspondingly. Respondents indicated a low level of formal pedagogy on scholarly communication topics and generally felt they were not well-prepared for scholarly communication work, coming at a significant opportunity cost.

CONCLUSION Scholarly communication practitioners should create and curate open teaching and learning content on scholarly communication topics for both continuing education as well as adoption within LIS curricula, and LIS programs should develop accordingly, either through “topics” courses or by integrating scholarly communication into and across curricula as it intersects with existing courses.