Changing Roles of Health Librarians with Open Access Repositories

Abstract

The aim is to explore how health library and information professionals can expand their current work roles by supporting open access initiatives particularly the development of institutional repositories. A role competency framework is presented to help analyse a case study in a cancer hospital in the UK, as well as some other examples from the literature. The findings show that librarians benefit from greater expertise gained in metadata standards, and the library service gains from closer relationships with the researchers.