Alignment, Collaboration and the Social Turn: Our Agenda for the Relational Library

Collaboration has emerged as a key theme in academic library discourse, but has been supplanted on the professional agenda by the digital shift that acquired a new urgency with the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic. The profession must put collaboration back on the top of the agenda. Collaborative activity will be instrumental in securing our digital future just as it has been in the past in fostering our position in open science and scholarly communication. Library leaders understand its importance and share a collective vision of libraries shedding their unwanted status of institutional support service and gaining deserved recognition as a strategic business partner in research, teaching and learning. But despite the long, strong tradition of collaboration within the profession and near-universal consensus that collaboration is a strategic imperative moving forward, scholars and practitioners have expressed doubts about the academic library sector’s capacity, propensity and appetite to build the mutually beneficial relationships of trust desired and required to accomplish these bold visions. There are three keys to success here: moving from a transactional to a relational library model; developing relationship building and management as a threshold competence; and using a social capital lens to understand how collaboration works in practice