By: Emily Gillingham

Translation: Dr. Abdulrahman Faraj

In the last meeting of the North American Beneficiaries Advisory Council, we asked librarians about some of the challenges they face and would like help with. This short article represents what we reached in this regard, and the reader can vote on what they see as the most pressing challenges among the following at the following link: https://wiley.qualtrics.IEQzURkd.IIIWI_com/jfe/form/SV

- Facilitating ways to access content, so that it is easy to find and benefit from, because access methods and all the multiple platforms of information providers are already complex, for both beneficiaries and librarians who need to absorb them all.

- Knowledge of how to benefit from content in their libraries and from which beneficiaries. There is a need for librarians to be familiar with the facts of benefiting from information in a way that es beyond what current reports of the "COUNTER" service provide (1),. They want to know, for example, which articles have been read, in which scientific disciplines, by which type of beneficiaries, and in which faculty; knowledge of the patterns of benefiting from their libraries compared to peer libraries. Did benefiting from the content of their libraries achieve od or bad rates compared to other libraries of similar types? And what can they do to reach the best?

- Revealing the extent of the impact of content purchased by librarians on the achievements of the parent institution. How can the library prove that it actually helped to graduate a better student than before, or obtained grant funding, or led to a discovery, or secured a patent for a specific product? Showing the library’s acquired value to those who hold the reins of power is very important. How can librarians best present the nuances of information resource licensing models to both beneficiaries and senior management? It is known that digital information resource licensing models are so complex that their interpretation is difficult for non-specialists.

- Fully embedding information services into the workflow of both researchers and scholars. To do this successfully, librarians also need deep knowledge of the information-seeking needs and behaviors of beneficiaries, and patterns of their interaction with library services. The question here is: how can librarians provide information relevant to a beneficiary's need for a service, which can make a real difference in the daily lives of beneficiaries?

- Supporting the education of authors/researchers, especially early in their careers. Librarians increasingly act as knowledge consultants in their institutions and are invited to provide training programs for emerging researchers beyond traditional research skills programs. This may include: training on knowledge of copyrights, writing research plans submitted for grants, methods for obtaining funding to publish their studies according to Open Access and including that in grant applications, publishing methods in prestigious scientific journals... etc.

- Developing the tasks of librarians using research data management tools. The question that imposes itself here is: Is the library the right place to support data preservation and research data behaviors for both academic departments and laboratories that work to provide them? If not libraries, then what? (2)

- Developing the tasks and capabilities of librarians as specialists. Supporting a hybrid economy between pre-paid subscriptions and Open Access methods, and expanding the response to advisory needs for knowledge in parent institutions, requires librarians to reformulate their tasks in this time characterized by scarcity of resources.

- The necessity of reformulating library policies to accommodate the hybrid economy and the new reality. If librarians buy e-books, should they also buy paper-printed books? What is the amount they should allocate to provide libraries with publications based on beneficiary requests? Should they buy textbooks in all circumstances? Does the library have a role in managing Open Access resource fees? All these emerging issues are still under study, and many scientific experiments are still oning.

In conclusion, are the ideas of this article familiar to you, dear reader? We need to know which of these challenges represents the highest priority for you on the electronic survey link referred to above. Many of these issues were also raised by community officers in the joint meeting of the Beneficiaries Advisory Council for Librarians and the Community, and a subsequent blog post on: "Discover the Future of Research" will reveal these areas of common interest.

Translator's Comments:

1- The (COUNTER) project is an international initiative to provide standards for electronic usage reports of information sources. This project was essentially developed to ensure consistency in usage statistics provided by publishers to libraries for each journal the library subscribes to (for example) allowing for necessary comparisons and analysis.

2- Many studies reveal that libraries, especially academic ones, establish what are called Research Data Services (RDS) to manage research data in universities and academic institutions. This generally falls within the context of libraries' support for the Open Access movement in general and Open Data in particular. See for example: Tinopir, Carol, et al. Research Data Service in European and North American libraries: Current offerings and plans for the future. Proceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology 1-53 / 2016 pp 1-6.

* Emily Gillingham, challenges librarians are facing in Discover. (**) Chair of the Executive Board of the Research4Life program, and Director of Library Relations at Wiley. (***) Library Science Department – Beni Suef University.