58  ·  Survey Results:  Survey Questions and Responses
highlights the role for Information Technology in the development of self-help software and tools, and the challenge for
research library liaisons to match the appropriate tool with the specific needs of the discipline.
Increased significance of altmetrics. Increased need for researchers to demonstrate qualitative impact to multiple
audiences within the university and industry. New publications methods and increasing importance of non-traditional
scholarly output. Increasing system and process integration. Increased importance of research data in assessment.
Increased demand and focus; open access movement and altmetrics taking greater prominence; capturing ‘non-
traditional’ data about scholarly output (e.g., music performances); changes in promotion and tenure processes to
reflect different scholarly dissemination environment.
Increased level of specialization within disciplines suggests necessity of training librarians of various disciplines to best
communicate with a diverse faculty. Need for careful navigation of the role of libraries between that of supporting
faculty and that of assisting administration in evaluating faculty.
Increasing use of article-level metrics and how those tie into tenure and promotion discussions.
Increasing use of standards like ORCID improve the quality of scholarly data and promise greater interoperability. In
addition, we anticipate more campus conversations about Altmetrics.
Libraries need to be out in front and provide these services and/or partner with other departments on campus.
Making the connection between immediate needs of scholars/researchers to demonstrate the importance/value/impact
of their work (a private “good”), with “openness” (a public good), seems to work very well here.
Many research libraries need to hire Scholarly Communication Librarians who can help lead the development of robust
services in this area.
Many tools and measures, federal research requirements, changes possible in tenure processes
More and more funding agencies, publishers, and professional associations are using ORCID. This gives librarians an
opportunity to promote ORCID.
More system integration across our campuses is needed and widespread use of standard identifiers for researchers and
their outputs.
New methods for assessing and analyzing impact
Open Access; San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment; Radical Collaboration and evaluation of collaborative
activities, practices, and impacts; Digital Scholarship trends broadly including Digital Humanities; assessment and
impact tracking with new programs and requirements from funding agencies and for legislative support with public
institutions, and with greater emphasis on accountability
Reallocate costs for new position in this area of expertise or stop offering services of this kind.
Scholarly assessment is a niche area that represents a transformative service model for libraries. Librarians possess skill
sets that are well suited for scholarly assessment activities. Librarians are familiar with bibliographic databases and have
an understanding of how the data can be used for grant reporting, tenure/promotion, benchmarking for performance,
to name a few. We are also familiar with the academic and research practices including funding mechanisms. Services
and expertise on scholarly output assessment may help libraries to move beyond traditional publishing support to
support of other sorts of output, such as data, code, informal dissemination, etc.
Scholarly output assessment tools are not advanced enough yet for the trend of team science and team-level
assessment, as opposed to traditional individual scholarly assessment.