Innovations in Learning and Teaching in Academic Libraries: Alignment, Collaboration, and the Social Turn

Abstract

• Academic libraries are central to the learning, teaching and research enterprise of their institutions. As emphasised by Brophy (2005, p. 216) “Academic libraries are here to enable and enhance learning in all its forms – whether it be the learning of a first year undergraduate coming to terms with what is meant by higher education or the learning of a Nobel Prize winning scientist seeking to push forwards the frontiers of her discipline”. While, perhaps, in the past our services and facilities have been designed to prioritise library operations and service delivery over pedagogy (Bennett, 2015), and as a profession we have been complicit in being described as “non academics” and accepting our role as “supporting” learning, in the present digital environment it is increasingly clear that libraries and librarians have a major role to play in learning and teaching in a rapidly changing global higher education sector.