How libraries have transformed through 25 years of digital innovation

The early years 

When ScienceDirect.com opens in new tab/window launched in 1999, its consolidation of discovery and access to a wide body of digitized research arrived on a wave of internet-enabled digital innovation. This wave has continued to transform the spaces, capabilities, and role of research libraries ever since.  

Imagine a librarian at work in a university library during the 1990s, surrounded by stacks filled with scholarly journals, books, maps, and other printed materials. There are also microfilm machines, CD-ROM collections, and a few computer terminals. 

Anita Laamanen opens in new tab/window, eLibrary and Tools team leader at VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, joined the library team in 1989 and remembers those days well. “We had NTIS [National Technical Information Service] reports from the US in microfilm. Those microfilm reader devices were quite large and it was not very convenient because you needed help from library staff to use it. It was also one user at a time.”

Carol Shannon opens in new tab/window, Informationist at the University of Michigan Taubman Health Science Library, remembers working as a shelver during the extra-late hours of exams week – she recalled, “we were going around at 2:00am when the library closed putting back piles of books.”  

Electronic resources emerge 

Experimental “electronic libraries” of scanned articles appeared around the same time as the internet first promised open connection to a global network of information.  While at the time they lacked interactive features, subsequent innovations between 1993 and 1997 – among them internet browser software, ethernet connection protocols, more powerful computing chips, the Portable Document Format (PDF) standard, and the development of algorithmic search – soon enabled the launch of robust research platforms like ScienceDirect.  

In place of disconnected library collections came a new digital interface that gave anyone with institutional ethernet connection the ability to search for and read full articles from across many scholarly journals. Anita recalls, “the first digital content we subscribed to was Academic Press in 1998 - that was the start. After that came ScienceDirect and all the major publishers - IEEE, American Chemical Society and Institute of Physics, for example.” 

Now researchers could read new issues of a journal without waiting for circulation – or having to visit the library. They could download a PDF copy of an article for reading offline, or for annotating and citing in their own research writing. And with a new algorithmic “full-text search” could discover a broad range of connected research topics without needing to select a specific journal first.   

When it officially launched, ScienceDirect had already incorporated 3 years of digitized full-length research articles in HTML and PDF format from approximately 1000 Elsevier journals, a years-long extension of an experimental project opens in new tab/window from the early 1990s.  

Organized by subject, it also included five years of abstracts from over 2300 journals, including several leading scientific publishers in addition to Elsevier. The site features included a demo for guests or licensed users to see the possibilities and learn how to navigate to articles within a favorite journal and how to use the full-text keyword search.  

Libraries (and publishers) adapt 

Right away, library services pivoted as researchers and faculties adapted to this new accelerating digital information landscape. Librarians quickly focused on training – for each other and the research communities they served. Anita says, “I found an advertisement for a ScienceDirect Day here on the 10^th of November 2000, where we familiarized our researchers with navigation, how to search, and how to create a search alert.” 

The search alert - an email notification when a new journal volume or new article on a topic was published – was a new concept at the time. For Anita’s library, it meant that “journal alerts eventually replaced our physical printed journal circulation.” 

The year 2007 was a tipping point in the digital transformation. After years of varied adaptation, journals now presented all the same content digitally as in print, standardizing the digital editions of their publications as the version of record. 

Meanwhile, research platforms had grown and evolved, adding books and reference works, and digitizing entire back catalogs of journals to offer access to all their publications’ literature in every field. ScienceDirect had grown from 300,000 articles at its launch to over 8 million articles from over 2000 journals, covering 1823 to the present day.  

These were key developments that led most journals and libraries to let go of print and fully move into the digital age. Though some faculty still preferred print, there was growing desire among researchers and students for the flexibility and reach that digital offered. “In the mid-2000s we got laptops and personal devices so it was more convenient to read papers with your own laptop” recalled Anita, who added “here in the wintertime it’s not so convenient to walk to another building because it’s dark, cold, and snowing heavily, so I think people were relieved that they don’t need to go into the library anymore to get their papers.” 

Librarian expertise becomes more essential, and more diverse 

The digital transformation dissolved many of the operational tasks connected with managing paper-based knowledge, but created many new skills and roles. Teaching and research became more significant in a research librarian’s role – creating training modules for workshops, contributing to online LibGuides resources, and researching best practices for maintaining integrity in the digitized research process.  

By this time, an expansion of discovery capabilities, including improved full-text search functions and related article suggestions increased the need for librarian expertise even while it accelerated what a researcher could do on their own. Knowledge about search strategies and conducting efficient literature as well as systematic reviews became part of librarians’ standard training offerings. They also began developing information literacy curriculums for students to build awareness of sound research methods and how to evaluate quality resources, based on the new features.  

Specializations have, if anything, expanded, as has collaboration between librarians with different skill sets. Carol describes how “the main library is now adding people on digital scholarship - using digital tools to do research in different ways. Not just citation management tools, which are great, but doing text mining and bibliometric research.” But she adds, “You still need someone with subject expertise to support the technical expertise of the student, because there can be differences in areas and how things are published.”  

She offers a recent example: “I had a medical student who was interested in creating a [software] program to make it easier for doctors to diagnose conditions at the bedside. I referred them to one of our engineering librarians because they first needed to look at what patents and technology already exist. We have somebody who specializes in patents and we also have a biomedical engineering librarian. The student might come back to me for something else, but different librarians have different strengths, so we are reliant on each other.” 

New roles for data analysis emerged in the library as standards and systems began to arise around the organization and dissemination of digitized research. The Digital Object Identifier (DOI) opens in new tab/window introduced in 1997 unified the identification of discrete research articles across different research platforms. Project COUNTER opens in new tab/window, (Counting Online Usage of Networked Electronic Resources, launched in 2003) was another standard that supported collections management and gave insights into library users needs as well, feeding back into the training curriculums and services a library offered.  

Anita added, “we can take a closer look at how they make their searches, because we have the data from the publishers’ platforms – what are the most used search terms? And how they search, what devices they use. If we monitor the usage, we’ve got the tools to analyze our usage and perhaps meet their needs more precisely.” 

Other roles that emerged for librarians included developing and managing their institution’s institutional repository (IR) and communicating with various faculties about how to use it. Contracts and licensing, finance and budget management, and outreach roles grew as well. 

Anita adds that “on our table are so many things now, and many of us know each other’s work, we can replace each other in the summertime for example. We have become more effective.”  

Yet for her, much of the day-to-day interaction with library users has stayed the same. “Only the way of contact has changed. Back then we met physically with the library desk between and nowadays it’s easy to contact us by chat, email perhaps, or some will still call on the phone. If they contact us by chat it’s convenient because we can share the screen and explain how to do something; or by email we can make a short video using these lovely video capturing services to show how to solve a problem.”

New waves of empowerment 

In recent years, a growing awareness of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion issues has led to new international digital design standards opens in new tab/window making websites and their content accessible for people with disabilities. The reliance of research publishing on visual interaction, whether digital or paper, has presented many barriers.  

For example, where once someone with a visual impairment would need to approach their library with a special accessibility request for research sites or articles, now that information –text and illustrations – can be navigated by speech or described with audio captions, thanks to innovations in the coding of websites that allows them to interact effectively with assistive applications - from screen readers to language translation tools. ScienceDirect has improved access for nearly every aspect of its content thanks to an ongoing, comprehensive approach opens in new tab/window to accessibility, with the ScienceDirect homepage achieving the #1 spot in the 2023 WebAIM Million opens in new tab/window study that evaluates the top 1 million websites around the world for accessible content.  

As Carol confirms, these changes have made this aspect of the library’s work no longer necessary - “We say ‘let us know ahead of time if we need to provide anything for you.’ In general, we don't get any response because the tools are now so much more accessible than they used to be. It's wonderful that people don't have to come in and request something of us because we're not automatically providing it.” 

Of course, the newest innovation to sweep through libraries and institutions is generative AI. Librarian’s core skills – sustaining the integrity around evaluating and disseminating knowledge - are already integrating into new roles  opens in new tab/windowas this latest wave begins to transform the capabilities of research platforms for the years to come.