Pascal V. Calarco
Associate University Librarian, Research and Digital Discovery Services
University of Waterloo
Judy Ruttenberg
Program Director for Transforming Research Libraries
Association of Research Libraries
In August 2013, the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), the Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL), the Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR), and the Association of European Research Libraries (LIBER) came together to work jointly on defining professional librarians’ competency needs to support e-research and scholarly communication. The aim of the task force is to outline the service areas, roles and competencies needed by libraries and librarians in this evolving environment. The first step will be to identify the various avenues of service for libraries within the context of e-research, repository management, and scholarly communication, amongst others. These services and roles will then be mapped to the competencies required by librarians and library professionals. The task force will also make note of the array of organizational models evolving to support new services. The task force will produce a toolkit that will help to build capacity in libraries for supporting new roles in the area of scholarly communication and e-research. The toolkit will allow library managers to identify skill gaps in their institution, form the basis of job descriptions, enable professionals to carry out self-assessments, and act as a foundation for the development of training programs for librarians and library professionals. In addition, the toolkit will provide an outline of new organizational models that are evolving in this dynamic environment. The work accomplished to date in 2-4 profile service areas will be presented, including scholarly communication and research data management.