The ever-increasing pace of technological development continues to have profound impact, both positive and negative, on the health and well-being of humanity and our environment. Whilst there are elements of this impact that are discipline specific, much is common to all and hard-won insight in one domain may be of great value to other domains. The locus of university libraries at the intersection of disciplines ideally situates them to facilitate collaboration and engagement between and across domains, creating new opportunities to address global issues and assimilate new technologies to enhance scholarly processes. Libraries are designed to evolve and transform. Fundamentally, they are places of innovation and collaboration. No longer simply repositories for the products of research, modern academic libraries are at the nexus of an increasingly complex international network of research creation, dissemination, mobilization, and preservation. Through their many local, regional, national, and international connections, academic libraries leverage collections, expertise, and infrastructure within rapidly shifting contexts full of ambiguity and necessitating much flexibility. Academic libraries exist within a higher education environment that continues to experience significant global change and disruption driven by multiple factors, the most salient of which is the transition to a rapidly evolving digital knowledge economy. The library’s long-standing trusted role in enabling access to and preserving knowledge is enhanced by a focus on opening new avenues to research, systems, and structures; engaging actively with stakeholders, including marginalized and under-represented communities; and adopting sustainable and enduring approaches to core research and learning activities. As the university’s academic commons, libraries are platforms for digital transformation, providing the physical and digital spaces, expertise, access to knowledge, and convening power to accelerate transdisciplinary research and build intellectual community. As such academic libraries are catalysts for creative approaches to scholarship. Exactly how this manifests within institutions will be determined by multiple factors within and beyond institutional and disciplinary confines. Each of our research libraries will need to leverage their strengths and strike a fine balance between their unique and evolving positions within their home institutions and the broader research milieu. This featured talk will focus on how this process is evolving at the University of Victoria and provide insights into the repositioning of academic libraries within the lifecycle of research production.

1. academic libraries
2. Interdisciplinarity
3. knowledge production

This talk was delivered on June 17, 2024, as part of Creative Approaches to Open Social Scholarship: Canada, an Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE) Partnership Gathering in Montreal, Quebec, Canada: https://inke.ca/creative-approaches-to-open-social-scholarship-canada/.