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9-2016Time to Adopt: Librarians’ New Skills andCompetency Profiles
Pascal Vincent Calarco
University of Windsor

Birgit Schmidt
Universitat Gottingen

Iryna Kutchma
Electronic Information for Libraries

Kathleen Shearer
Confederation of Open Access Repositories

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Calarco, Pascal Vincent; Schmidt, Birgit; Kutchma, Iryna; and Shearer, Kathleen. (2016). Time to Adopt: Librarians’ New Skills andCompetency Profiles. F. Loizides and B. Schmidt (Eds.). Positioning and Power in Academic Publishing: Players, Agents and Agendas. IOS
Press, 2016..
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Positioning and Power in Academic Publishing: Players, Agents and Agendas
F. Loizides and B. Schmidt (Eds.)© 2016 The authors and IOS Press.
This article is published online with Open Access by IOS Press and distributed under the termsof the Creative Commons Attribution License.
doi:10.3233/978-1-61499-649-1-1

1Time to Adopt: Librarians’ New Skills andCompetency Profiles
1

Birgit SCHMIDTa, , Pascal CALARCOb, Iryna KUCHMAc, and Kathleen SHEARERda

University of Göttingen, State and University Libraryb
University of WaterloocElectronic Information for Libraries (EIFL)d
Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR)

Abstract. On the one hand, libraries are at the forefront of the digitaltransformation and digital information infrastructures, on the other, they manage
and curate cultural heritage collections. This brings about new ways ofengagement with information and knowledge and the need to rethink skills andcompetency profiles – which enable librarians to support e-research all along the
research cycle. This paper presents findings of the joint Task Force on Librarians’
Competencies in Support of E-Research and Scholarly Communication.
Keywords. e-research, competencies, job profiles, libraries.

1. Introduction
Rapid changes in technology and associated shifts in research and scholarly
communications are profoundly changing the role of libraries in the 21st century. The
emergence of e-research, for example, is bringing about new ways of doing science
across the globe, compelling libraries to adopt new services, such as assisting with thedevelopment of research data management plans, hosting collaborative virtual research
environments, managing institutional repositories, and disseminating research outputs
through open access mechanisms. These novel services require a range of new skills
and expertise within the library community as well as a shift in organizational models
for libraries.
In August 2013, the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), the Canadian
Association of Research Libraries (CARL), the Association of European Research
Libraries (LIBER), and the Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR)
launched the joint Task Force on Librarians’ Competencies in Support of E-Researchand Scholarly Communication.
Since then, the Task Force has been working on identifying emerging specialty
roles, through performing literature reviews and collaboratively preparing a series ofservice areas and competencies documents for research data management, scholarly
communication and Open Access, digital curation and preservation and support for
digital scholarship.
2

1 Corresponding Author. E-mail: bschmidt@sub.uni-goettingen.de.
2 https://www.coar-repositories.org/activities/support-and-training/task-force-competencies.

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B. Schmidt et al. / Time to Adopt: Librarians’ New Skills and Competency Profiles

2. Competencies and Skills under Review
The growing abundance of digital information and data affects the whole research
workflow, including methods and tools as well as enabling infrastructures.
Accordingly, there is an emerging need for a new type of workforce, and existing andemerging staff competencies and skills are under scrutiny. In particular, a lot of
attention has been attracted by “data science”, in particular in relation to “big data”;
with Hal Varian, chief economist at Google declaring “the sexy job of the next 10 years
will be statisticians” (Lohr, 2009). With a view on customers Affelt (2015) pointed out
how librarians and information professionals – which have always been well-versed inworking with data – can leverage their skills and training for big data applications that
resonate with stakeholders.3
Librarians manage different types of published information and data, and also
curate a wealth of information that awaits further exploration and exploitation based on
digital methods and tools. To step up skills and competencies of librarians and to somedegree research staff, several initiatives have looked into specific areas, e.g. open
science, research data management, digital curation, digital humanities, eResearch, data
science, etc.4 Some of these initiatives focus on professional training, others target
the development of higher education curricula and explore how librarians cancontribute.
3

4

2.1. Defining Competencies and Skills
According to the European e-Competence Framework (e-CF) competence is the“demonstrated ability to apply knowledge, skills and attitudes to achieve observable
results”. Hence, a competence is not a skill; on the contrary, acompetence embeds skills. Whilst competencies are holistic concepts, skills are precise
and definite abilities, either hard technical, e.g. make a cost / benefit analysis, develop
user interfaces; or soft, e.g. deploy empathy to customer needs, negotiate contract terms
and conditions (e-CF, 2014). Job profiles typically combine several competencies, andone single competence may be assigned to a number of different job profiles. A coreidea in this context is that competencies can be grouped by areas (plan, build, run,enable, manage) and can be categorized by proficiency levels, ranging from the ability
to apply knowledge and skills to solve straightforward problems to the overall
accountability and responsibility, and to solve critical problems in an innovative way(the e-CF’s levels e-1 to e-5 are related to the European Qualifications Framework’slevels 3 to 8) (e-CF, 2014).
In North America, ARL members have been engaged in identifying the issues
around evolving competencies needed for the work of research librarians, and how
these roles intersect with new functional specialists, documented in a series of
3 See also: Florida Library Webinars, 31 August 2015, http://floridalibrarywebinars.org/the-accidentaldata-scientist-a-new-role-for-librarians-and-info-pros-ondemand
4E.g.
Facilitate
Open
Science
Training
forEuropean
Research(FOSTER),
https://www.fosteropenscience.eu/; MANTRA Research Data Management Training,
http://datalib.edina.ac.uk/mantra/; Essentials for Data Support, http://datasupport.researchdata.nl/en/;
Curriculum Framework for Digital Curation, Digital Curator Vocational Education Europe (DigCurV), 2013,
http://www.digcur-education.org; EDISON, http://www.edison-project.eu.

B. Schmidt et al. / Time to Adopt: Librarians’ New Skills and Competency Profiles

3

publications entitled “New Roles for New Times” (Janguszewski and Williams, 2013;
Covert-Vail and Collard, 2012) and by Rockenbach et al. (2015).

3. Mapping E-Research and Service Areas
A range of descriptions of services areas and related competencies have beendeveloped and shared with the community for comments by the joint Task Force on
Librarians’ Competencies in Support of E-Research and Scholarly Communication.
Consolidated versions will be published in spring 2016.

3.1. Managing Research Data
Research data management (RDM) involves services and infrastructures in order tosupport the handling of research data across the data lifecycle (i.e. creating/collecting,processing, analyzing, publishing, archiving/preserving, re-using data). The various
aspects of RDM are often distributed across different support services (research office,IT services, library) and academic departments. Interviews with researchers
demonstrate that, while researchers need support in numerous areas across the entire
research lifecycle: planning, organizing, security, documenting and sharing, preparing
datasets for deposit and long-term preservation, as well as issues related to copyright,
licensing and intellectual property more generally (e.g. Wilson, 2014; Parsons et al.,2013).
Research data management encompasses a large group of activities that may differ
significantly across the research data lifecycle. Generally it requires a high level ofinteraction with researchers and also working with other support services including
technical services and research officers.
There are various strategies for service development and operation, someconcentrate on discipline-specific services developed in the context of projects, others
highlight multidisciplinary perspectives (e.g. Molloy and Snow, 2012; Carlson, 2015).
For RDM training close work with disciplinary experts is recommended to ensurethat the terminology used is accurate and clear; discipline-specific examples and goodpractices are also highly valuable for engaging the audience and for putting basic
principles in context (Molloy and Snow, 2012).
Based on funder requirements, the need to support researchers in creating andimplementing data management plans has substantially grown over the last years.
Several libraries have set up a service to support such needs, often in collaboration withother service units (e.g. research office, IT services, legal advisor, ethics committee).
The development of such a service can even serve as a training ground for librarians
and other institutional stakeholders (Davis and Cross, 2015).
Libraries’ activities in research data management can be usefully conceptualized as
falling into three broad categories: providing access to data; supporting researchersand students in managing their data; and managing a data collection. There are
overlaps, but each of these areas has some distinctive roles for librarians. Providing
access to data mainly involves consultation and reference services, e.g. to identify
datasets, provide advice on discovery and analytic tools as well as how to cite/reference
data. Advocacy and support for managing data is a wide area of activities ranging frompromoting the institutional data policy, providing support and training, e.g. on how to4

B. Schmidt et al. / Time to Adopt: Librarians’ New Skills and Competency Profiles

write a data management plan or how to identify and use data repositories, to develop
data curation profiles, and to manage software related to data. The management ofcollections targets activities such as the preparation of data, its preservation, sharing
and publishing. Further details on the core competencies needed to cover these areas
can be found in the RDM skills and competency profile (cf. note 1).

3.2. Scholarly Communication and Open Access
Scholarly communication and Open Access (OA) involves changing modes ofcommunication of research made possible in the digital environment. For example, theevolution from the traditional commercial publishing model where the author signs
away their copyright to a work of original research scholarship to subscription-basedjournals to one of several OA models that have been emerging over the past two
decades. Scholarly communication can be defined as “the system through which
research and other scholarly writings are created, evaluated for quality, disseminated tothe scholarly community, and preserved for future use. The system includes bothformal means of communication, such as publication in peer-reviewed journals, andinformal channels, such as electronic listservs” (ARL). Other informal scholarly
communication channels include posts in social media, e.g. blogs, tweets, etc.
One of the most widely used definitions of OA is that from the Budapest Open
Access Initiative, from a conference of that name held in 2001: “By ‘open access’ tothis literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users
to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of thesearticles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any
other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those
inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on
reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be
to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly
acknowledged and cited” (BOAI, 2002).
Some examples of how libraries have been involved in this process are:x Providing consultation and training that encourages and enables faculty to
manage their own copyright and improve the economics of, and access to, publishedresearch.
x Developing and contributing to scientific information infrastructures for the
dissemination and linking of research outputs, e.g. digital repositories and their
networks – on institutional, national and international levels (e.g. SHARE,OpenAIRE, LA Referencia, COAR).
x Offering OA journal and/or book publishing services and other value-added
services to scholars on their campus (work with the university press if there is any).
x Working with the acquisition department, library consortia and research
funders to develop and maintain a publication fund, OA memberships and OA clauses
in licenses.
x Providing access to services and resources that help measure quality andimpact of scholarship, from traditional bibliometrics to emerging altmetrics.
5

5 SHARE, http://www.share-research.org/; OpenAIRE, https://www.openaire.eu/; LA Referencia,
http://lareferencia.redclara.net/; COAR, https://www.coar-repositories.org.

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Libraries’ activities in scholarly communication and open access typically fall into
one of these categories: scholarly publishing services; copyright and open accessadvocacy and outreach; scholarly resource assessment. Some level of subject
knowledge is required in most of these roles. In particular, librarians will need to havea broad perspective and understanding of the traditional (commercial, society) and open
access models of publishing, intellectual property issues, and economics of scholarly
publishing. For example, librarians in this role may support graduate students andfaculty members who wish to start new Open Access journals that the library may host,coordinate education and advocacy events such as Open Access Week, and serve on
campus copyright committees to assist with campus policy development andinterpretation.
3.3. Digital Humanities
Digital Humanities (DH) describes a multidisciplinary research community involving
the application of computational methods to humanistic topics of inquiry, or, more
broadly, the intersection between the arts and humanities and information technology
and/or digital expression (for a discussion of research trends and views on DH see e.g(Burdick et al., 2012; Holm et al., 2015). Digital humanists utilize computational
methods and/or digital tools to advance research and pedagogy. Methods and tools
include, but are not limited to: 3-D representation, digital mapping, electronic textual
analysis, digitization of materials, data visualization techniques, and interactive digital
media including game-based systems.
Over the last decade, several universities have stepped up their support ofhumanities research by creating research centres and workspaces,6 many of themin close collaboration and physically located with their respective university libraries.
Engagement with Digital Humanities is an evolving specialization in librarianship,
one that requires a combination of a strong academic background in the arts andhumanities (domain expertise), technical grounding in technologies and tools to support
computational models of research and teaching in Humanities, and project
management. The role has other important components such as advisor, advocate, andpartner for special collections curators. The digital humanities librarian’s role is also
directly related to scholarly communication and data management.
The library’s organizational structure will affect the services offered and roles
played by digital humanities librarians, but across various models, the digital
humanities librarian will likely work in a team environment, making collaboration andthe ability to perform in a changing and dynamic role core competencies for thisspecialization.
When it comes to services and responsibilities digital humanities librarians engage
in scholarly communication and publishing, technical services (in particular related tointeraction with digital resources and collections), partner with faculty and student for6

6 Cf. centerNet, an international network of digital humanities centres, http://www.dhcenternet.org/, andEuropean Association for Digital Humanities, Digital Humanities Centres, http://eadh.org/education/digitalhumanities-centres. From a much broader perspective an increasing number of universities and colleges arealso establishing digital scholarship centres to support researchers in their work with digital tools and large
datasets, such as data visualization in the environmental sciences, data mining of large corpora of texts in thehumanities, and developing GIS or other geolocation data representations in the social sciences (Lippincott,2014).

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B. Schmidt et al. / Time to Adopt: Librarians’ New Skills and Competency Profiles

digital humanities research and consulting, provide teaching and training activities,
and develop and manage spaces (labs, collaboratories) for digital humanities work.
Accordingly, digital humanities librarians bring together a wide range ofcompentencies a n d skills. A b a s e l a y e r is typically advanced academic
subject expertise and professional training in library and information science,
particularly in scholarly communication and data management. When it comes totechnical skills, many job descriptions note the emerging and evolving state oftechnology by requiring general competencies such as “demonstrated ability andinterest in exploring and evaluating emerging technologies in support of digital
humanities,” and a “willingness to remain current with changing technology and its
applications” (cited from job descriptions, cf. note 1). Technical skills andcompetencies include e.g. data visualization, text mining, metadata standards andschema, text markup and encoding, semantic web technologies. Essential for direct
involvement and/or consultation with research activities are also project and program
development and collaboration skills, e.g. grant writing and the development oftechnology-rich work spaces.

4. Conclusions
Not surprisingly, a number of other new areas could benefit from librarians’ support –and this again comes with a need for developing/expanding skills to fulfill these newroles. One area which is evolving very fast is text and data mining (TDM), and libraries
might already have a range of subscriptions and collections which come withappropriate licenses but have not yet stepped up to provide practical support for
researchers to exploit these riches (Okerson, 2013). As already mentioned above
support for TDM plays a key role in digital humanities research, e.g. allowing newviews on texts, but other research areas such as economical and social sciences will
benefit as well (Liber, 2014; ASIS&T, 2015).
In our discussion of competency profiles we have only briefly touched how
librarians acquire the skills and competencies needed for these evolving and sometimes
already well-established service areas. Strategies will vary depending on institutional
and personnel resources and range from attending workshops or conferences and/or
joining working groups, the development of institutional training programs forindividuals and/or groups, participation in online learning course (e.g. MOOCs), etc.
Most beneficial might be to combine newly hired experts and long-term staff in newteams which dedicate their efforts to developing and delivering new types of services.
Such teams will often combine staff with different backgrounds, and bring new skills
sets to the institution, e.g. from the publishing industry to build up / enhance a
publishing unit, or from research disciplines or technology experts to develop andpromote specialized data infrastructures and digital work environments. Not
surprisingly, involvement in collaborative projects, national and internationally, are agood instrument to contribute own expertise and learn from others to build up
prototypical services. However, additional effort will be needed to assess the results ofthese efforts and for sustaining both personnel and infrastructures.
It should be noted that job descriptions can be excessively demanding in terms ofexperiences and skills, as if the search is for the “Unicorn Librarian – that magicalcreature who can be all things to all people” (Johnson, 2014). Therefore, individuals
and employers should consult the task force’s competency profiles with some caution.

B. Schmidt et al. / Time to Adopt: Librarians’ New Skills and Competency Profiles

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Typically it will be a group of individuals that bring together these competencies andskills, a collaborative work force which strengthens the library’s capacities and which
may also be an element of new organizational structures.
Acknowledgement. The authors would like to thank Rob Grim, Alicia López
Medina, Susan Reilly, Judy Ruttenberg, and Dominic Tate for their contributions to thework of the Task Force and their comments to this paper.

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