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Introduction
Early career researchers (ECRs) encounter a myriad of opportunities for professional and personal development experiences, whether guided or self-directed. These development opportunities are essential to nurturing both individual and collective research capacities for communication and eventual impacts within academia and into society. In the context of growing trends in the increased visibility of research information support services and roles (Miller et al., 2017), this paper considers implications toward applying a conceptual model developed from a qualitative study into the information and learning experiences of ECRs. This model, known as the “knowledge ecosystem” (Miller, 2015; Miller et al., 2016) has identified various forms of tangible information visibly encountered in the outer world, as the springboards for creating intangible knowledge residing in the inner worlds of researchers; knowledge which is hidden and less visible. Highlighting these forms of tangible information that can inform the learning experiences of ECRs prompts a need for understanding how research information specialists can strengthen engagement with ECRs on their professional and personal development journeys.
Furthermore, the knowledge ecosystem model can be adapted toward promoting specialist researcher support in the context of inter-departmental “operational convergence” (Corrall, 2014) for researcher career development. This includes collaborative activities between university libraries with departments such as faculties and schools, research grants and commercialization offices, information technology, research communication and outreach, career counseling and human resource development. Across the multi-disciplinary sample of ECRs who provided qualitative data from which the knowledge ecosystem model was developed, university libraries were not mentioned as key informants for research development (Miller et al., 2016).
This reflects a finding from recent large-scale longitudinal research into ECRs’ information use and source preferences, which indicated that ECRs are bypassing university libraries in favor of what they perceive as more accessible research-related information from Google Scholar or the invisible college (Nicholas et al., 2017). Such findings suggest that while university libraries are increasingly recognizing the importance of reinventing reference services and client partnerships (Thorpe, 2017) and offering a range of traditional and novel “point of need” (Pontis et al., 2017) research information services at any time throughout the research lifecycles (Groenewegen, 2017), considerable gaps remain in our knowledge of the specific information needs intertwined in the lived experiences of ECRs.