6 - Forecasting a Future for Academic Libraries: Engagement, Community Building and Organisational Development

Summary

… academic libraries need to continue to adapt their roles and develop stronger relationships across the university in order to maintain and promote their relevancy to all stakeholders. Embedded roles in research and teaching, and an embedded existence through collaboration and outreach will strengthen the academic library’s presence within its parent institution.

(Delaney & Bates 2015, p. 30)

Introduction

This chapter brings together several compelling yet disparate areas of scholarly focus in the library and information science (LIS) literature and research into organisational development and maturity to argue that library engagement, social networks and relationship and community building are functions of social and intellectual capital and are considered critical concerns for libraries in the 2020s. The underlying premise is a theoretical argument that the social future of academic libraries depends on a form of organisational development within academic libraries both at the individual and group level that prioritises the social agency and reach of the library as it faces an approaching transition point that requires a new contextualisation of its value proposition. For this transition to be met and overcome, organisations of all stripes must seek congruence between internal and external conditions for optimal viability. In this regard, social capital serves as a uniquely useful framework in which to conceptualise the work academic libraries do.

The type of socially driven professional behaviour and organisational outcome that I am arguing for would be a natural expression of an organisation at a high level of development and growth that, like a learning organisation, would be capable of transforming itself. It would do so in service to an evolving mission and values as well as external circumstances that demand responses that at times stretch the organisation past comfortable thresholds and organisational boundaries. One of the few non-monetary coins of the realm in higher education is engagement, which is usually parsed as student engagement and encompasses a wide but well-defined set of activities, behaviours and outcomes that are agreed as being foundational to student learning and development. Zepke (2018) supports a holistic, inclusive understanding of student engagement and, although he resists formal definition of the concept, his summary description can serve as a working definition: ‘student engagement is a complex construct used to identify what students do, think and feel when learning and how teachers can improve that doing, thinking, and feeling in instructional settings’ (Zepke 2018, p. 433).