Librarian-academic collaboration: the role of strategic communication and relationship management

Abstract

Information literacy and critical thinking skills are essential in the information age towardsachieving academic success and being adequately skilled for lifelong learning. Academiclibraries have an indispensable role to play in this regard. Collaboration between librarians andacademics is important to ensure both effective information-literacy training and service provisionto students and to the academic community. However, a lack of understanding, knowledge, andcommunication regarding academic libraries’ teaching and research role is proving to be anobstacle in obtaining librarian-academic collaboration. Academic libraries do mostly not applystrategic communication management to build and maintain relationships with its stakeholders,which contributes to the challenges surrounding librarian-academic collaboration. This paperreports on how four academic libraries practise communication and relationship managementto enhance librarian-academic collaboration. The study aims to make recommendations for theapplication of more effective, strategy-driven communication and relationship management toenhance librarian-academic collaboration.