6 March 2026
Brian Lavoie, Senior Research Scientist, OCLC, Ellen Hartman, Leaders Council Manager, OCLC
The research library’s role in the institutional research enterprise is expanding and becoming more complex. This can leave the research library with the challenge of making its impact visible and communicating its value proposition effectively to institutional stakeholders.
Communicating a compelling narrative about the library’s value proposition is not a new problem. Brian Mathews, University Librarian at Elon University in the United States, observed that, “For decades librarians have been trying to tell students and faculty about all the great services they offer. Collections. Tools. Events. Workshops. Expertise. I find that most people are unaware of most of the things that we offer. (sadly)”
But the problem may be becoming more acute. A 2021 RLUK study on the role of academic and research library staff in the research process found that librarians’ specialized skills and expertise, which make them valuable research partners, are nonetheless often overlooked by other stakeholders around the institution.
In response, OCLC Research has developed a new framework called the Library Beyond the Library.[1] This framework captures an emerging operational principle for research libraries: the need to engage with the broader institutional environment through several important channels – strategic alignment, collaboration, and storytelling – to sustain the library mission, maximize impact, and remain valued, influential, and adequately funded within the parent institution.
The shifting value proposition of research libraries
Research libraries are evolving to offer a wealth of new capacities in support of the institutional research enterprise, such as research data management, publishing, and bibliometrics and research impact assessment. As the library expands its service portfolio beyond the traditional role of collection steward, its value proposition to institutional stakeholders becomes more complex and potentially opaque.
This brings us back to the Library Beyond the Library and what constitutes the third pillar of the framework: storytelling. Narratives shape institutional understanding of the library’s value proposition and impact. Research libraries must proactively develop and communicate compelling stories that highlight the full scope of their contributions, including how librarianship and expertise is evolving to strengthen that support.
While storytelling is important for communicating the library’s value and impact, it can also be an obstacle to that end. This happens when a disconnect arises between the library’s evolving service portfolio and institutional perceptions of what that portfolio consists of. In these circumstances, the library’s stakeholders may be influenced by an out-of-date narrative of what the library does, even as library capacities and expertise have expanded into new areas.
This creates the risk that even as the library’s service portfolio becomes more deeply embedded in the research lifecycle, its value proposition is overlooked or misunderstood by institutional stakeholders who have fixed ideas of library roles centred around traditional collections-centric narratives.
The lesson is clear: as the library’s value proposition to the institution changes through an evolving service portfolio, the accompanying narrative – the stories libraries tell about themselves to their stakeholders – must change as well.
OCLC Research spoke to an international group of library leaders to gain their perspectives on successful engagement with the broader institutional environment through the channels defined in the Library Beyond the Library framework, including storytelling. From these conversations, two strategies for creating effective narratives about the library stood out in particular.
Expanding the evidence base for library impact
An evolving narrative about the library’s value proposition requires a parallel evolution in the evidence used to describe, benchmark, and demonstrate impact. Libraries must supplement traditional collections-oriented statistics (number of volumes, circulation totals) with new metrics that reflect the library’s growing portfolio of services in areas like research support.
Consider this example from the University of Pennsylvania Libraries’ 2023 Selected Facts report, which showcases the Libraries’ commitment to supporting research and education at the university. The Libraries employ a custom business intelligence tool to measure library engagement across a wide spectrum of activities, including workshops, classroom instruction, and consultations. Using this approach, the Libraries documented approximately 44 million service interactions in 2023, accounting for every user touchpoint. According to the report, updated, innovative metrics demonstrate “our evolving engagements and the need for research libraries generally to design new metrics that capture and inform the growing intersection of library service with the academic enterprise.”
Jenny McHugh, Research Data Manager at Lancaster University, shared an especially innovative library engagement metric at the December 2025 UKSG Forum. Noting the Library’s efforts to engage stakeholders in the university’s academic departments on the topic of research data management, McHugh supplemented more traditional metrics of engagement (e.g., number of departments represented, total registrations) with the novel statistic of number of pizza slices eaten during the events (711)! While the “pizza index” was perhaps reported light-heartedly, it illustrates the idea that libraries need to think in innovative ways about how to gather evidence of their engagement and impact across the institution. Beyond its novelty, the “pizza index” is an effective storytelling device: it captures attention and makes the engagement story more memorable and therefore impactful.
Bridging the gap through social interoperability
Storytelling strategies are also strengthened by dedicated attention to relationship management. Relationship management involves, among other things, ensuring that the library’s narrative about its value and impact, and the evidence marshalled to support it, reaches the people who need to hear it. Storytelling involves a connection between the source of the story and its intended audience. Relationship management helps establish and sustain that connection over time.
Monash University’s newly created role of Library Business Partner illustrates the importance of stewarding connections as part of a broader storytelling process. The Library Business Partner is responsible for strategic relationship management with senior leadership in academic units across the university. Communication is two-way: the Library Business Partner communicates library messaging to the academic unit while also gathering information on stakeholder needs and mobilizing library resources to address them. Emphasizing relationship management as a distinct role helps the library move beyond a reactive, transactional model to a proactive, two-way partnership with its stakeholders.
Monash’s Library Business Partner role exemplifies social interoperability, a concept that OCLC Research defines as the “creation and maintenance of working relationships across individuals and organizational units that promote collaboration, communication, and mutual understanding.” In addition, OCLC Research has gathered strategies and tactics to help librarians improve their ability to engage with other parts of the parent institution. Social interoperability aligns neatly with the imperative for libraries to articulate their evolving value proposition through compelling narratives and stories. For example, one social interoperability tactic is to offer concrete solutions to stakeholder pain points. Since stakeholders are often unaware of how the library can help, library staff must take the initiative to tell clear narratives of how library capacities and expertise align with stakeholder needs.
Research libraries must proactively tell their stories
In summary, consider these practical steps to strengthen institutional understanding of the library’s evolving roles and value:
- Communicate an updated value proposition by crafting and disseminating compelling narratives that accurately reflect expanding service portfolios and expertise in areas like research support.
- Modernize the evidence base by developing metrics that capture engagement with teaching, research support, open scholarship, and digital services – complementing, not replacing, traditional collection-centric statistics.
- Invest dedicated attention to relationship management by creating specialized roles, establishing channels (formal and informal), and employing social interoperability tactics to ensure narratives about the library’s evolving value proposition reach its stakeholders.
Allowing passive assumptions about library value to persist is no longer practicable. Research libraries must transform how they communicate their evolving value proposition to institutional stakeholders by crafting and disseminating compelling narratives that accurately reflect their expanding service portfolios and expertise. Without proactive storytelling grounded in relevant evidence and communicated through strategic relationships, libraries risk becoming invisible even as they remain indispensable.
[1] An OCLC Research report on the Library Beyond the Library framework is forthcoming in Spring 2026.