Leveraging Librarian Liaison Expertise in a New Consultancy Role

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper presents a case study of an advisory role that librarians successfully developed with faculty editors to increase the visibility and readership of an open access scholarly publication. The study represents an example of how expertise among liaison librarians and other library service professionals can be leveraged in new consultancy roles in support of evolving library service models. It also depicts local application of a hybrid model for librarianship that combines the functional specialist and subject librarian liaison roles in implementing advisory activities and recommendations. The liaison librarians successfully used their knowledge of scholarly communications and applied innovative bibliometric analysis to help enhance the discoverability and user experience of an online journal publication. The librarians made specific recommendations for optimizing journal website content organization, search functionality, metadata standards and marketing opportunities that were subsequently implemented by the editors and platform managers. The faculty editor places a high value on these recommendations, and the librarian advisory role continues to develop. Our study also outlines many of the essential considerations that scholar-editors and librarian advisors can use to help implement open access scholarly publishing projects successfully.