NORDIC JOURNAL OF INFORMATION LITERACY IN HIGHER EDUCATION

2014, vol. 6, issue 1, 23-38 noril.uib.no

The Changing Role of Digital Tools and

Academic Libraries in Scholarly
Workflows: A Review
Research Article

Sharon Favaro1 * and Christopher Hoadley2

1 Seton Hall University Libraries; 2 New York University

Abstract
In this paper, we review the literature on how information literacies are manifested in scholarly
workflows for undergraduates, graduate students, and scholars, and the need to support
integrating library resources into their knowledge practices, and how available tools support
their needs. We argue that research is needed on how libraries and digital tools both support,
and indeed teach, knowledge-building practices across the entire lifecycle of knowledge. Finally,
we advocate for studying researcher and student workflows as a way to both improve the tools
we make available, and more importantly, to inform us on the role(s) libraries can play in the
shifting practices of research in an information-rich world.

Keywords: research workflows, information literacy, technology adoption, libraries,

information technology, scholar workflow, undergraduate research, graduate research

*Contact:
Sharon Favaro
Seton Hall University, USA
E-mail: [email protected]

Received: 29 September 2013; Revised: 30 June 2014; Accepted: 25 June 2014

Nordic Journal of Information Literacy in Higher Education, 2014. ©2014 Sharon Favaro and Christopher Hoadley
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0
Unported License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/).
S. Favaro & C.Hoadley

Introduction
With the emergence of new tools and technologies, information practices have changed
radically. Libraries, which previously served an information warehousing, dissemination, and
search role, now serve patrons whose information habits are continually being reshaped.
Increasingly, the work of scholars focuses more on just-in-time retrieval, quick bootstrapping to
learn new disciplines, online collaboration throughout the research process, and knowledge
construction and dissemination activities unlike traditional publishing. For example, the
Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) indicated in a 2012 report that their
existing standards on information literacies need to be “extensively revised” due to these
shifting practices. In 2014, a draft of the Framework for Information Literacy for Higher
Education was released, according to ACRL President Trevor A. Dawes, “The revision of the
ACRL information literacy standards is vital in order for our libraries and librarians to think
about, understand, and use new methods of incorporating information fluency in our curricula.

Similarly, greater access to information increases the need for scholars of all types to learn
how to effectively marshal information resources throughout the knowledge construction
process. For example, Leckie (1996) identifies gaps between the practices of faculty, students,
and librarians, as well as differences in research skills between novice and expert. Although
students may be familiar with new information tools such as microblogs, photo sharing, social
networking, or filesharing tools, students are unfamiliar with the research process and lack
subject domain knowledge, thus implying even a basic search by subject or author is
challenging. In contrast, faculty have well established networks for research, i.e. informal
communications, citation lists, and domain expertise (Leckie, 1996; Acord & Harley, 2012), but
often may not be fluent with Internet-based information retrieval and collaboration tools. An
additional barrier is that not only do students lack understanding of the research process, but
faculty also lack understanding of the skill level of the student (Leckie, 1996). Information
seeking skills are crucial, but are only a piece of the larger overall process of research. Libraries’
role in supporting both novice and expert scholars is changing. In the past, libraries’ information
storage and retrieval role was vital, uncontested, yet separated from the core research and
learning processes of knowledge-building which took place in laboratories or classrooms. Now,
as the Internet subsumes much of the storage and retrieval roles, libraries face a choice.
Libraries have an opportunity to become a key partner in the use of information throughout the
research process beyond storage and retrieval (including increasing their role in helping new
scholars learn to effectively use, share, and disseminate information resources throughout the
lifecycle of knowledge); otherwise, libraries risk becoming a less integrated, paywall-filled
alternative to the Internet. Although there are many tools to support research, there are
profound disconnects between library-oriented resources and tools, and the other tools scholars
use to do their work. Scholars increasingly turn to online tutorials and MOOCs (Massive Open
Online Courses), Internet search engines, and collaborative sharing and writing environments, in
some cases bypassing traditional publishing institutions entirely. Libraries could become
increasingly marginalized in the workflow of scholars, where 'going to the library' (whether
virtually or physically) can be seen as disruptive within the larger context of scholarship and the
activities of learning, collaborating, and writing. While online services and tools have attempted
to decrease barriers to using library resources, the fragmentation of the tools for library work
and the tools for the rest of research instead serves as a disincentive. For example, Gargouri et
al. (2010) found that articles available freely on the web are significantly more likely to be cited.
Some might argue that this relates to paywalls and subscriptions, but it is also entirely plausible
that scholars are more likely to cite work found on the web simply because it is easier from
within their workflow. Regardless, clearly technologies have an impact on the practice of
scholarship. This is both a challenge, and an opportunity, for libraries.

In this paper, we describe a possible way to explore the issue of the changing role of
libraries in information literacy as a component of scholarly research. First, we discuss
information literacy in the context of the larger generation of knowledge through a lifecycle

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 The Changing Role of Digital Tools and Academic Libraries in Scholarly Workflows: A Review

model of knowledge comprising research and education. Second, we summarize the literature
on how students and faculty use information tools and library resources to accomplish their
work in this knowledge lifecycle, and points of friction where tools fail to support these scholars.
Third, we explore these points of friction and explore possible new roles and tools for libraries
by proposing use cases of researcher workflows. Finally, we describe some of the research
needed to carry this agenda forward.

The lifecycle model of knowledge

What is the purpose of library-based information? This question highlights that although
information may be valued, it is not intrinsically valuable except as an instrument in the creation
and dissemination of knowledge. Historically, the lifecycle of scholarly knowledge was one in
which roles were highly distinct. Scholars would create ideas which were written down as
information resources. Publishers helped filter and quality check this information, and then
replicated the information media and disseminated it through sales networks. Libraries and to
some extent bookstores helped curate, preserve, index, and broker these information resources.
Then, the information resources would either be used in the context of formal teaching and
learning, informal learning (e.g., public libraries), or professional scholarship (student and
faculty library research), which helped begin the cycle anew. This description focuses primarily
on the information resources represented by media such as books, journals, etc.

Knowledge, however, is not identical with information. In this stereotypical model of

research leading to publishing leading to teaching and learning, the knowledge itself follows a
different path. First, both philosophy and educational psychology have described the degree to
which knowledge is not transmissible directly; rather, a knower must learn knowledge by
constructing new understandings based on his or her own prior knowledge (i.e., the
constructivist theory of learning, proposed by Piaget (1970). Moreover, this construction of
knowledge is intrinsically socially embedded (Vygotsky, 1978). Whether through invention, co-
construction through discourse, or through the experience of monologic information resources
such as texts (Bahktin,1984; Enyedy & Hoadley, 2006), the knowledge is not properly
considered known until it can be applied in some fashion, and this learning process is
demonstrably not mere transmission of information (Dewey, 1897/1954).

Scholars have a particular stance regarding knowledge; the word has become synonymous
with both studying, deliberately cultivating the knowledge of others in oneself; and with
knowledge discovery, or creating new ideas or interpretations, often through both writing and
teaching. This goal entails a particular set of activities that represent the working lives, the
workflow, of scholarship. This workflow encompasses not only reading and writing tomes, but
debate, teaching, critique, discussion, exploration, organization and juxtaposition, and
application, not to mention any non-literature based research activities such as collecting data in
the empirical disciplines.

Traditionally, libraries have focused on supporting and training scholars on the portion of
the scholarly workflow that comprises information seeking and supplying and/or locating
information, usually under the moniker of ‘information literacy’. For example, the Association of
College and Research Libraries (ACRL) defines information literacy as: finding, retrieving,
analyzing, and using information. Similarly, the Eisenberg-Berkowitz Information Problem
Solving model is a six stage process: Identify information requirements, information seeking
strategies, location and access, use of information, synthesis, and evaluation (Cortell &
Eisenberg, 2001). In both of these definitions, the focus of information literacy tends to be on the
front-end process of gathering information for research, rather than on the entire process of
doing scholarly work, with much of the work hidden under broad notions of ‘synthesizing and
applying’. With the changing information environment: ebooks, open access, public search
engines such as google scholar, large amounts of information including online research datasets,

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S. Favaro & C.Hoadley

and new collaboration tools and technology, the research workflow is changing. Yet, libraries
have not fundamentally changed either the role they expect to play in these shifting practices of
scholarship, nor in this changed world where libraries are often only one of many sources for
information. For instance, scholars might collaborate to write a paper online at a distance in
Google docs, may share research data via Dropbox, could explore unfamiliar related topics by
starting with Wikipedia or a web search, or publicize their work via social media. These are all
information-intensive portions of the research workflow that libraries, library resources, and
library-provided digital tools could support, but typically do not.

This is not simply a question of tool integration to make existing research practices more
convenient. Rather, as with Internet-mediated shifts in other domains, research practices are
becoming more ad hoc, decentralized, and nimble (Brown & Duguid, 2000; Shirky, 2008). It is
increasingly important because scholars must learn to locate and integrate resources at all times
in the research process; for example, a scholar must be prepared to ‘synthesize and apply’ a
citation suggested by a collaborative author; to ‘identify information requirements’ in a new way
when submitting a prior manuscript to a newly identified journal or a conference in a different
subfield; to evaluate or synthesise when reacting to comments on a draft in an open review
system; or simply to be able to answer questions that arise during the writing process. Each of
these practices is different enough from the traditional model of information literacy that
different skills are needed to be truly information literate scholars. We therefore think that
libraries should expand their mission from supporting not only the ACRL definition of finding,
retrieving, analysing, and using information but also sharing, collaborating, managing, and
dissemination, all within the context of ethical use.

Figure 1: Life model cycle of knowledge (Favaro, 2012; Favaro & Hoadley 2012).

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 The Changing Role of Digital Tools and Academic Libraries in Scholarly Workflows: A Review

Review of Literature: What are scholars doing and what do scholars need?
From the perspective of research libraries, how should we support students and professional
scholars within the entire lifecycle of the research process? We begin to answer this question by
posing another: What are the differential workflows and needs of research library users? Below,
we discuss the research on undergraduate students, graduate students, and professional
scholars. After exploring these workflows and research practices, we consider how libraries and
their tools might better support the emerging practices of scholarship.

Supporting undergraduate students

As previously stated, undergraduate students typically lack knowledge of the entire research
and knowledge building process (Head & Eisenberg, 2010; Leckie, 1996). The transition from
high school to college research typically leaves a large skill gap (Favaro, 2012). Head and
Eisenberg (2010, p. 21) found that undergraduate students had changed their research practices
from high school. One way in which these practices change in that undergraduates are required
to take ownership of their learning (Smith, Given, Julien, Ouellette & DeLong, 2013). The usual
response to the knowledge gaps of students in doing research using library resources is a
patchwork of classroom and library-offered training, but rarely do we focus on directly
supporting students learning about the research process while enacting it. In addition, Cottrell
and Eisenberg (2001, p. 345), found that information communication technology (ICT) failures
disrupt the information seeking process. The disconnects between tools may further hinder
learning about the process. Cottrell and Eisenberg (2001, p. 345) call for adding “synthesis
tools” to support the entire model of the information seeking process. Tools to support students
through the entire process could not only reduce cognitive load for students doing (for them) a
novel and difficult task which in itself can support learning (Favaro, 2012; Plass, Moreno, &
Brünken, 2010), but such tools could also directly scaffold best practices in the complex task of
writing a research paper (Favaro, 2012). Students do try to use digital tools to make their work
easier: Eisenberg and Head (2010, p. 22), found that approximately half of the 25,000
undergraduate students they surveyed made use of citation managers, digital highlighters, and
document sharing (i.e. Google docs). It is discouraging that these three categories of tools which
were found to be the most used research tools by undergraduates typically have no integration
with each other. For instance, imagine the loss of focus and the distraction created whenever a
student needs to move from a highlighted PDF to typing the metadata into EndNote or Zotero,
and then additionally needs to manage moving the document and inviting collaborators into a
space such as Google docs or Dropbox. There are ubiquitous disconnects between tools;
between tools and the library; and between tools and research process. These disconnects not
only have productivity costs, but also have learning costs. Research in software to support
scientific inquiry in primary and secondary school students shows that explicitly scaffolding a
model research process can improve how students learn not only the disciplinary content but
also the research process itself (Quintana et al., 2004; Schwartz, Brophy, Lin, & Bransford, 1999).

Additionally, students may lack ICT skills generally and overestimate their “research
skills” (Buschman & Warner, 2005). For students with low access to technology before entering
universities and colleges, the lack of technology skills can be crippling. Even if students have
prior technology skills, they are generally not integrated with the practices of good scholarship.
Furthermore, when ICT skills training is provided at the undergraduate level, it is just as
fragmented as the toolsets. While libraries are a natural place to provide technology training,
they tend to focus on only limited parts of what students need to learn, usually database search
and retrieval. Within libraries, information literacy training tends to be disconnected from the
tools that support it (Tuominen, Savolainen, & Talja, 2005). Students might be given training in
study skills and reading skills by student affairs; in database access and retrieval by a librarian;
and in appropriate scholarly reading and citation practices by a subject matter professor.

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S. Favaro & C.Hoadley

Supporting graduate students

There is a growing need to support graduate students in research workflows; their need tends to
be less on information seeking, as typically at this point they are advanced users, and more on
information management. According to a report published by Association of Research Libraries
(Covert-Vail & Collard, 2012) graduate students will not only need skill-sets for finding
resources, bibliographic management, basic technical skills, knowledge of discovery and
delivery tools, but also the ability to use advanced technology for analytical and methodological
skills (i.e., data mining or data visualizations).

A study, "Researchers of Tomorrow: The Research Behaviour of Generation Y Doctoral

Students", conducted a survey of 17,000 doctoral students and 70 higher education institutions
across the UK on a variety of topics, including their use of digital tools (JISC, 2012). Key findings
of their study indicated that generation Y students and older doctoral students adopt
technology, such as alerting tools (RSS), text and data mining tools, and social bookmarking, at
similar levels; access and authentication to resources are problematic; open access and
copyright is a point of confusion; doctoral students are not fully using innovative technology nor
are they trained or informed of opportunities within digital landscape. In general, tools are
adopted when there is an immediate fit within their research workflow (JISC, 2012). While
many explanations of this are possible, one is that institutions are providing access to tools that
are less likely to fit into the research workflow of the modern graduate student. An alternative is
that specialised tools come from institutions while more general-purpose tools come from the
consumer Internet. A study of 45 humanities doctoral students at Columbia University and
Cornell University, found students had frustrations with online citation tools, e-book formats,
and managing their own personal libraries and the needs for tools to support their work
including linking bibliographies and note taking (Gessner, Jaggars, Rutner & Tancheva, 2011).
Additionally, most students relied on advice from peers and advisers, rather than asking a
librarian or technologist (Gessner et al., 2011). Several graduate student blogs reviewed
describe a need for writing tools to be integrated with document, annotations, and citation
management. Graduate student bloggers’ recommendations of tools and workflows, sometimes
held together with custom scripts or code, seem to be a growing theme, further evidencing the
need to have better integration of tools between the library and the research process (Lawson,
2009). One doctoral student advocates for a space or “one-stop shop” for annotations, writing,
storing documents, citing, during the dissertation writing process and for use later as a
searchable database (Schafer, 2011). An important point made by Schafer is that ‘a searchable
database’ is pertinent for later use in the dissertation writing process, later use as faculty
member, researcher, etc.

Often, when confronted by disconnect between the tools and the research and writing
goals, typical practices can consist of piecing together software and sometimes with code to
make them connect. This code can be developed directly by the scholar or made open source and
searchable so that researchers can download and use it. However, this brings with it issues of
access for those not as information literate or programming savvy.

An example of the disconnects caused between the research and the writing process is
illustrated by Lawson (2009):
(…) I presume to be the more common, is that if one has a very large quantity of
notes on many different sources, when one shifts into the writing mode, one has
to hunt through one’s notes looking for the information relevant to the claims
one wishes to make in that particular section of the dissertation. This is the
problem of the lack of the “middle layer” of organization that I referred to in my
first posting and for which I have presented a temporary and imperfect solution
for in the second posting.

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 The Changing Role of Digital Tools and Academic Libraries in Scholarly Workflows: A Review

Lawson laments about tools that do not support the process in cohesive manner. To flip
back and forth between notes then shifting to writing impedes workflow and thought process as
one must sift through material for the writing process.

Other issues cited by graduate students include understanding best practices along with
technology. Another graduate student blogger (eCommunites2.0, 2011), consults with other
researchers for best practices for technology to support research. Researcher recommendations
included using a Mac for ease of use and including Mac software, rather than using the advice
from the University’s help desk. First, the fact that the student would contradict the explicit
recommendations of a university help desk on which he was depending for advice shows that
there is likely a strong motivation for using the platform and tools assembled. Second, the
students’ choice of tools demonstrate how activities can cross the phases of information
behaviour specified by ACRL information literacy definition: communication or brainstorming
are not the types of activities that neatly fit into find, retrieve, analyse, use categorisation. Third,
this example highlights the high bar necessary for library resources in that robust
interoperability with these tools would require modification of a huge swath of software across
a wide variety of developers and application areas. Finally, the case shows that graduate
students seek counsel of other researchers and informants such as the IT help desk, to help them
better understand how to do research using digital tools, supporting the idea that learning and
scaffolding could be provided in the context of those tools.

The study "Researchers of Tomorrow: The Research Behaviour of Generation Y Doctoral

Students study" (JISC, 2012), found that doctoral students were not quick to take up technology
unless it readily integrated with research work practices, and preferred tools to alert for new
resources rather than having tools to organise their research. Doctoral supervisors and peers
influence technology adoption, and technology offered by institutions may not always be
appropriate, flexible, or may “lock-in to proprietary systems” (JISC, 2012, p. 69). An important
point in this study is that libraries did not play a key role facilitating technology in the research
workflow, and librarians were seen more for information seeking consultations. Could the role
of the librarian be more visible in supporting the technology of the research workflow? Hence
findings go on to include comments from students of what they wish they had learned: Many of
the student cohort wished they had known about certain technologies and applications that they
realised might have eased the workflow and research process; Google Scholar, cloud computing,
EndNote and Mendeley were all mentioned as things researchers did not know about until too
late. (JISC, 2012, p. 71).

Thus, we see that while graduate students may have mastered basic research skills and
have nascent workflows for scholarship; those workflows are still fragile and subject to
inappropriate tool selection and fragmentation. Furthermore, graduate students face scaling
issues as their scholarship workflows come to encompass not only isolated research projects,
e.g., for a course paper, to a potentially lifelong cumulative scholarship and knowledge base,
containing a mix of primary sources and metadata, personal notes and annotations, and shared
resources from peers and faculty. Again, this workflow provides opportunities for us not only to
support their information use, but to provide a nexus to scaffold their learning best practices in
the research tradition for which they are being trained. For example, Rutner and Schonfeld
(2012) found in a study of historians and graduate students of history that the best practices of
information use from archives and libraries are missing from traditional training. A graduate
student was quoted as saying,
One of my big issues with graduate education in general right now is that there’s
almost no training with methodology and what you actually do in the archive and
why that matters. You don’t always know how to ask someone for help. There are
larger philosophical questions about what an archive is. I haven’t gotten
systematic training. I had done some archival work through previous education.

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I’d been to an archive and I kind of knew how to use one on a basic level. A lot of
it is figuring it out as you go. (Rutner & Schonfeld, 2012, p.37).

Another student said even more simply, “I would be interested in attending a session
about organizing information and writing [it] up.” (p. 37). While the first quotation focuses more
on learning needs related to tasks traditionally done in a library, and the latter focuses more on
learning needs related to tasks traditionally done outside a library, both connect directly with
library-related resources. What both of these quotes demonstrate is that successful information
practices, workflows, and learning the inquiry methods of the discipline are intertwined,
reinforcing our idea that if we can support workflows across the lifecycle, we may also be able to
support learning about the entire lifecycle of scholarly knowledge.

Thus, we see that graduate students are using a wide variety of digital tools to
accomplish their work. Increasingly, those tools include not only university-or library-provided
tools, but also a variety of tools from the broader Internet. Commercial and free software
providers on the Internet have advanced beyond libraries in designing tools that explicitly
support social information flow, collaborative writing and data analysis, and low-threshold
sharing and publication. What does this imply for how libraries can conceptualize the research
process of their users? How can we envision the role of libraries in a much broader process of
knowledge building that extends beyond a trip to the library or constructing a bibliography?

Supporting scholars
Scholars, faculty and professional researchers,. expect tools to support them in their research
process, but these tools are lacking and rapidly changing. As noted by other scholars, the
changing nature of research due to both the explosion of information and the increasing
interdisciplinary nature of scholarship has heightened the need for collaboration in research
(Harley, Acord, Earl-Novell & Lawrence, King, 2010). Rowlands, Nicholas, Russell, Canty, and
Watkinson (2011), found the main use of social media within the research workflow is used for
collaborative authoring, conferencing, and scheduling meetings. Rieger (2010) found that
humanities scholars wanted their institution (i.e. libraries, academic learning centers, digital
humanities centers) to support the ICT, thus allowing them to focus more on research rather
having to ‘understand, manage and sustain’ new technologies. Bauder and Emmanuel (2012)
conducted a survey on technology use in faculty workflows and found that the preference was
for customized web portals thus showing only relevant content. Burke (2011) blogged about the
type of tool needed for his research, which would “generate several kinds of notes as I read
through it: a) direct quotations; b) summaries of the argument or analysis or content of a
particular section or part of the source; c) my own commentary on or responses to what I’m
reading.”

Scholar workflow may involve high level of collaboration, in some cases working with
scholars at several different institutions. An example of workflow for writing a paper is
illustrated in Kim and Crowston (2011):
We conceptualize cyber-infrastructure as an assemblage of diverse technologies,
as a collection of computing elements and software-based systems assembled to
address an individual's diverse computing needs. For example, in writing this
paper we used Google Docs, Microsoft Word, EndNote, Google Scholar and a
range of library databases, a collection of articles as PDFs in various folders on a
laptop, email, ManuscriptCentral, not to mention more infrastructural
technologies such as the Internet, Mac OS X, Windows and laptops. The
conception of an assemblage emphasizes that digitally-enabled work is
increasingly done by drawing on multiple systems that are rarely well-
integrated and often not formally planned, designed, delivered or governed. (p. 2)

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 The Changing Role of Digital Tools and Academic Libraries in Scholarly Workflows: A Review

Further evidence of workflow, provided on Chad Black’s blog “Parezco Y Digo” (Black,
2011), is a list of nine steps in his workflow and a compilation of 13 tools, occasional use of five
more tools, plus scripts. One thing that is very apparent in Black’s workflow is the emphasis on
“Ubiquitous access and backup” as he notes working from multiple locations and creating
archives. Being able to access work from multiple locations and creating archives, are key
features for designing software, to facilitate ease in access during the research process and
proper storage techniques to ensure access.

Workflow Differentiations
It’s important to note that as students become scholars, their workflow may be more and more
differentiated by discipline; thus the workflow needs of a historian using medieval central Asian
primary sources is likely to differ significantly from that of an experimental psychologist
referring primarily to her own datasets and published articles, from that of an astrophysicist
whose work relies almost exclusively on large shared datasets and/or collaboration with dozens
of co-authors on each paper. One set of tools to support scholars in certain fields is the concept
of a ‘collaboratory’ (Finholt, 2002). While collaboratories may provide shared support for data
gathering, analysis, and writing, they traditionally have not provided any integration with the
types of resources libraries manage.

Increasingly, libraries are beginning to be asked to participate in supporting the data

management and archiving functions of the research lifecycle. Libraries can
provide stewardship, archiving, preservation, and access (Delserone, 2008), as funding agencies
such as the National Science Foundation (NSF), National Institute of Health (NIH), and Institute
of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), have included data management plans and access to
data as part of the application process. A memo released by the Obama administration calls for
expanded access to federally funded research (White House, 2013).

There is a need for libraries to also partake in training scholars in best practices for data
management. An Ithaka study (Long & Schonfeld, 2013) found that chemists need data
management support as they do not have sufficient training in data management
practices including proper data storage in formats and metadata standards. They also identify a
shift in the custodianship of shared information repositories from libraries to discipline specific
databases, such as databases of information on specific chemicals, or repositories of
experimental data on chemical structure (p. 39). However, again, these tools typically would not
be deeply integrated with the tools and resources used elsewhere in the research workflow. It
would be easy to mis-conceptualise this type of support as simply supporting and making more
efficient the scholars’ research practices, but even here there is a learning role that can be
played. Williams (2002) describes the role of technology in not only accelerating but
fundamentally changing disciplinary inquiry across the humanities and sciences in her role as a
dean at MIT, and similarly Long and Schonfeld (2013) identify collaboratory, discovery, and
knowledge management as functions that are lacking in the information practices of
experienced chemists. We anticipate, building on the collaboratory idea, that even experts are
always learning new knowledge-building techniques as technology advances in its ability to
provide new lenses on disciplinary knowledge.

Research Tools integration with research lifecycle and the library.

If so far as there are tools, the ones that support library work rarely integrate with the whole
research lifecycle or even each other. The previously cited workflow cases from Ithaka (Long &
Schonfeld, 2013; Rutner & Schonfeld, 2012) both explicitly identify a need for tools to be
integrated to facilitate better research practices, both for students and expert scholars alike.

Thus, we see that while tools are either extant or coming into existence to support a
wide variety of aspects of the entire research cycle, nothing supports scholars across the entire

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S. Favaro & C.Hoadley

process. What this table fails to show is the dismally poor integration of these tools with each
other. Even in cases where there theoretically is interoperability, the difficulty of moving
information from one tool to another is great, requiring advanced technological skills and
tediously lengthy procedures. This lack of interoperability can be a real barrier in the
networking and production of knowledge (Hoadley & Pea, 2002). Again, we additionally believe
that tools can not only reduce barriers to research, but can explicitly scaffold good research
processes.

What can be done? Hoadley and Pea (2002) advocate a seven stage process to support
knowledge networking in communities: defining the scope of the community, examining existing
practices, identifying potential improvements, identifying potential technologies to support
those improvements, designing and building technology for the community, cultivating a
community of use around those tools, and finally understanding and evaluating the outcomes.
Treating the community of researchers, from undergraduates through faculty, at universities
and colleges as our scope, there is much work to be done on each of these stages. At this
moment, we especially advocate investigating the existing practices of research workflows
among faculty and students.

Constructing use cases of researcher workflow

We believe the first step in re-imagining the role of libraries is to examine the workflows of
researchers, both novices and experts, and identifying ways not only to streamline how tools
might support integration of information resources beyond the retrieval phase of research, but
more importantly identifying ways to support novices to learn best practices about the uses of
information resources across the knowledge lifecycle.

The research workflow is still relatively poorly understood. To understand research

workflows, we draw on the tradition of use cases as a research tool from the Human-Computer
Interaction literature (Preece, Rogers, & Sharp, 2002). Information systems design often relies
heavily on user research, in particular workflow analysis and development of use cases, to help
identify needed information supports. The purpose of a use case is to describe a full scenario of
use of the relevant tools within the context of a particular task or subtask. They act as
generalized stories, in which actors, tools, actions, and outcomes are described. In short, use
cases are simply descriptions of sequences of events that, taken together, lead to a system doing
something useful (Bittner & Spence, 2003). Use cases can be empirical records of actual user
behavior, hypothetical activities of prospective users, or an abstraction or generalization of
typical behaviors. Use cases are not only a research tool, but also can be used as a mechanism to
involve users in a design and development process. While some research has been done on
researcher workflow and probing scholars for the types of supports they might need in different
disciplines (Harley et al., 2010). Acrod and Harley (2012) note changes in scholarly workflow
with web 2.0 tools, as tool adoption is discipline specific (Crotty, 2011). We undertook an
analysis of specifically how a researcher workflow might suggest use cases that would be helpful
in designing tools across the research lifecycle.

In this article, we review existing studies of technology in research workflow practices

and offer design considerations for academic libraries for supporting research workflows for
undergraduate students, graduate students, and faculty, with a special interest in how such
support may scaffold learning to research. According to Barry (2005, p. 103) “libraries have an
important obligation to support the building of quality, academic resources that are accessible
via the Internet”. It is important to note that while mere access is one portion of accessibility,
ease of use within existing practices is equally, perhaps more, important. There is need to
examine research workflows and how the shift in the information landscape impacts workflow
and the ways libraries can best support all phases of research--not only a self-contained and
planful literature review phase. We will review existing work and suggest ways libraries could
design/support research workflows.

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 The Changing Role of Digital Tools and Academic Libraries in Scholarly Workflows: A Review

Below, we provide an example of a use case to identify areas where library tools could be
better integrated to support library resource use throughout the lifecycle of research. The
purpose of constructing this hypothetical use case was to examine commonly performed steps in
collaborating on a research paper as experienced by faculty and/or graduate students.

Figure 2: Collaboration workflow example (Favaro, 2011).

In this use case, user 1 and user 2 email to start a project, and start a shared document in
Google docs for brainstorming. Users individually search for material at the library and the
Internet, retrieve information, and store information. User 1, for instance, might use primarily
searches in google scholar, and cutting and pasting URLs into the shared Google doc. User 2, on
the other hand, uses the library catalog database, and cuts and pastes metadata information as
formatted by the campus library catalog website into the google document. Collaboratively, the
two work synchronously in the document to start an outline, chatting with the embedded google
chat. They begin to write the paper asynchronously within google docs. One user manages
citations using her own personal Zotero library, and the other creates a conceptual diagram for
the document - tasks are done individually. Throughout the process communication is occurring
via email, face-to-face, and chat.

During the information seeking process, there is not an easy way to co-browse and share
retrieval results virtually, robbing the participants of an opportunity to learn search best
practices by watching each other, and distracting them from the intellectual core of writing the
paper and instead encouraging them to focus simply on collecting citations. There are several
pieces to the research process after information seeking. Once the information is retrieved it
must be exported to a format suitable for the researcher (i.e. pdf, doc, scan), and stored. The
metadata must be exported to a citation management tool (i.e. Zotero, EndNote, RefWorks) and
then re-exported out and formatted for within the writing software (i.e. Google docs, Word). The
collaborators need a space for annotations, and then the ability to reference those during the
writing process, which they might do in a separate google document. Once in the writing phase

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S. Favaro & C.Hoadley

for the collaborative project, it is possible for them to use a google doc for asynchronous writing
while being able to comment and chat, however it is difficult to share all documentation and
annotations during this process, as there is not a shared workspace to do so, and their fallback of
copying and pasting information into the shared documents destroys digital formatting for their
structured tools like their personal bibliographic database.

Again, not only is this hodgepodge a barrier to efficiency, but it is also a lost opportunity to
scaffold nascent and expert scholars alike in attending to the hard problems of doing good
research. Designing a tool to scaffold this process could be very effective for librarians when
teaching the research process. For example, digital tools could provide reinforcement of a
holistic research process; they could scaffold the details of managing information resources
across that process; and they could allow direct collaboration with mentors and librarians alike
from beginning to end. Instead, the current workflow provides ample opportunity to lose the
forest for the trees, and to run up against best practices while working around technological
limitations.

Future research
Future studies are needed to examine how existing library tools sync with existing workflows;
types of tools and technology libraries should offer within physical and digital spaces; types of
tools do researchers need to conduct work and how can libraries integrate library tools within
the across the research lifecycle and future planning for connecting users to the library
resources and disconnects between new technology.

Conclusion
Thus, we can no longer focus only on the retrieval aspects of the research cycle. Design research
techniques such as workflow analysis, use cases, and scenarios can help us explore new
possibilities. We need to think about how our information resources are used in context and not
just during a library research phase. We need to think about the research will be able to retain
lifelong access to their information works (i.e. once they graduate and/or move to another
institution) they should be able to retain access (the researcher is the owner) without having to
migrate another system.

Acknowledgements
We gratefully acknowledge the helpful comments and feedback of colleagues. Portions of this
paper were originally presented at emtacl 12 in Trondheim, Norway.

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 The Changing Role of Digital Tools and Academic Libraries in Scholarly Workflows: A Review

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