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Discusses the 6th ITCRR, its breadth of textile and clothing research activity, plus the encouragement given to workers in this field and its related areas. States that, within the newer research areas under the microscope of the community involved, technical textiles focuses on new, ‘smart’ garments and the initiatives in this field in both the UK and the international community at large. Covers this subject at length.

Looks at the eighth published year of the ITCRR and the research, from far and near, involved in this. Muses on the fact that, though all the usual processes are to the fore, the downside part of the industry is garment making which is the least developed side. Posits that the manufacture of clothing needs to become more technologically advanced as does retailing. Closes by emphasising support for the community in all its efforts.

Given the ways in which the research pressures on university staff are becoming seemingly ever greater, an issue of the European Journal of Marketing that is given over to a survey of the kinds of research initiatives which are currently being carried out is timely. The study which provides the basis for this was conducted between December 1994 and February 1995, with questionnaires being sent to staff in universities throughout Europe. At the time the final selection was made, a total of 150 responses had been received from 18 countries.

This paper aims at understanding the current situation of research support services offered by academic libraries in world-leading universities and providing useful implications and insights for other academic libraries.

Of the top 100 universities listed in the QS World University Rankings in 2017, 76 libraries were selected as samples and a website investigation was conducted to explore the research support services. The statistical method and visualization software was used to generalize the key services, and the text analysis and case analysis were applied to reveal the corresponding implementation.

Research support service has become one of the significant services of academic libraries in the context of e-research and data-intensive research. The research support services can be generally divided into seven aspects, as follows: research data management (62, 81.58 per cent), open access (64, 84.21 per cent), scholarly publishing (59, 77.63 per cent), research impact measurement (32, 42.11 per cent), research guides (47, 61.84 per cent), research consultation (59, 77.63 per cent) and research tools recommendation (38, 50.00 per cent).

This paper makes a comprehensive investigation of research support services in academic libraries of top-ranking universities worldwide. The findings will help academic libraries improve research support services; thus, advancing the work of researchers and promoting scientific discovery.

This paper aims to outline principal implications for institutions, particularly universities, in supporting the increasingly complex tools which are used in the data lifecycle.

The discussion paper draws upon the experience of authors in this domain at the institutional, national and international levels.

Support for research tools by universities has high-level implications, ranging from financial, strategic and compliance through to capacity, capability and connectivity. The large number of existing tools highlights the need to evaluate them against standardised checklists to determine suitability and levels of resources required for support. Librarians and other information professionals need to expand their current support for research tools beyond the discovery phase to the entire data lifecycle.

Universities can use this paper to assess their maturity in supporting tools in the data lifecycle. Librarians, in particular, can broaden their knowledge of the various categories of tools which support specific aspects of that lifecycle.

While much attention is currently being focused on supporting researchers with their data management requirements, there is a general lack of literature on how to support tools as a critical element in enhancing research outcomes.

Academic library consortia activity has become an integral part of academic libraries’ operations. Consortia have come to assert considerable bargaining power over publishers and have provided libraries with considerable economic advantage. They interact with publishers both as consumers of publishers’ products, with much stronger bargaining power than individual libraries hold, and, increasingly, as rival publishers themselves. Are consortia changing the relationship between academic libraries and publishers? Is the role of academic library consortia placing academic libraries in a position that should and will attract the attention of competition policy regulators? Competition policy prohibits buying and selling cartels that can negatively impact the free market on which the Canadian economic system, like other Western economies, depends. Competition policy as part of economic policy is, however, only relevant where we are concerned with aspects of the market economy. Traditionally, public goods for the greater social and cultural benefit of society are not considered part of the market economic system. If the activities of academic library consortia are part of that public good perspective, competition policy may not be a relevant concern. Using evidence gained from in-depth interviews from a national sample of university librarians and from interviews with the relevant federal government policy makers, this research establishes whether library consortia are viewed as participating in the market economy of Canada or not. Are consortia viewed by librarians and government as serving a public good role of providing information for a greater social and cultural benefit or are they seen from a market-economic perspective of changing power relations with publishers? Findings show government has little in-depth understanding of academic library consortia activity, but would most likely consider such activity predominantly from a market economic perspective. University librarians view consortia from a public good perspective but also as having an important future role in library operations and in changing the existing scholarly publishing paradigm. One-third of librarian respondents felt that future consortia could compete with publishers by becoming publishers and through initiatives such as open source institutional repositories. Librarians also felt that consortia have had a positive effect on librarians’ professional roles through the facilitation of knowledge building and collaboration opportunities outside of the home institution.

The Research Committee at Texas A&M University (TAMU) Libraries provides a model of tenure support that includes funding of research projects and an annual Research Forum. The purpose of this article is to review these support mechanisms and their outcomes. An argument for the benefit of such a model is presented.

Tenure support provided by the Research Committee and the broader supportive environment in which it functions is described. Each supported project was reviewed to determine its outcome (publication or conference presentation).

This model of support benefits tenure‐track librarians at Texas A&M University Libraries.

This model of support would likely benefit other academic libraries that require librarians to engage in scholarly communication. Thus this paper should be of interest to academic librarians and to library managers seeking to enhance tenure support for their faculty librarians.

Much of the literature on tenure support advocates mentoring. While TAMU's Research Committee functions within a library that requires mentors for its untenured faculty, this article provides an argument for the retention, or adoption of the kind of support provided by TAMU's Research Committee, including research funding and the opportunity to present research results to colleagues.

The academic library mission is defined based on the need to support the larger parent university mission. In the case of the urban university, which has been the focus of relatively little discussion and research in the library and information science literature, the research component of the mission potentially influences research agendas as well as the decisions of faculty who choose to teach and do research in such a setting, with a particular focus on “applied scholarship” or research that is community‐focused, considering social problems. Of the urban issues that have shaped the urban university mission, crime is also a key determinant of the resilience of urban areas. The breadth and depth of the research issues related to crime have been well‐documented. The purpose of this paper is to present an analysis of the research findings, indicating the complexity of the research and findings, as well.

The research related to crime ranges from the basic documentation of crime statistics, to the analysis of trends in the data, to attempts to understand why factors as divergent as economic downturns, media coverage, drug use, population reductions, weather or season of the year, and sentencing guidelines impact crime rates. The research also addresses issues, such as the use of DNA and other forensic evidence in crime investigation and juror opinions and the fallibility of eyewitness accounts. The paper presents an overview and analysis of crime‐related research, reflecting the breadth of such research and examples, which indicate the fact that the research is frequently characterized by complexity, often manifested in findings that are inconclusive and conflicting, and rarely reflecting causality. The paper presents an analysis of the research related to crime, intended to be representative, not exhaustive, of a broad range of examples of findings and analyses, across a range of academic disciplines and professions, supported by academic libraries.

The analysis of research related to the causes of increases and reductions in crime, why crime rates vary by city, and a range of other related issues reflects broad interest in enhanced understanding of issues related to crime, among researchers across disciplines, public policymakers and law enforcement, as well as members of the general public. This interest is reflected, not only in the amount of published research, the publication of such research in disciplinary, scholarly sources, but also in the general interest literature, and the growth in research following increases in various types of crimes. The analysis also reflects interest in a number of specific research questions and the extent to which models, such as the broken windows theory, possibly the best known theory of this type, are effective in reducing violent crime. The results of research related to crime indicate the complexity, breadth and interdisciplinarity of the concepts studied by scientists and social scientists, as well as the complexity of research findings, as represented in inconclusive and conflicting findings and difficulty in isolating variables and representing causality.

The analysis of the nature, breadth, complexity, and interdisciplinarity of the research related to crime provides the basis for a more informed approach in considering the role of the urban university library, in particular, in supporting fulfillment of the larger institutional mission.

The paper aims to explore the new and changing role of the research librarian with specific reference to Charles Darwin University (CDU), Australia. In response to the changing research landscape in Australia, Charles Darwin University Library in the Northern Territory has developed a series of services and resources to meet the special needs of its growing research community.

The impact of the support being provided to researchers by CDU Library has been measured through two survey questionnaires followed by focus group discussions. Feedback is also obtained regularly from workshop participants through an evaluation form. In order to meet researchers' needs, Library staff have successfully used both formal and informal methods of professional development on an ongoing basis in order to bridge any gaps that are identified through the evaluation exercises.

In the face of the changing research landscape in Australia, the research librarian needs to ensure that in turn, his or her skills and qualifications will need to be continually updated to ensure that researchers' needs are being met. Librarians have to become involved in new roles, roles that are not traditionally associated with librarians, such as data management and curation.

The practical implications will include: Continuing Professional Development for the research librarian; possible reorganisation of the functional units of the Library; and the relationship between the librarian and the researcher in a changing environment.

This paper asks questions of LIS providers in relation to opportunities for upgrading the skills and status of librarians engaged with the research community.

This paper provides a discussion on recent literature on research librarianship and it deals with an issue that is currently of interest to a number of academic libraries. The strategies adopted by CDU will be of interest to smaller, isolated and less well resourced university libraries in similar situations.

The purpose of this paper is to look at the journey and experience of the University of Hong Kong (HKU) Research Data Management (RDM) practice to respond to the needs of researchers in an academic library.

The research data services (RDS) practice is based on the FAIR data principle. And the authors designed the RDM Stewardship framework to implement the RDS step by step.

The HKU Libraries developed and implemented a set of RDS under a research data stewardship framework in response to the recent evolving research needs for RDM amongst the academic communities. The services cover policy and procedure settings for research data planning, research data infrastructure establishment, data curation services and provision of online resources and instructional guidelines.

This study provides an example of an approach to respond to the needs of the academic libraries about how to start the RDS including the data policy, data repository, data librarianship and data curation.