With the advance of technology, academic libraries play a key role in supporting researchers throughout the knowledge creation cycle.
This paper focuses on the strategies undertaken by The Hong Kong Polytechnic University Library to align its services and organization with these new priorities. It took place at a time when universities worldwide are placing increasing emphasis on research performance evaluation, institutional benchmarking and international rankings. New opportunities arose for the Library to contribute to the university’s research endeavors and demonstrate the value of its services to university administrators. These included, for example, supporting the university’s Research Assessment Exercise, providing copyright clearance services for research outputs, the development of the Institutional Research Archive to increase accessibility to the university’s research outputs, and facilitating faculty members to increase their research visibility.
Other than providing one-on-one research consultation and subject-based research skills training for students and research staff, the Library was called upon by university administrators to provide professional advice on selecting assessment tools for research impact analysis. Awareness of the Library’s research services, and Library’s engagement with the research community was much enhanced by the university’s requirement for all academic staff to register for an ORCID ID with technical assistance and training provided by the Library.
Currently, the Library is collaborating with the University’s planning office to help researchers to clean up their Scopus Author IDs, to facilitate analysis of the university’s research strength. All these new initiatives necessitate the reallocation of manpower, the setting up of new functional units, redefining roles, and ultimately bring about a transformation of library services.
