Support of Scientific Research as Libraries’ Field of Activity

Abstract

Support of scientific research as a field of activity is one of the leading topics discussed in the professional library, especially foreign, periodicals. In 2020, there was conducted the analysis of research support services provided by research libraries of domestic and foreign universities. Based on the experience of the 2017’ study, the authors divided all research support services into two groups for the analysis of 2020: information and library services and general scientific services. Information and library services include all those that the library traditionally provides to its readers and users, taking into account the development of modern information technologies. General scientific services are essentially a certain continuation of the work with information that researchers have already received in the course of their work. For the analysis of research universities, the authors selected Russian universities that were included in the Shanghai ranking of world universities for 2020 (there are nine of them), followed by the same number of foreign universities. Comparison of the results of the 2017’ and 2020’ studies showed that university libraries have found stable, relevant directions and forms of communication with scientists. They can be grouped as follows: preparation and maintenance of special resources that are a priori useful to researchers for obtaining information necessary for conducting, promoting and organizing scientific research; assistance in preparing publications; assistance in using tools for scientific communication; assistance in working with research data; assistance in working with scientometric data; comprehensive support for scientific research. The article indicates that the core of this area of library and information activity has been formed over the past four years. The only significant difference in the activities of research libraries of foreign and domestic universities is that the latter do not offer data management services. The authors draw attention to the appearance in library activities of such type of services as “help”/assistance on the websites of libraries of domestic and foreign universities. The authors propose to consider it in the “help — consulting — support” paradigm, which reflects the competence level of the librarian.