Advancing transdisciplinarity through library–academic collaboration

Abstract

Libraries are a central part of the academic system, which is increasingly embracing a range of approaches for tackling complex societal and environmental problems, including transdisciplinarity, which is our focus. The systemic, structural and discipline-based challenges that supporting transdisciplinarity poses for academic libraries are outlined, along with how they are compounded by murkiness around what transdisciplinarity is. A case study of producing a world-first library guide to transdisciplinary problem solving is used to highlight how library–academic collaboration can provide a way forward, with lessons for individual libraries in producing their own library-based resources to support transdisciplinarity. The lessons are (1) exploit your context and seize opportunities, (2) find a task and framework that suits your purposes, (3) adapt to, and make the most of, your means, (4) be in it for the long haul. While action in individual libraries is important, embedding transdisciplinarity in the academic system needs much more, both in libraries as a collective, and in the information science field, with these also requiring library–academic collaboration, but on a global scale.