Parallel Session 5 – Research Libraries in Challenging Landscapes
Date: Wednesday, 1 July 2026, from 11:00 to 12:30
Moderator: TBC
Location: R9
5.1) Understanding How Academic Libraries in the United States Navigate Uncertain Times: Results from Ithaka S+R’s 2025 US Library Deans and Directors Survey
Presenters: Tracy Bergstrom and Ellen Carroll, Ithaka S+R, United States of America
Over the past year, research libraries across the United States have faced severe budget reductions coupled with personnel hiring freezes. Underlying these challenges is a political climate increasingly antagonistic to the independence of higher education and the scholarly record. As a result, library leaders are making difficult decisions around how to safeguard users’ fundamental rights to access knowledge, where to restructure staffing, and how to sustain or strategically reduce collections. These compounding pressures raise critical questions about the contemporary role of the research library in a nation grappling with profound social and political change. While such dynamics are currently acute in the United States, the challenges they reflect are shared globally. Thus, understanding how library leaders in the United States are navigating these conditions can offer insights that translate across national contexts.
This presentation will share key findings from Ithaka S+R’s 2025 US Library Deans and Directors Survey, with a particular focus on evolving perceptions of the core values that underpin academic libraries and the changing nature of library work. Since its inception in 2010, this triennial online survey has provided foundational data on both longstanding and emerging priorities for library leaders. Each cycle offers longitudinal insights into libraries’ core services and responsibilities while introducing new questions that address novel strategic concerns. This cycle, fielded Fall 2025, explored several new areas, including library leaders’ confidence in their ability to guide their organizations through times of change, how libraries are adapting services and workflows in response to operational budget cuts, the perceived role of the library in protecting academic freedom and access to knowledge, and the function of the library within the third role of the institution to engage broadly with the community. The survey was distributed to all deans and directors of four-year, not-for-profit academic libraries in the United States, yielding responses from 36 percent of all such leaders (n = 492).
Respondents indicated their views using 5- and 7-point Likert scales across a battery of measures aligned with the aforementioned topical areas. We will present results derived from descriptive statistics and a suite of inferential techniques, including independent-samples t-tests, correlation analyses, and one-way ANOVAs with Tukey’s HSD post-hoc comparisons to examine variation across libraries of different sizes and institutional profiles. Where applicable, we will draw on longitudinal data from prior survey cycles to illustrate how library leaders’ perceptions and strategies have shifted in response to acute organizational, social, and political change. In addition, we will present findings by region, highlighting how library leaders are responding to real and potential political threats across the United States.
The findings reveal a library environment characterized by significant operational strain, organizational change, and growing uncertainty. At the same time, the data also reveal emergent areas of innovation, most notably the adoption of generative AI tools to augment traditional library work. We highlight functional areas in which AI is being integrated and the resulting changes to staff workflows. Taken together, the survey data illustrate how myriad interconnected factors are accelerating change within the working environments of research libraries.
We will conclude the presentation with a discussion of the global implications of these findings, situating them within the international circulation of scholarship and students and highlighting how library leaders in other national contexts might leverage these insights to anticipate and respond to similar pressures.
5.2) Structured Collaboration for Uncertain Times: The Role of Libraries in European Alliances
Presenters: Christopher Landes, Hertie School gGmbH, Germany; Sophie Forcadell, Sciences Po, France
In the current era of rapid geopolitical and technological change, libraries play a pivotal role in safeguarding the stability, openness and continuity of the European knowledge ecosystem. The presentation will examine how the EU-funded CIVICA European University Alliance, which unites ten social science universities across Europe, is leveraging international collaboration to strengthen library services and resilience. This use case is indicative of more widespread changes in the governance of European higher education institutions, as evidenced by the emergence of the European Universities Initiative, which has been described as “an evolutionary and experimental network of university networks” (European Commission).
Since 2020, CIVICA libraries have transitioned from traditional professional exchange to a structured, practice-driven model of cooperation. As Charret and Chankseliani (2023) note, alliances rely on pre-existing higher education and research partnerships while simultaneously experimenting with diverse institutional forms in order to achieve the ambitious goal of creating “European Universities”. Guided by a shared governance framework comprising a dedicated steering body and thematic working groups, the CIVICA library network has developed joint approaches to information literacy, research support, open science, resource licensing, artificial intelligence and staff development.
These efforts have yielded a range of concrete library services, including the CIVICA OpenAIRE gateway for shared open-access outputs, coordinated e-book provision to support inter-campus teaching, a comprehensive information literacy “skills barometer” surveying over 72,000 students, cross-institutional online training, and sustained staff mobility and communities of practice, including the AI Community of Exchange.
The presentation will argue that alliances such as CIVICA represent a paradigm shift in international library cooperation. Rather than ad hoc networking at conferences or reliance on Erasmus exchanges, alliances facilitate long-term, jointly funded and strategically aligned collaboration. This provides a more robust foundation for libraries to adapt to political, technological and economic uncertainty.
Similar collaborative governance mechanisms have been observed in other European alliances, suggesting that structured cooperation can accelerate organisational learning and policy convergence across institutions. The presentation will outline the governance mechanisms that facilitate this cooperation, demonstrate the most impactful services, and address challenges at the library level, including legal diversity, uneven institutional capacities and cross-cultural coordination. Drawing on practical experience, it will conclude with reflections on the opportunities and constraints of alliance-based collaboration and offer recommendations on how libraries can remain strong and relevant in an uncertain world.
Charret, J., & Chankseliani, M. (2023). The European Universities Initiative: Governance, experimentation and institutional transformation. European Journal of Higher Education, 13(2), 123–139. https://doi.org/10.1080/21568235.2022.2160023
European Commission. (n.d.). European Universities Initiative. https://education.ec.europa.eu/education-levels/higher-education/european-universities-initiative
5.3) Libraries United: Sumy State University and the University of Liverpool
Presenters: Matthew Greenhall, University of Liverpool, United Kingdom; Olha Krytska, and Yana Fandikovia, Sumy State University, Ukraine
This presentation will explore the bonds and friendship that have emerged between two university libraries following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. It will explore how the conflict has brought together a group of previously unconnected library colleagues, working at the universities of Sumy State, in north-eastern Ukraine, and Liverpool (UK), to share knowledge, skills and collections at a time of profound uncertainty. It will explore the key role that libraries can play in fast-moving international relationships between universities, and how in the darkest of times, the deepest of friendships can emerge.
The presentation will begin with the context of each library and the wider partnership between their parent universities. This relationship began in 2022 and was part of a national programme, led by the Cormack Consultancy Group, which twinned UK universities with Ukrainian institutions to offer support in response to the conflict. Initially focused on immediate humanitarian aid and access to learning and research support, the presentation will consider how the relationship between Sumy and Liverpool’s libraries grew to include joint staff meetings, knowledge exchange, the sharing of skills and information literacy programmes, in-person visits of Sumy colleagues to Liverpool, and the shipment of physical book collections from Liverpool following the destruction of parts of Sumy’s university library in April 2025. Importantly, the presentation will consider how an initial humanitarian relationship quickly grew into one of shared understanding, strategic focus, and mutually beneficial partnership between previously unconnected libraries.
Achieving this partnership hasn’t been easy. The paper will consider the many challenges facing a relationship like this, including the ever-present threat of violence and destruction, differences in languages, logistical difficulties when moving material across international borders, and licensing restrictions for electronic library content.
Ultimately, the paper will consider how the shared language of librarianship, a commitment to the intellectual freedom, psychological wellbeing and physical safety of our users, and the care and determination of colleagues can overcome such challenges. The paper will share lessons learned which could inform and support other institutions and partnerships elsewhere, andhighlight opportunities for both university and public libraries to collaborate across borders at times of international crisis. The presentation will explore the fundamental question of how such relationships can be sustained, at a time when many similar partnerships have struggled to become established or continue between other institutions. In doing so, the paper will outline a framework for collaboration that could be useful to other institutions and the wider sector. As global tensions rise, there’s never been a more important time for libraries to work together and to strengthen the common bonds between us.