ArLA 2026 Annual Conference

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11:00am CDT

Liaison Librarians and Scholarly Communication Support: A National Examination of Practices at R2 Institutions

Sunday October 18, 2026 11:00am - 11:50am CDT

Librarians are increasingly playing new roles in support of scholarly publishing. At larger institutions, scholarly communication librarians contribute to the research efforts of faculty and graduate students by enhancing research visibility, interpreting impact metrics, promoting open access, guiding publishing decisions, preserving datasets and maintaining institutional repositories. Libraries at smaller institutions typically lack specialists to rely upon for scholarship support so they rely on liaison librarians to assume some of these responsibilities. A review of librarian job descriptions and a national survey of academic librarians was conducted to read the landscape of current scholarly communication support at R2 universities. This session will cover two related topics of discussion. First, the findings of both the content analysis and the national survey will be outlined. Second, this session will argue that a shift in MLIS education, ongoing support for professional development, and establishing best practices for formalizing scholarly communication duties in job descriptions are all paramount for preparing both new and current academic librarians for this new path of librarianship.

After Attending this session, participants will be able to:

Inventory common scholarly communication duties
Recognize both the ubiquity and the importance of scholarly communication support
Evaluate the efficacy of current scholarly communication support networks at their institution
Plan to develop best practices to better support scholarly communication at their institution in the future

Speakers

Amie Johnson

Academic Success Librarian, University of Arkansas Little Rock

Amie Johnson is an academic success librarian at the the University of Arkansas Little Rock. She has a masters of library and information science from the University of Oklahoma and a bachelors in anthropology from Austin College. Amie is an early career librarian with research interests... Read More →