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The aim of this article is to introduce the special issue of Journal of Documentation focusing on perspectives on research libraries.

The paper outlines the theme of the issue and its underlying problems.

The traditional services of research libraries may diffuse to other kinds of institutions. There is, however, a need for information specialists studying and improving research infrastructures. Future services probably need to be more focused, domain-specific and based on research in information science.

The introduction is written to assist readers surveying the issue and to share the thoughts of the editors in planning the issue.

A key issue in the literature about research libraries concerns their potential role in managing research data. The aim of this paper is to study the arguments for and against associating this task with libraries and the impact such an association would have on information professionals, and consider the competitors to libraries in this field.

This paper considers the nature of data and discusses data typologies, the kinds of data contained within databases and the implications of criticisms of the data-information-knowledge (DIK) hierarchy. It outlines the many competing agencies in the data curation field and describes their relationships to different kinds of data.

Many data are organically connected to the activities of large, domain-specific organizations; as such, it might be difficult for research libraries to assume a leadership role in curating data. It seems more likely that the qualifications of information professionals will come to be needed in such organizations and that the functions of research libraries will shift toward giving greater prevalence to their role as specialists in scholarly communication. In some cases, however, research libraries may be the best place to select, keep, organize and use research data. To prepare for this task, research libraries should be actively involved in domain-specific analytic studies of their respective domains.

This paper offers a theoretical analysis and clarification of the problems of data curating from the perspective of research libraries.

The purpose of this paper is to put librarian use of instant messaging (IM) into a context of new media development. The paper aims to evaluate use of IM from findings in a research project of a Danish IM test.

The paper is grounded on findings related to the author's research of a specific Danish instant messaging test called Need2Know. With help of theories of communication patterns on the internet and of media theory of Web 2.0 IM is assessed as a tool for public libraries.

Instant messaging is an instance of expanding conversational and decentralized ways of communication on the internet. It is a useful communication tool to get in touch with young users, but it may be a waste of resources if the purpose primarily is to answer short questions of encyclopaedic facts. If the service is not anchored in an explicit library context or in library resources, the ask service easily will decay to a type of “living search machine” and not be part of a participatory culture promised by Web 2.0.

The paper assesses an instant messaging tool, Need2Know. The Need2Know service mirrors a traditional attitude to the relationship between users and library. Today users are able to find simple information themselves, and they are even able to disseminate and share this information through numerous social technologies.

By using the UNISIST models this paper argues for the necessity of domain analysis in order to qualify scientific information seeking. The models allow better understanding of communication processes in a scientific domain and they embrace the point that domains are always both unstable over time, and changeable, according to the specific perspective. This understanding is even more important today as numerous digitally generated information tools as well as collaborative and interdisciplinary research are blurring the domain borders. Nevertheless, researchers navigate “intuitively” in “their” specific domains, and UNISIST helps understanding this navigation. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The UNISIST models are tentatively applied to the domain of art history at three stages, respectively two modern, partially overlapping domains, as well as an outline of an art historical domain anno c1820. The juxtapositions are discussed against the backdrop of, among others, poststructuralist concepts such as “power” and “anti-essentialism”

The juxtapositions affirm the point already surfacing in the different versions of the UNISIST model, that is, structures of communication change over time as well as according to the agents that are charting them. As such, power in a Foucauldian sense is unavoidable in outlining a domain.

The UNISIST models are applied to the domain of art history and the article discusses the instability of a scientific domain as well as, at the same time, the significance of framing a domain; an implication which is often neglected in scientific information seeking.

The aim of this paper is to reposition the research library in the context of the changing information and knowledge architecture at the end of the “Gutenberg Parenthesis” and as part of the rapidly emerging “semantic” environment of the Linked Open Data paradigm. Understanding this process requires a good understanding of the evolution of the “document” notion in the passage from print based culture to the distributed hypertextual and RDF based information architecture of the WWW.

These objectives are reached using literature study and a descriptive historical approach as well as text mining techniques using Google nGrams as a data source.

The paper presents a proposal for effectively repositioning research libraries in the context of eScience and eScholarship as well as clear indications of the proposed repositioning already taking place. Furthermore, a new perspective of the “document” notion is provided.

The evolution described in the contribution creates opportunities for libraries to reposition themselves as aggregators and selectors of content and as contextualising agents as part of future Linked Data based scholarly research environments provided they are able and ready to operate the related cultural changes.

The paper will be useful for practitioners in search of strategic guidance for repositioning their librarian institutions in a context of ever increasing competition for scarce funding resources.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the monographic literature related to developments in research libraries within recent years and the strategies that they are adopting to deal with change. The main aim is to identify any visibly established directions along which research libraries adapt to their social and organizational environments.

Qualitative content analysis was applied to identify topics emerging from the texts. The chosen texts were read and topics signifying directions of change in the immediate environment of research libraries were mapped. This initial topic map was used for ascertaining the reactions of research libraries to identified changes. The activities of libraries directed to future anticipated changes were noted separately.

The review shows the surprising resilience of research libraries and their ability to change within a short period of time. This ability signifies that research and academic libraries as organizations perfectly adapt to the incessant transformations of current times, contrary to the widely spread stereotypical image of them as conservative institutions. At the same time, they seem to be keeping true to their core of mediating services to researchers and to their place in the chain of scholarly communication.

The article identifies the main directions of transformation of research libraries and outlines their potential roles in the future of digital scholarly communication.

To argue that library web sites embedded in a new media environment initiate and demand new kinds of communication and new communication skills.

The paper is a short version of findings related to the author's research of the internet as a medium in libraries, especially in the domain of imaginative literature. The paper is based theoretically on findings of new media research. The approach is a theoretical clarification of what is new about new media and why new media may move librarians to new kinds of publicity and communication. This is illustrated by a presentation of the Danish library web site litteratursiden.dk, produced by librarians to inspire readers of fiction among library patrons.

Theoretical and practical findings by new media research have indicated several new media features concerning the internet and the web. The web is a hypertextual media environment – all web sites are part of a global media environment, a global publicity. Local web communication is already a global communication. The web interface is also a multimedia interface, and it gives the possibility of interactive, dialogic communication. Further web sites are “remediations” of media types and genres from other media. These features must be considered when analysing library web sites, and they must be considered in the education of librarians in the future. The Danish library web site litteratursiden.dk is used to demonstrate how a literary library web site may use the web as a medium, and how new skills are needed and developed. The site gives access to the fiction of library catalogues, but at the same time it is a literary magazine with news, essays and recommendations. The librarians operate in two kinds of space – the library space and the literary public space. The addressee is both the library patron and the common reader. This duplicity may be seen as an expansion of the reader advisory service and may be compared with similar advisory services in reader development programmes.

The world wide web and new media may change the roles of the librarian in public libraries. The library web site is embedded in a general media environment, which may demand new skills of media communication.

The paper aims to focus on the public librarian as a new media producer and communication expert.

The purpose of this paper is to improve comprehension of some of the intricate interrelations between research libraries, the role of media and the knowledge production system.

This paper establishes arguments from a historical analysis of stages in the conceptual development of digital media and stages in the digitization of library functions. The historical approach leads to some discussions and forecasts of the future of research libraries.

Digital media have a disruptive, revolutionary potential, but path dependency is often a modifying component in the historical development. This is demonstrated in different stages of the development of the interrelationship between digitization, digital media and research libraries. Digital media become disruptive due to the strength of the historical dynamic, rather than as a result of particular agencies. Today the historical dynamic has reached a point where all institutions concerned with knowledge handling will have to redefine themselves. Research libraries are gradually incorporated into a number of new “research infrastructures” which are being built around different kinds of data materials, and each research library may specialize according to some sort of coordinated criteria.

This paper demonstrates new openings to a theoretical and conceptual understanding of the interrelationship between digital media and developments of research libraries.

Internet banking is now such a well‐established fact in the most developed countries that it is possible to map its actual role in customer relations. Inspired by the resource‐based view of the firm and based on a recent empirical study in the banking industry in Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden, this paper traces important antecedents of Internet banking adoption and analyses its impact on relationship‐marketing performance. Based on structural equation modeling, the findings offer some support for the view that the more advanced Internet applications adopted and the more attractive the Web site, the more the banks are able to keep profitable customers. However, the results question whether it pays to be a first‐mover and organizational factors related to market orientation and customer‐relationship management seem to have a much stronger impact on customer‐related performance.

Neither market orientation nor the possible link to performance is easily achieved and in various countries companies may organize differently to cope with the information‐processing and customer‐responding challenges. Nationwide surveys in banks in Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden indicate that a path to performance involves innovations such as “supported empowerment” though there are differences in the antecedents of market orientation. Thus the most distinct Scandinavian ways to improvements may be found in Sweden. Especially Swedish banks and to a lesser extent Finnish banks are upfront in their use of “the technology of customer‐focusing”. Nevertheless, the overall analyses based on rigorous structural equation modeling lead to the estimation of a model reflecting causal relationships which seem to be independent of nationality.