The Transformative Power of Librarians | ACS Axial: Your Bond With Chemistry Research

"How has your job changed over the years? What is it like being a 21st-century librarian compared to the more traditional image most people have in their minds?

Luti Salisbury (Distinguished Professor and Librarian, the University of Arkansas):Librarians are more embedded with their faculty, researchers, and students. We actively seek out opportunities to understand their needs and to connect them with the subscription and other appropriate resources. We assist patrons to understand the scholarly communication ecosystem and the issues surrounding open access and open educational resources. Librarians play an integral role in keeping up with the federal requirements for open access and data management and provide just-in-time support to help faculty and researchers manage them. We also play an important role in helping faculty and researchers showcase their research activities in a variety of ways. These include creating researcher IDs and/or ORCID profiles on their behalf and helping build our institutional repositories.

Lisabeth Chabot (College Librarian, Ithaca College): The move from ownership of content to curating access to content has impacted all areas of library work. I like to say that we have moved from a 'preserve and protect' model to one of enhancing the discoverability of library resources. Most academic libraries are challenged to continue to build collections in view of flat funding and escalating resource costs. Resource sharing and consortial collection development projects have taken on greater significance."