Demonstrating library’s new values in the research workflow at HKUST

Academic libraries have long been key players in supporting faculty and researchers, from acquiring research materials to managing publications, preprints and post-prints. Digital technologies have revolutionized the traditional research workflow over the past decade. At the same time, university administration has increasingly expressed strong interest in developing a systematic way to assess research performance. All these diverse changes will inevitably affect the future roles of libraries. In fact, the fundamental challenge faced by academic libraries today is to increase their visibility among researchers and help institutions raise their research profiles in a highly competitive environment. The purpose of this presentation is to describe how HKUST Library helps the university respond to the changes in the research landscape, and how it becomes a key partner in the institution-wide Research Information System (RIS). It also highlights the Library’s experience in creating HKUST Institutional Repository (IR) and Scholarly Publication Database (SPD); and how it pursues new initiatives to build institutional partnership, thereby demonstrating the Library’s values in the research workflow. These workflows include managing the research output metadata, creating scholar profiles, streamlining multiple research reporting activities by faculty, depositing full-text articles for open access, and playing an important role in supporting the Research Assessment Exercises (RAE).