Understanding researcher needs and raising the profile of library research support

Researchers at North Carolina State University expect little to no difficulty in discerning how their Library can support their work. At the same time, librarians repeatedly find that researchers are unaware of what our Library has to offer. Within this context, we embarked on a two-year study to help inform the development of outreach strategies to enable new research engagement opportunities that will scale and, at the same time, help us transform our model of research support strategies and engagement. We interviewed both librarians and researchers to gain an understanding of researcher needs from both perspectives. The results of the interviews provided a solid grounding for building our awareness of researchers’ behaviors, expectations and workflows as well as presenting a unique picture of both unmet and unarticulated needs. In this article we summarize our results with a specific focus on findings from the researcher interviews. We share our recommendations for evolving library research support and enhancing outreach strategies to provide an easier starting point for different types of researchers to discover relevant research assets provided by libraries such as ours.