Today, in partnership with the Association of Research Libraries and EDUCAUSE, we published the final report from our study of the impact of emerging technologies on research libraries, titled "Crest or Trough? How Research Libraries Used Emerging Technologies to Survive the Pandemic", authored by ARL Visiting Program Officer Scout Calvert of Michigan State University.

This initiative has followed a rather extraordinary trajectory, beginning well prior to the pandemic with a series of interviews with a wide range of experts to identify key technologies for further examination. In the past few months, Scout was able to reconnect with a number of these interviewees to reflect on how universities and their research libraries have been navigating the pandemic (with some particularly interesting observations about innovation practices and investments), and on how the impacts and priorities related to various emerging technologies might change. The current report summarizes these conversations, and then abstracts out a series of socio-technical thematic areas, concluding with some considerations for continued technology adoption.

You can download this report from

Crest or Trough? How Research Libraries Used Emerging Technologies to Survive the Pandemic, So Far — Association of Research Libraries

The final deliverable of the ARL, CNI, and EDUCAUSE joint initiative to advance research libraries’ impact in a world shaped by emerging technologies, this report returns to 11 participants in interviews conducted for the initiative, to find out how their perspectives have changed in the year and a half since the initiative began, given the disruption to research and learning caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. In these new conversations, the interviewees retain optimism for the same transformative...

Note that this page also contains links to the prior reports from this initiative.

Clifford Lynch Director, CNI