The Role of Academic Libraries in the Digital
Transformation of the Universities
Gurdish Sandhu
Ex-Associate Director Information & Digital Strategy
University of East London, UK
sandhugurdish@hotmail.co.uk
Abstract—Digital transformation involves vision, strategy,
people, processes, and technology. A digital university
continuously exploits digital technologies to both create new
sources of value for the university communities and increase
operational agility for digital operational excellence.
Academic libraries have the expertise and mindset of
being early adopters of new technologies to perform activities
such as digital curation, digital preservation, digital archiving
etc. Hence, the role of academic libraries in the digital
transformation of the universities becomes central. Only those
universities that stay relevant and leverage the power of digital
and put in place focused digital transformation will survive in
the digital era. Indeed, libraries should act as a platform for
digital transformation. Learning Commons, digital education
centres, digital scholarship Centres, Information Commons
have revolutionised teaching & learning. Digital technologies
are changing the way research is conducted. Digital capabilities
are the key enabler of university digital transformation through
the competent digital workforce.
Keywords—Academic libraries; Digital Transformation;
Digital pedagogy; Digital Scholarship Centres, Digital Capabilities
I.  Introduction
Digital revolution has been around for some time now
and it is going to stay. It is entering every aspect of life,
businesses and everything around us. It is perceived as more
significant than the invention of writing, pen or printing. The
industrial revolution of the 18th century helped humanity to
transcend the limitation of muscle power; with the digital
revolution, we transcend the limitation of human mind. In the
fast-moving digital world, there is no time for procrastination,
digital disruption is on us.
In the digital world people, processes and things are
hyperlinked. There is no doubt that digital empowers people
but it also disrupts well-established businesses including the
higher education institutions.
A. Disruption in higher education
Digital technologies are reshaping the very nature of
higher education i.e. how it is delivered and consumed. The
role of universities is being re-defined in the digital society.
Universities are seen not just as a degree awarding bodies. In
addition to imparting knowledge for the sake of knowledge,
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preparing students for jobs and delivering corporate social
responsibility are also expected. Universities like any other
multinational businesses are competing globally for students,
academics and funding. Only those universities that stay
relevant and leverage the power of digital and put in place
focused digital transformation will survive in the digital
era. New players in the marketplace such as Amazon, Uber,
Airbnb etc. have disrupted well-established businesses and
leapfrogged by leveraging the power of digital combined
with their business expertise and customer insights.
Similarly, universities are being disrupted by
developments such as open education, MOOCs (Massive
Open Online Courses), OERs (Open Educational Resources)
etc. Online Education is democratising and disrupting
global learning. The rapid growth in online education makes
learning opportunities more abundant, cheaper and more
accessible [11]. New providers such as Pearson Education,
and Khan Academy are offering personalised education
to mass students. YouTube has become the biggest digital
learning platform of all ages. Around the globe, many
traditional universities are beginning to respond to these
challenges and developing specific digital strategies to
digitalise the university. This requires well planned digital
strategy including the digital transformation framework in
which all key players and stakeholders can play an active role
in shaping the university to thrive in the digital age.
Academic libraries are recognised as the early adopters
of new technologies and trendsetters. I believe university
libraries have a major role and ideally can become the agents
of digital transformation of their universities.
II.  Libraries as a Platform for Digital Transformation
A. Role in the Digital Teaching & learning (Digital
Pedagogy)
Digital pedagogy (DP) is defined as the use of electronic
elements to enhance or to change the experience of education.
It is engaging and reflective practice and scholarship of
teaching & learning through digital technologies. Today’s
teaching & learning involves active, personalised, social
learning and include activities such as problem solving,
group project, creating a video, podcast, or website for a class
assignment, developing data visualizations, data mapping,
 2018 5th International Symposium on Emerging Trends and Technologies in Libraries and Information Services
making a prototype for an engineering or art class, collecting,
locating, and analysing data, conduct interviews, conduct
seminars etc.[7]. Libraries are playing the proactive role in
enabling innovations in university’s teaching & learning in
various ways. Learning Commons, digital education centres,
Information Commons have revolutionised teaching &
learning by enabling /supporting changes in the curricular
and digital pedagogy.
Libraries are perceived to be playing a big role in the
digital university’s teaching and learning in many ways i.e.
administering or collaborating with the digital education/
e-learning/teaching & learning centre. These centres offer
services such as developing & supporting technology
platforms (Learning Management Systems, digital
assessment tools, diagnostic tools, plagiarism software etc.),
support the instructional design, development of new type
of digitally enriched learning spaces to support problem-
based, collaborative, competency-based learning. Digital
learning spaces such as audio-visual classroom support,
media production labs, Artificial Intelligence / Virtual
Reality labs, Makerspaces etc, to support & encourage
innovative teaching & learning methods[8]. For example,
North Carolina University’s Hunt Library is supporting, in
pedagogy through well designed technological rich spaces
which include interactive computing, multimedia creation,
large-scale visualization in visualization studio, 3D scanning
printing, laser-cutting in makerspaces.
A typical media creation lab supports the teaching &
learning through the provision of digital scanning, poster
printing, video editing, loan of video cameras, laptops, and
other devices. Secondly, libraries facilitate & support the new
learning models through the development of Open Educational
Resources and other digital content. Digital content is the key
enabler of online education. Thirdly, libraries play a key role
in licensing & purchasing and harvesting the quality digital
content in enriching coursework by exposing students to an
array of perspectives beyond the primary reading of the course
material. Libraries are playing a pro-active role in raising
awareness and educating the faculty through organising
digital technologies roadshows, future observatory events,
content creation workshops, legal & compliance workshops
such as the use of Creative Commons, Copyright, IPR etc.
Lippincott advocates that libraries have the potential to
become learning labs for the digital university, providing
technology platforms, software utilities, digitally enhanced
facilities along with the expertise to enable students to
develop/co-create new types of information products such as
video, websites, data visualization, AI, VR programmes etc.
Libraries in the UK are also championing learning
analytics initiatives to improve student success through the
development of personalised learning. Learning analytics use
data from various university systems/ entry points such as
attendance, learning management system, online downloads
& reading of materials, library visits etc. Through learning
analytics, the tutors gain insight into student learning and put
a meaningful intervention in place to improve student success.
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These interventions may involve differentiated learning
materials such as e-textbooks, problem sets, assessment tools
etc to develop a personalised learning environment. It may
involve the library offering personalised learning materials
based on analytics software recommendations. (Lippincott,
J 2015). In UK academic libraries have played an active role
in influencing system suppliers to develop analytical tools,
established learning analytics community with the help of
JISC to raise awareness, organised events, hence playing
important role in the improvement in learning and student
success.
B. Role in the Digital Scholarship
Digital technologies are changing the way research
is conducted. Digital technologies’ power lies in making
everything visual and hyper-connected. Research have
become more collaborative, connected, global and beyond
academia i.e. in partnership with industry and businesses.
Digital scholarship / e-research encompass methodologies
that rely heavily on the use of technology from an idea to
impact and re-use of research data for new insights. Digital
Scholarship takes advantage of digital technologies to
ask and answer research questions in new ways. Digital
scholarship marks the move away from the passive one-way
form of scholarly communication from scholar to peers,
researchers and students. The digital scholarship is much
more interactive, it is a new form of enquiry & research
practice that generates new questions, new evidence, new
conclusions and new audiences [10].
Technologies have transformed the tools of doing
research from the data collection, data visualization, models
of representation, presentation and dissemination. Informal
channels of communication such as blogs, wikis, institutional
repositories, the community of practices, open access materials
are democratising the scholarly conversations and removing
barriers to scholarly information. Hence, transformation in
research is highly visible and seen as dramatic.
University libraries can be seen as a neutral and shared
central spaces on campus offering the potential to digitalise
the university research and promote & support the digital
scholarship and bring university’s research together.
Sinclair calls this role of the library an Incubator for Digital
Scholarship [10]. As libraries have expertise and mindset of
being early adopters of new technologies to perform activities
such as digital curation, digital preservation, digital archiving
etc.
In the recent past, many university libraries in USA,
Australia and UK have established dedicated research
support services in the form of Digital Scholarship Hubs,
Research Commons, Scholarly Commons, Digital Research
Centres etc. These centres are playing an important role in the
digital transformation of research activities of the university
through the development of research support services
such as implementing Research Information Management
System(RIMS) also known as Current Research Information
 2018 5th International Symposium on Emerging Trends and Technologies in Libraries and Information Services
Systems (CRIS), research repositories, provision of high-end
hardware for data archiving, digitisation of research analogue
collections along with expertise needed for the digital age
such as advice & training for digital copyright, creative
commons, IPR, administering university e-Press, enabling
university scholarly publishing, partnering in grant bids,
project management etc. These centres facilitate knowledge
creation and knowledge transfer by connecting people, data
and technology in a shared physical & digital collaborative
space. These Digital Scholarship centres act as Digital
scholarship incubators by supporting intergenerational
exchanges between experts and budding scholars. [10].
Typical Research support services offered by the Digital
Scholarship Centre / Research Commons include the services
mentioned below.
1) Research Data Management
Research data management’ (RDM) is defined as “the
organisation of data, from its entry to the research cycle
through to the dissemination and archiving of valuable
results”, (Whyte, A., Tedds, J. 2011). Open data and good
research data management practices are currently high on
the UK government agenda. Many of the UK’s top research
funders such as Research Council UK, the Welcome
Trust, Cancer Research UK etc. have made research data
management plans and data sharing mandatory as part of their
conditions of funding.[4]. Similarly, Research Councils in
the rest of Europe, Australia and USA have made mandatory
requirements to make research data available openly. This
data can be reused for inter-disciplinary subjects for new
insights and new discoveries, hence saving time & efforts to
collect new data. Libraries have taken the lead in creating
the data management policies and associated services to meet
the requirements of research councils and promoting the
university research data. Academic librarians consider RDM
to be their most important activity. Libraries are offering
the following RDM services to the university research
community. Establishment of Research Data Management
service at the Bristol University library is well documented
and worth looking at.[4].
Academic librarians are already co-ordinating the
university RDM policy to comply with funding bodies’
requirements. Academic libraries also provide an RDM
advisory service. They support researchers with data
management, put in place RDM technical infrastructure
including the administration of data repositories etc.
They also offer advice on how to cite data, registration
with datacite services, liaising with Digital Data curation
Centre (DCC) about the developments in RDM field, offer
metadata services for recording research data assets, offer
RDM training to research students and researchers, provide
advice on IPR, copyright & licensing of data, provide
support for retrieval of external data sources, offer advice
on data analysis etc. [3].
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2) Proactive role in Scholarly Communication/Publishing
Digital technologies continue to transform the scholarly
environment. Scholarly communication is simply the
communication of scholarship. Association of College &
Research Libraries (ACRL) defines scholarly communication
as the system through which research and other scholarly
findings/writings are created, evaluated by peers for quality,
disseminated to the scholarly community and preserved for
future use [1].
Scholarly publishing started around 1665 as a public good
rather than a commodity (Steele, 2015). It started as open
access but later moved into hands of commercial publishers
and became an expensive but profit-making commodity.
However, with the emergence of digital publishing, scholarly
communication is moving back into hands of scholars and
libraries. It is back into open access arena and is disrupting
traditional publishing. Digital publishing is no longer limited
to text-based publishing, it adds value to scholarly records
by including research datasets, interactive programmes,
complex visualization, web-based conversations via social
media, video etc. (NMC, 2017).
Libraries along with national/ international
e-infrastructure, data experts and researchers are leveraging
the online Open publishing platforms such as Open Aire,
Open Journal Systems, Open Monograph press to create open
scholarship workflows and scholarly outputs. ARL scholarly
communication Toolkit has been made available to libraries
to integrate scholarly communication into library operations.
Libraries play a key role in increasing integration,
operability between university systems, national/
international, consortia and publishers’ digital publishing
platforms for increased visibility of institutional research and
collaboration.
In the UK libraries have been actively working with JISC
on the OAPEN-UK project to facilitate the publishing of
open access monographs.
Many universities are closing university printing presses
and the new role of electronic publishing is given to libraries.
3) Scholarly Training
With the emergence of Digital Scholarship centres and
scholarly commons, libraries are beginning to recruit the
new breed of librarians such as Scholarly Communication
Librarians, Research Librarians, Data Librarians etc. The
major role of these librarians is to educate, make aware and
skill the new researchers and staff. Training is being offered
in open access publishing, research data management &
data plans, thesis management, authoring tools, retrieval of
scholarly materials including data retrieval, bibliometric &
altimetric (to measure the impact of research through digital
channels), IPR/copyright, reference management, training
in data analysis, data visualization, use of data manipulation
software such as SPSS, STATA, R, NVIVO, Dedoose etc.
 2018 5th International Symposium on Emerging Trends and Technologies in Libraries and Information Services
4) Collaborative research bids
Libraries support research grant applications through
fulfilling essential criteria for data plans, open access etc.
Libraries are also collaborating on research projects to
produce shared resources for researchers beyond their
universities.
C. Libraries Developing Digital Capabilities
Digital capabilities are the key enabler of university digital
transformation through the competent digital workforce.
“Digital capabilities are the capabilities which fit someone
for the living, learning and working in a digital society.” UK
Joint Information System Committee (JISC).
Digital capabilities are important for students as well
as for academics, university staff who supports students’
learning as well as for university senior leaders. JISC
created six-dimension framework of digital capabilities that
are needed to become a digital competent person. JISC has
developed digital capable profiles for students, researchers,
senior leaders and support staff. In UK academic libraries are
collaborating with the training providers in the university and
beyond in assessing and delivering the programme to build
digital capabilities across the university. At the University of
East London current training provision have been mapped
along the six dimensions and gaps have been identified. A
programme to bridge the digital capability gap has been put
in place. The Digital Capability team has been established
with the new roles of Digital Capability trainers. Digital
capability trainers with the support of Digital education team
are delivering the digital capability training. Hence, playing a
key role in building a digital capable university.
The JISC Digital Capabilities Framework is available to
international Higher & Further education institutions. The
University of Adelaide, Australia has adapted the six digital
capabilities framework for Australian digital environment.
D. Library as a Digital Infrastructure platform
Libraries are developing & administering key information
management systems, software applications such as Learning
Management Systems (e-learning systems), Current
Research Information Systems, Institutional Repository,
Data Repository, Digital Archives, Resource Discovery,
Virtual Reference/chatbots services, Reference Management
software and many more. Libraries provide self-loan of
digital devices laptops, tablets to enable learning. Libraries
have record of working with systems suppliers to shape their
products to meet emerging needs of the university.
E. Digital student experience
Today’s digital students are grown up with active
participation in technology as an everyday feature in their
lives. Digital technologies are becoming increasingly
inseparable part of their learning and living. Students do
not think in terms of silos, they expect the outcome of one
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interaction with the university to be consistent with and to
inform the next interaction seamlessly.
The Digital-First student’s experience deals with
complete student journey. It aims to make all touch points, i.e.
all interactions of a student in each of the above experience
digital. The Digital-First student-centric strategies can deliver
new ways of cross-departmental working and create an inter-
connected processes & technology structures.
The Digital Student Experience Benchmarking Toolkit
developed by JISC provides a good framework to assess and
develop digital capability in this area.
JISC has also provided set of cards / guidelines to UK higher
education institutions to enhance the digital student experience.
The areas of digital student experience addressed include:
managing students’ expectations of the digital environment,
prepare students to study in digital settings, give students a
sense of belonging to the digital university, access to university
technical infrastructure (hardware, networks), provision
of software & e-services, support for digital technologies
including students’ own devices, embedding digital experience
in the curriculum, preparing our staff and students for the digital
workplace and putting digital first strategies at the top level.
The JISC Digital student experience benchmarking toolkit and
enhancing digital student experience cards are available for
international higher education institutions to use [6].
Academic libraries in the UK are at the forefront to use
the benchmarking toolkit and putting policies & practices in
place to enhance the digital student experience. This does not
only enhance student digital experience but also make the
university a digitally capable institution.
F. Role in Digital Business Transformation
Digital business transformation can be defined as the
modification of business processes, procedures, capabilities
and policies to take advantage of the changes and opportunities
presented by new digital technologies, as well as the impact
they have on society, while always thinking about current and
future trends.
A digital university continuously exploits digital
technologies to both create new sources of value for the
university communities and increase operational agility
for digital operational excellence. It seeks to look at each
business process and function with the aim to making these
end-to-end digital. Digital is not about technology; it is
mindset, an approach to solve business problems ad exploit
opportunities offered by the digital technologies. The digital
business transformation seeks to adopt a digital-first mindset,
i.e. everyone in the University knows what is possible
through digital and this is the default option. A shift to digital-
first mindset puts all staff at the forefront of innovation and
reimagining the business in the digital age.
Libraries have been in the forefront of digitalising their
services through the automation of their back-office activities,
 2018 5th International Symposium on Emerging Trends and Technologies in Libraries and Information Services
using Artificial Intelligence – chatbots for reference service,
self-service, developing shared services through the intensive
use of digital technologies. They can play important role in
digitalising the university business administration services
through showcasing, commissioning, co-developing and
administering technology platforms. Libraries have learnt
harsh lessons and used the crisis as opportunities to re-
engineer their business processes, re-skilling people and
transformed their services, hence, are in the best position to
lead, facilitate and support the digital transformation across
the university.
III. Conclusion
The future has never been so enticing as it is right now.
The digital technologies will continue to have a positively
disruptive influence on the success of higher education
institutions as it has done on other businesses. The library
leaders who are able to look beyond the library automation and
consider the evolving dynamics impacting their universities
would be best placed to ensure that they themselves and their
libraries stay relevant to their institutions in the years ahead.
Digital transformation needs leaders with vision, courage and
persistence. Libraries have the potential to drive the digital
transformation university-wide. To do this, library leaders
must understand the true nature of digital transformation
and work with deans, directors, VC/PVC and other leaders
as digital transformation is driven by business decisions and
by business strategies. It is university-wide initiative and
touches each & every area of university business as discussed
above. Digital transformation involves vision, strategy,
people, processes and technology. Though technology is
critical for the transformation, it is not the beginning or end
of the digital transformation journey. In order to play a key
role in digitalising the university, library leaders need to
think beyond their own silo, understand the challenges faced
by the university and what role they can potentially play to
bring technologies, people together for positive gains. It is
evident from the above examples that librarians in the west
are beginning to turn challenges of teaching & learning,
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Digital scholarship, Digital student experience and business
transformation of the organisation into opportunities, playing
thereby important role in enabling & facilitating the university
digital transformation.
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